Ethics Committee Turns on Scientists, Act 2: The Face Transplant

AP is reporting that the face transplant we discussed yesterday was conducted against the advice of the French government ethics panel. In America that would be meaningless - our sitting Presidential ethics committee has no power whatsoever, and its standing (unfortunately) is not even really recognized in the academic discipline of bioethics. But in France and most of the remainder of the world these ethics committees carry some weight.

And the committee's complaint is that this procedure should not have been conducted as an emergency procedure, which seems like a strange problem for them to have, given the huge range of other ethical issues in face transplantation (which, again, were reviewed in The American Journal of Bioethics special issue on face transplantation.

UPDATE: Boing Boing quotes "Dr. Jean-Pierre Chavoin, secretary general of the French society of plastic surgery, [who] noted that Lantieri had planned to do a face transplant himself and had been beaten." Great. Yet another medical ethics structure used to push an inappropriate agenda. Although this is the first case with which I am familiar in which a surgeon used an ethics board to slam the competition.