Wounded war veterans will be able to get face transplants if needed, thanks to a new multimillion dollar contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

The face transplant is a rare procedure; less than ten of them have ever been performed. But doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston may perform eight more over the next 18 months after receiving $3.4 million from the government. Each operation costs as much as $300,000, and insurance won’t cover it.

The patients are expected to be war veterans disfigured after injuries sustained by improvised explosive devices in Iraq or Afghanistan. However, a patient only qualifies for a face transplant, if he’s missing at least 25 percent of his face and can’t be treated through any other surgical methods.

The Boston hospital performed one face transplant in April, which was only the second one ever performed in America. But right now, sources say, as many as 200 veterans may have injuries that qualify them for this operation.

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In John Woo’s Oscar-nominated 1997 film Face/Off, the characters portrayed by Nicholas Cage and John Travolta literally switched faces, each having the other’s face surgically attached to their own skull in order to advance the plot.

But did you know that face transplantation surgery is real?

It is. The first full face transplant in England took place in October 2006, followed by the first full-face transplant in the U.S. in December 2008. The second was performed in Boston this April.

Now the patient who received a new face in that operation, James Maki, is taking his incredible story public in an effort to encourage organ donation.

In 2005, Maki fell onto the electrified third rail at a Boston subway station. The surge of high-voltage electricity burned away much of his face, including his nose, cheeks, upper lip, the roof of his mouth, and the muscles, bones and nerves associated with them. Emergency surgery saved his life, but his horrifying disfigurement and the resulting social stigma turned it into a kind of living hell.

But James Maki didn’t give up on life – and his doctor didn’t give up on him. Dr. Bohdan Pomahac successfully transplanted a donor face onto his skull in a 17-hour-long operation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The operation did more than restore hope to James Maki: it offers new hope to others like him.

With this in mind, a recovering Maki took the podium at Brigham and Women’s Hospital last month to discuss his case with the news media and urge the public to consider patients waiting for face transplants when making decisions about organ donation.

He was joined by Susan Whitman, the widow of Maki’s donor, sociologist Joseph Helfgot. Ms. Whitman explained how the donation of her late husband’s face to Maki helped in “taking the sting out” of her husband’s death.

Helfgot, a well-known motion picture marketer and entertainment industry figure, died on April 8th after a heart transplant.

Click the screen below to catch this week’s Plastic Surgery News!

Organizations in the Episode:

• Merz Aesthetics
• American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery
• Dr. Corey Maas, MD, FACS
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (medical journal)
• Dr. Scott Oishi, MD, FACS
• John Woo (director)
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital
• Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, MD
• MyFreeImplants.com
• Melissa Joan Hart

This month, doctors at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston performed the world’s seventh face transplant, and may have sidestepped the hospital’s policy in the process.

Plastic surgeon Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, performed the surgery and acknowledged that the patient had not undergone immunosuppressant therapy before the operation–a deviation from the hospital’s policy on facial transplantation.

However, some in the medical community are supportive of Pomahac’s course of action. In an interview with ABC News, doctors Joseph McCarthy and Rosamund Rhodes both weighed in with positive comments.

Dr. McCarthy, director of the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, said that the side effects of immunosuppression may be an even weightier consideration than the surgery itself.

And Rosamond Rhodes, director of bio-ethics education at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, agreed.  She said, quote, “When the facial disfigurement is so severe as to merit the risks of transplantation, the extra burdens of immunosuppression hardly adds to the burden.”

According to Rhodes, it seemed as if Brigham’s policy was designed to spare the surgeons and institution from guilt or public criticism, rather than to serve the interests of patients in need of a face transplant.