face transplant

AP: Dozens to Interview for Chance at New Face

"CLEVELAND - In the next few weeks, five men and seven women will secretly visit the Cleveland Clinic to interview for the chance to have a radical operation that's never been tried anywhere in the world....
This is no extreme TV makeover. It is a medical frontier being explored by a doctor who wants the public to understand what she is trying to do.
It is this: to give people horribly disfigured by burns, accidents or other tragedies a chance at a new life. Today's best treatments still leave many of them with freakish, scar-tissue masks that don't look or move like natural skin...."

The article quotes a plastic surgeon as saying that the technology/techniques to do this have been available for 10 years, but evidently it hasn't yet been attempted because of the psychological issues for the patient and for the family of the donor, as well as the risk of the tissue being rejected.

I'm slightly creeped out, but more amazed and impressed that such an operation stands a good enough chance of success that it's been approved for a medical trial.