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Body grafts don’t look or work like the skin on the face, and they can’t fully restore appearance or movement. But recent advanced medical technologies have enabled partial and full facial transplants of a face from a donor. The result looks and acts far more realistic than skin grafts, but the transplant isn’t without trepidation.

A very real concern to any transplant is rejection of foreign tissue from the donor. Anti-rejection drugs developed in the 80’s improved to the point where transplantation surgery became quite routine and far less risky.

Doctors made history in 1994 when they performed the first human face reattachment. 9 year old Sandeep Kaur’s hair was caught in the threshing machine as she was chopping grass in northern India, tearing her entire face, scalp and hair off. Sandeep’s family put her face in a bag and drove her to the hospital, where surgeons performed surgery to reattach her face and scalp.

She was left with some scars and has never regained full mobility in her face, but she’s been able to lead a normal life. A number of more successful face reattachment surgeries followed, including an operation at Massachusetts General Hospital on a man whose hair was caught in a conveyer belt at work.

The first recipient of the world’s first partial face transplant from a donor was 38 year old Isabelle Dinoire in May 2005. Dinoire took sleeping pills and passed out on her sofa, awaking to find her Black Labrador had chewed off the lower part of her face including her chin, lips and much of her nose, leaving her teeth and gums completely exposed.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — it was too horrible.” she told the New York Times. After the incident, Dinoire was forced to eat pureed food and wear a surgical mask to hide her disfigured face.

Surgeons Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michael Dubernard performed the transplant from a 46 year old female donor who had been left brain dead from a suicide attempt, requiring two medical teams consisting of about 50 professionals to perform the surgery at a hospital in Amiens, France. Within a week after the 15 1/2 hour surgery, Dinoire could speak, eat and drink, but doctors said it would likely be several months before she gained sensitivity in her new skin.

Li Guoxing had been attacked by a bear in his farming field, ripping away most of the right side of his face including part of the bone in his nose and cheek. A team of 18 doctors led by Guo Shuzhong performed a 15 hour operation in 2006 to give him a new nose, upper lip, cheek and eyebrow from a brain-dead donor. The surgery was highly successful, and Guoxing’s new skin even sprouted facial hair and acne within days of the operation.

French doctors performed a 3rd partial face transplant in 2007 on a 29 year old man with neurofibromatosis — a disease that causes tumors to grow on nerves throughout the body — leaving him so disfigured he was unable to eat or speak. Doctors gave the man a new nose, mouth, chin and cheeks over a 15 hour operation.

The success of these three partial face transplants has prompted doctors to attempt the first full face transplant, which would include an entire face, as well as the ears and hair. In 2004, the Institutional Review Board at the Cleveland Clinic gave doctors there the go-ahead to proceed with the operation. As of 2007, all that was left to do was find the right candidate.

Face Transplant Surgery
Candidates must first be physically healthy enough to undergo surgery, and psychologically prepared to handle the emotional stress of undergoing such a huge physical transformation. People who undergo this operation may need counseling to regain some normalcy in their lives.