London surgeons plan full face transplant ‘within 12 months’

A team of British surgeons have revealed that they plan on carrying out the world’s full face transplant within the next year.

Following on from the recent news that Ohio-based Dr Maria Siemionow successfully transferred 80 per cent of a dead woman’s face onto a patient with severe disfigurement, a specialist at the Royal Free Hospital in London has vowed to advance cosmetic surgery one step further.

Acknowledging the breakthrough made across the Atlantic, Dr Peter Butler explained that the ability to perform a full transplant is just around the corner.

"We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months," he said.

"This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people.

He added that such a procedure would take at least ten hours to perform and would place the patient at serious risk, though as developments in the US have shown, some people would be happy to risk their lives to get a new face.

According to Dr Eric Kodish of the Cleveland hospital where the revolutionary surgery took place, the ethics of such a procedure are "beyond reproach".