[syndicate] Making Faces

[hoord'hur]

tah it's something to see ze 'vamous' handz
tranzplant, all were remove, zis piece iz an inzult to
all sculptor & criminologue jugment, poor obzcurantizt
konzeptual workerz, regressing to limbic, ces petits
cons découvrent her doctort phibes et fantomas se
collant un roulé de veau et ça nous en fait tout un
big ben.. merde! mais puisque c'est une pissotière ta
liste clément



 --- a at e8z.org a écrit : > 
> 
> 
> 
> March 9, 2003
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/magazine/09FACE.html
> 
> 
> Making Faces
> 
> By CHARLES SIEBERT
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A few years ago, in the course of researching an
> article for this 
> magazine about the human heart, I was allowed to
> accompany a couple of 
> surgeons from a hospital near New York on what is
> known as an organ 
> harvest. We were on call to extract a heart from the
> next available 
> ''brain dead'' donor.
> 
> 
> 
>   ''If anyone asks,'' I remember the head surgeon
> telling me outside the 
> operating room the night our call finally came,
> ''you are here to 
> observe.''
> 
> 
> 
>   The other harvest teams -- liver, kidney, pancreas
> -- were already in 
> place when we arrived, pressed elbow to elbow around
> the operating 
> table. I must have frozen a moment upon entering the
> O.R. I remember a 
> number of people turning to stare. One began to
> approach. There was the 
> press of a hand on my right arm. It was the head
> heart surgeon, leading 
> me farther in. He brought me to the very top of the
> operating table and 
> positioned me there, my hands clenched beside the
> head of the donor. A 
> young woman, was all I had been told, who had died
> earlier that evening 
> of a brain aneurysm.
> 
> 
> 
>   I first saw only the blue cloth covering the
> donor's face and then, 
> lifting my head, her body, split open from the
> shoulders to the waist: 
> a glistening, multishaded inscape of organs. But for
> the lungs -- 
> spongy pink, diaphanous, rising and falling with the
> whooshing clicks 
> of a respirator -- all that moved was her heart,
> beating without any 
> signal or governance from the brain, beating with no
> other compulsion 
> than its own primordially instilled, deep cellular
> memory to do so.
> 
> 
> 
>   I remember my body making one brief, dizzying
> pitch forward and then, 
> like the quick flip of a focus knob, a compensatory
> lurch back. And 
> then my mind did this: it withdrew, pulled like a
> just-brushed anemone, 
> all of its feelers in. It took refuge in anonymity,
> the donor's and by 
> extension my own. I had seen more of, and further
> into, this human 
> being than I had anyone in my life, and yet somehow
> to have seen her 
> face, the most surface aspect of her, would have
> been my undoing.
> 
> 
> 
>   There are, I now understand, other, unwritten,
> reasons why civilians 
> are prohibited from operating rooms. Whether it is
> the ultimate genius 
> or jest of our biology that it seems to strand us on
> the very surface 
> of its makeup -- rendering us little skiffs of
> awareness atop our 
> inwardly roiling, reticular entrails -- we all live
> and, perhaps, can 
> only go from day to day in a kind of ongoing, airily
> dismissed story -- 
> or film -- of being alive. Indeed, it is only when
> illness causes that 
> film to sputter that we are forced to contemplate
> its underpinnings, to 
> indulge -- as impatiently as we do the tinkerings of
> a projectionist in 
> a suddenly darkened theater -- the detailed
> descriptions and 
> prescriptions of a doctor or, in more dire
> circumstances, the 
> ministerings of a surgeon. But to willfully go into
> the heart of the 
> projection room forever changes the way you view
> your own and everyone 
> else's life story.
> 
> 
> 
>   I have relived this moment a number of times in
> recent months, ever 
> since news reports began to appear at the end of
> last year about the 
> latest potential breakthrough in organ
> transplantation. According to 
> Dr. Peter Butler, a consulting plastic surgeon at
> the Royal Free 
> Hospital in London, the technology is now in place
> for surgeons to 
> perform a full-face transplant.
> 
> 
> 
>   A separate harvest team will be positioned where I
> was standing that 
> night, some donor's family having extended the
> parameters of their 
> sacrifice to include even their loved one's face.
> The surgeons will cut 
> and lift it away, packing it, as we would that young
> woman's heart, in 
> a cold preservative solution and then spiriting it
> away to a waiting 
> recipient, someone whose natural face has been
> severely disfigured 
> either by disease or an accident. The question, as
> Butler put it to a 
> meeting of the British Association of Plastic
> Surgeons back in 
> November, is not whether we can but whether we
> should.
> 
> 
> 
>   Initial reaction to Butler's announcement has
> been, somewhat 
> predictably, extreme. Most of the reporting has
> readily abandoned 
> science for science fiction. The movie ''Face/Off,''
> in which John 
> Travolta seamlessly switches faces with the
> villainous Nicolas Cage, 
> has been invoked. Eileen Bradbury, a consulting
> psychologist at the 
> University of Manchester Dental Hospital, suggested
> that criminals 
> would find it easier to adapt to a stranger's face.
> A writer for The 
> Sunday Herald in Scotland breezily speculated about
> the wealthy aging 
> American who, ''thanks to a tragic accident in which
> a beautiful young 
> woman died . . . can now check into the clinic to
> receive the phizog of 
> her dreams.'' Still others spoke of a kind of
> obverse vanity, people 
> donating their faces in order to gain some measure
> of immortality by 
> keeping at least their visages moving a while longer
> through the world, 
> a notion that I soon found myself morphing into the
> deeply unsettling 
> scenario of a person walking down a city street and
> spotting their dead 
> parent's or sibling's face on someone else's head.
> 
> 
> 
>   A few months after Butler's announcement, I called
> him at the Royal 
> Free Hospital and asked if we might get together to
> discuss the 
> particulars of face transplant surgery, what is and
> isn't possible. He 
> suggested the following Monday afternoon, 4:30 p.m.
> at the Starbucks 
> just across from the hospital and the southwest gate
> of 
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