Face/Off is science fact!

Big Yellow Nasty medicine wires

Remember the movie Face/Off? The badass action flick whose intense action is overshadowed by amazing acting from Nicholas Cage and John Travolta who alternately play the good guy and the bad guy when their faces are surgically switched? John Woo's best American movie? With lines such as, "It's like looking in a mirror. Only... not."? Remember that?

Well, the medical technology that allowed John Travolta to go undercover as Nicholas Cage is now a reality. According to the BBC, the French performed a face transplant on a woman whose original face was mangled by a dog.

Doctors are stressing that the woman's face won't look like her original face, and it also won't look like that of the original donor. It will be a hybrid of the two (you will recall that Travolta required cheekbone and chin implants as well as liposuction and a lot of other super-high-tech prosthetics before he looked exactly like Cage in the movie).

Ethical and psychological issues have been holding up such procedures for a long time. And more questions are a-coming!

For example, organ donors may soon have to check boxes on the backs of their drivers licenses that say they're willing to donate their face.

X Heart
X Lungs
X Liver
X Kidneys
Face

But my Illinois license doesn't have those boxes. It only has one for "Any organ or tissue." Does that include my face? And how willing will loved ones be to give up a person's face? Isn't that a little creepier than a kidney or a heart?

Now stop for a minute and think about kissing a person you love, only that person has a dead person's face. Are you creeped the heck out or just happy they have a normal face again? And how long will it take you to get over it?

What if the person starts rejecting the face, the way a body can reject other organs? I remember in the sixth grade, we used to say to the ugly girls "Your face is rejected." It was kind of synonymous with "retarded" or "deformed" or "ass nasty." But now it could really mean rejected. Like your body is rejecting your face. Take that, ugly sixth graders!

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the can of worms this opens up.

"I don't know what I hate wearing worse. Your face or your body. I mean I certainly do enjoy boning your wife, but let's face it, we both like it better the other way yes? So why don't we trade back." - Castor Troy

Thanks to Slashdot for the story. Also, I read a story a few months back that said Americans had selected a candidate for this operation, and I swear I blogged about it. If you can find a link to either my blog or the story, you post it, because everyone here is too lazy.