This clip is Hollywood fiction, but there is enough evidence around to suggest that fiction will soon become reality. Right now the discussion is not about whether we can or cannot do face transplants, but when we will be able to do them. Even if the people who think we can do it now are wrong, it can’t be too far away, so the real question is not “Can we do it?”, but should we do it?
Interestingly, one of the key objections put forward against doing it is that you would look too much like your donor, and that freaks people out a bit. In the movie the whole thing is about John Travolta looking like Nicholas Cage and vice versa. But with a real face transplant that won’t be the case. Everyone’s bone structure is different, so putting my face on someone else’s bone structure is going to look
totally different. Imagine if you put Mattingly’s skinny face over Norman’s boof head. Its going to look different – ugly, but different. So that’s a bogus argument.
There is also a more practical reason why we don’t need to fear cosmetic surgery as an abuse of the procedure – there is already enough ways to alter your face beyond its original form without a transplant. They are far easier, can be more easily fine tuned, you can pick just the features you want – without having to go to the extreme lengths of a face transplant. Look at Michael Jackson – he turned himself into a freak and he didn’t need a face transplant.
One thing really annoys me about people arguing against something like this is that the people who make the arguments are never likely to need or want a face transplant, but they think they should make these moral judgements for the rest of us. If someone
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