ONE month after receiving a new face, Isabelle Dinoire is using her new lips to smoke a cigarette.
But rather than condemn her for renewing the habit, the French surgeons who performed the first ever partial face transplant, by giving Dinoire a flap of tissue containing the nose, lips and chin of a dead woman, are hailing the operation鈥檚 outstanding success.
At the Sixth International Symposium on Composite Tissue Allotransplantation in Tucson, Arizona, last week, her surgeons Jean-Michel Dubernard from Lyon and Bernard Devauchelle from Amiens described how they selected the tissue and connected the blood vessels (New 杏吧原创, 10 December 2005, p 10), and displayed the first photographs of Dinoire to be shown at a medical conference. 鈥淭he actual surgery is extremely skilful,鈥� says Roy Calne, a transplant surgeon at the University of Cambridge.
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鈥淥ne month after receiving a new face, Dinoire is using her new lips to smoke a cigarette鈥�
Experts at the conference also agreed that the surgeons had taken all necessary ethical precautions, contrary to earlier suggestions that Dinoire may have been psychologically unprepared.
