Medical Meccas: Swapping Body Parts

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By Newsweek Editors

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Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard is not afraid of notoriety. When he co-led the world's first face transplant, on Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire in November 2005, he was derided for being an opportunist preoccupied with making headlines at his patient's expense. But after a year, Dinoire is doing well, and Dubernard is making no apologies. "I'm 65 years old and at the end of my career," he says. "Looking back, I'm proud of what I've done."

Dubernard's boldness has propelled the Urology and Transplant Surgery Department at the Hôpital Edouard-Herriot in Lyon, France, to world-class status. The French doctor, who also holds a seat in the National Assembly, trained abroad in the 1960s with Dr. Joseph Murray, a Nobel laureate, at Harvard. Methods and techniques he had learned during his American apprenticeship--like finding ways to improve the functioning of transplanted organs and avoid their rejection--were key to the development of his transplant practice in France. His unit has perfected techniques for transplanting the pancreas and other organs that are now widely copied. He led the first team to complete a successful transplant of the hand in 1998, and the first to transplant two hands at once, in 2000. His success now attracts a steady flow of foreign patients; his team carries out about 120 kidney transplants a year. Dubernard has also made teaching a priority. "I want to train foreign doctors so that they can practice in their home countries," he says.

Dubernard is now working to promote "transplantology," as the practice is called, to the status of a medical discipline in its own right. He wants to combine two of France's top transplant centers in Lyon and Nantes to produce the unquestioned world leader in the field. "We don't do this for money or success," he says. Whatever the reason, his patients have many new reasons to be grateful.

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