Prof Fay Bound Alberti and Dr Matthew Ridley have published a piece on the complicated history of face transplantation in the Bulletin of The Royal College of Surgeons of England. Read the article here.
Face transplants are an innovative, still experimental form of modern surgery. Just 47 have taken place around the world to date (including two retransplants) and none yet in the UK even though in 2003, Peter Butler’s team at London’s Royal Free Hospital was poised to undertake the world’s first face transplant. Concerned about the media attention given to face transplants, and the ethical and surgical issues involved, The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS England) assembled a working party that concluded that it could not give approval for face transplants, effectively bringing to a halt the UK’s momentum in the field.
The details of RCS England’s decision (and its subsequent approval for face transplants under highly specific circumstances) are the subject of another article by Fay Bound Alberti and Victoria Hoyle. In this paper, the authors focus on what we have learnt in the 16 years since the first face transplant took place, in France, and the psychological, social, immunological and ethical challenges that remain.
At present, NHS England and NHS Scotland will not fund face transplants, on the grounds that they are life enhancing rather than life saving technologies. Should this perspective change or should some other form of financial support emerge to support the UK teams that have the capacity to undertake face transplants, the UK might very well have its first face transplant after all. As things stand, however, and judging by the patterns of face transplants during the period 2005–2021 as well as the ongoing immunological and psychosocial challenges, it seems far more likely that face transplants will be a thing of history, being supplanted by tissue regeneration and stem cell technologies.
Find the article here, and please email aboutface-project@york.ac.uk if you don’t have access.
