For years, we've had technology that can simulate the sensory mechanisms of the eye and the ear, but now science has developed a functional electronic nose: the Cyranose can be programmed to detect odors too faint for the human schnozzle, even the minute amounts of chemicals that can signal diseases like cancer. [via FuturePundit]

Doctors at the University of Louisville [Kentucky] are reviewing the ethical implications of the proposed first-ever face transplant that would graft skin, subcutaneous tissue and blood vessels from a cadaver onto a severely disfigured person.

Doctors currently are limited to grafting skin and muscles from other parts of the body in patients who have suffered catastrophic damage to their faces, but the result is typically cosmetically unsatisfactory. Still, some bioethicists have urged caution: The face recipients would need to undergo life-long immunosuppression, which carries increased long-term risks of cancer. The Louisville team includes three bioethicists, Barker said.

But what of the implications, such as the donor family's knowledge that a person wearing a loved one's former face walks the world?

[Barker] noted that the underlying skeletal structure of a recipient would differ from that of a donor, meaning that the recipient's face would look much different from that of the donor's. Because of the lengthy approval process required before any such attempt of the procedure, patient recruitment has not begun, Keadle said.

Hopefully the onerous burden of immunosuppression regimens would discourage anyone from undertaking such a procedure for purely cosmetic reasons, but you never know. But a really frightening thought? The consequences of tissue rejection...I think I saw that in a science fiction movie once. But then, life seems to edge a bit closer to science fiction every day...

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