Worldwide, surgeons have so far only performed nine face transplants, but the idea – however counterfactual – has been circulating in Hollywood for decades. A look back at the surgery's transition from movie screen to mainstream:
1960 – "Eyes Without A Face": The cult horror flick, based on a French novel and rereleased stateside as "The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus," depicts the face transplant of a young beauty disfigured in a car accident. Some surgery scenes were so graphic that a handful of audience members fainted at the film's premiere.
Paramount Pictures / Courtesy: Everett Collection
In John Woo's blockbuster "Face/Off," the characters played by John Travolta and Nicholas Cage traded mugs.
1990s – The patient as donor: In 1994, Indian surgeons reattached the face of a 9-year-old girl after it was torn off in a farming accident. Three years later, Australian doctors performed a similar operation on a woman whose face was packed in a bag of ice and brought to the hospital.
1997 – "Face/Off": Even as medical innovation was catching up with screenwriters' imaginations, Hollywood was taking new scientific liberties in its depictions of facial transplants. In John Woo's blockbuster, the director one-ups "Eyes Without a Face": Not only do John Travolta's and Nicholas Cage's characters' surgeries imply complete transformation of underlying facial structure, but – realism be damned – the two swap mugs twice.
2005 – "Nip/Tuck": In an episode of the glossy FX cosmetic surgery drama, doctors transplant the face of a brain-dead patient onto her 14-year-old sister, who's been injured at a carnival. Melodrama aside, this time the entertainment business shed light on a very real risk of the procedures: The girl's body rejected the transplant, and it had to be removed.
2005 – Partial transplants: Soon after "Nip/Tuck" aired, surgeons in France performed the first successful transplant of a nose and mouth. The patient, Isabelle Dinoire, has been a success story, despite immune system complications. Chinese surgeons followed soon after, but their patient died after he replaced immunosuppressive drugs with herbal remedies.
2008 – First American surgery: Four years after they started face transplant trials on cadavers, doctors at the Cincinnati Institute perform the United States' first face transplant surgery. It was also the most complicated yet: 80 percent of the donor's face was grafted onto the recipient, including muscles, bone, upper lip and nose.
2009 – Facial transplants get fast-tracked: Brigham surgeons plan to start recruiting suitable candidates for the surgeries – which cost between $250,000 and $300,000 each – using a government registry of injured veterans. Also on the horizon: research into improving immunosuppressive drugs, which surgery patients currently take indefinitely.
