Tech Shout!

Peter Butler, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, has been contacted by 29 disfigured volunteers willing to undergo the procedure, major British newspapers reported on Sunday.

The hospital’s ethical committee is expected to announce Wednesday that it will approve the first operations, according to the Observer newspaper.

“My aim is not to be first, but to do it on the right patient,” Peter Butler was quoted as saying. “It would be very dangerous to look at it as a race because it could harm the patient and (the reputation of) the procedure,” he told the Sunday Times newspaper.

“There is a meeting of the ethical committee that will consider the next stage in the process,” he said. “What they will be discussing is the form of the operation and whether that operation is right to go ahead. After that we have still got to find a panel of four to five patients, before an operation can be considered.”

A thorough face-change operation would involve removing eight different blood vessels, four arteries and four veins from the donor and attaching them to the patient’s face by re-connecting the tissue.

One potential candidate is reported to be a 22-year-old who was badly burned as a child. Last year, surgeons in France carried out the world’s first partial face transplant. Isabelle Dinoire, 38, had her nose, lips and chin replaced after she was savaged by a dog. In April, a hospital in China conducted what is believed to be the second partial face transplant on Li Guoxing, 30.

Butler’s 30-strong team has spent 10 years studying face transplants. “We have done everything we can to prepare for this surgery, and we would like to go ahead,” he told The Observer. “We don’t know how people will react. Does the government want us to go ahead with this? We just don’t know. But a huge amount of work has been done with the group of patients who might benefit from this surgery.

“Many of them have very disfiguring injuries and spend their lives indoors so for them, this is not just life-enhancing surgery, it is life-saving because it gives them back the chance to join society.” You can do more and more research but at some point the leap has to be made, and people have to say, ‘OK, we’ve done our preparation, let’s get behind this’.”

The Royal College of Surgeons has voiced concerns about such operations in Britain, concluding in a 2003 report that more research was needed into the psychological impact on the recipient and the donor family. It also expressed concern about the long-term risks associated with the drugs which a patient would have to take for the rest of their life to stop them rejecting the face.