Organ transplantation is becoming commonplace and can be medically justified, but the transplant of external body parts is morally acceptable? The debate flares up in response to the planned double bone grafting by a Spanish surgeon.

Pedro Cavadas provoked discussion

During these months, the Spanish surgeon Pedro Cavadas in a wheelchair patient to the transplantation of two legs. The doctor already in 2006 a double hand and armtransplantatie brought to a conclusion, getting a lot of criticism, because this type of transplantation is not vital and already prostheses available to patients to help. It's a discussion already in the nineties of last century was conducted when the first successful transplantation of external body parts were performed.

What exactly are transplants?

Where a person a particular organ or bad will not function properly, he can sound a copy of a donor in their place. So we know have a certain tradition of different types of organs that were successfully transplanted.

Reduced resistance

Despite the intervention is indeed a life-prolonging effect, most patients can record their normal lives again and still long years to live, they are aware that life with a new body is not always easy and difficulties can arise at any time.

For example, the patient is regularly checked to ensure that when the slightest infection or early signs of rejection can be treated immediately. Indeed, following the transplant, the patient must take anti-rejection medication. These immunosuppressants suppress his immune system so that it more susceptible to infections.

Shortly after surgery, the patient several times a week for inspection services. Later, the frequency gradually phased out. It takes several months before he can build a normal life again. The reduced resistance in the long term the patient more prone to cancer. Especially skin cancer is more common in these people.

The history of organ transplants

When the technique in the middle of last century were the first applications was not so long patients alive because the problem of immune rejection of implanted organs not yet under control.

The first successful organ transplant was a kidney transplant from identical twins in Boston in 1954. There was no rejection to occur because it was an identical twin with an identical tissue. The first patients of the lung and liver and pancreas transplants (1966) and heart transplant (1967) not long survive the surgery. The discovery of Cyclosporine in 1972 led to a breakthrough. When the drug that suppresses rejection phenomenon, early eighties was commercialized, it suddenly became life-transplantation. The first heart-lung transplant took place at Stanford University (USA) in 1981. In Belgium, it began late eighties, but the big breakthrough came mid and late nineties, kidneys, pancreas and lung. In 2001 also began with liver transplants.

External body parts

In 1998, the United States for the first time an external body successfully transplanted. Within a short time two men had a donor hand. Since then, already dozens of people with one or two new hands.

In 2004 managed Chinese doctors to offer a cock to transplant. In 2006, the Spaniard Pedro Cavadas furore by two new hands and forearms to transplant and a few months ago in Barcelona, even performed a face transplant with a full face inlclusief cheeks, nose, facial muscles, eyes and teeth of a deceased donor were transplanted.

Issues

Unlike organ transplants transplants of external body parts no lifesaving or life purpose. The intention is to use living tissue to the disabled again to feel 'full' and working with his new body style original functions to absorb along with the sensation of the self 'feel'.

For many, however, this is a psychologically difficult step to take because there are well aware that it is not a private body concerned. This is also why some after a while decide to re-attached limb amputated. That may be the case with one hand but also the man with the new penis did shortly after the procedure again from severe psychological problems because of him and his wife.

Sci-Fi

The further the science evolves more man is dreams. In 2001, scientists tried in Ohio, the head of a monkey on the body of another monkey transplant. The experiment succeeded in part. Intention of the researchers was to treat people who are paralyzed or for other reasons unable to use their limbs. Others see the transplanting of the brains as a long term goal, but again that moral objections to the opponents because you have the essence of a personality begins to tinker.