Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic on Dec. 17 provided details of the first face transplant done in the United States, a painstaking 22-hour operation to stitch most of a dead woman’s face onto a recipient so horribly disfigured that she was willing to undergo the risky surgery in the hopes of being able to smile, [Sign in to read the full article...]

The first full-face transplant could be less than a year away, a leading surgeon predicted today after the Cleveland Clinic announcement.   Professor Peter Butler, of the Royal Free Hospital in London, told the Times newspaper that the successful replacement of 80 percent of a woman’s face would pave the way for his team to [Sign in to read the full article...]

A plastic surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston who is planning to start a face transplant program there says that the hospital has enlarged the pool of patients it would consider for the life-changing surgery, the Boston Globe reports. The hospital said last year it would offer face transplants only to people who [Sign in to read the full article...]

A San Francisco transplant surgeon accused of hastening the death of a man so his organs could be procured was acquitted Dec. 18 of dependent adult abuse in a case that led to national organ transplant reforms, the Associated Press reports. Dr. Hootan Roozrokh was found not guilty in San Luis Obispo County Superior Court [Sign in to read the full article...]

Surgeons at Toronto General Hospital in Canada have developed a procedure to repair, outside the body, lungs that previously would have been considered too diseased or injured to transplant to another person, the National Post newspaper reports. Currently, up to 90 percent of donor lungs have to be discarded because of damage, but the surgeons [Sign in to read the full article...]