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Transplants

Face transplants are not the preserve of science fiction. Nearly 50 face transplants have taken place around the world since 2005. Face transplants have physical and emotional effects on patients and their families, on surgical teams and on society. Interface explores these effects in history, and in the present, working with world-leading surgical teams, patients and families, institutions and policy makers to show how an arts and humanities approach can enrich scientific and cultural understandings of face transplants as an experimental, innovative form of organ transplantation.

Patients and families

The experiences of potential and actual face transplant patients are central to Interface research. We work with people undergoing a wide range of facial surgery, as well as their families.

Interface collaborated with 9 surgical teams around the world to produce a guide to best practice that is historically informed, and patient centred

Media and representation

Media coverage of facial surgery and transplants can be sensational or hurtful. From films like Face/Off – in which transplants are a kind of “Frankenstein science” – to the casual representation of people with scarring and facial difference as Hollywood “baddies”, social attitudes can impact negatively on the experience of patients. We work with charities, patients and surgical teams to advocate for better social understanding of face transplants and more respectful language around the experience of facial difference.

Interface multi face cropped

Our blog

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  • October 14, 2024

‘People say, just get surgery, and I’m like: Bruh, this is after surgery’

  • May 9, 2024

The reconstruction of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman’s face makes her look quite friendly – there’s a problem with that

  • April 9, 2024

Standardising healthcare: the case of face and hand transplants

  • January 10, 2024

NEW YEAR, NEW YOU?

  • March 15, 2023

The face race

disfigured
  • October 31, 2022

Disfigured Faces, “Accursed Ugliness”, and Hollywood

  • October 24, 2022

‘Like Changing a Windshield on a Car’ – Transplantation and The Eye (2008)

Interface
  • October 17, 2022

Silence, surgery and strangeness: face transplant and the film Eyes without a Face/Les yeux sans visage (1960)

Interface face
  • October 14, 2022

Transplantation narratives on screen: a Halloween blog series

AI
  • October 6, 2022

Artificial Intelligence and Facial Discrimination

Technology
  • August 31, 2022

Regulating facial recognition and other biometric technologies

facial recognition
  • July 27, 2022

Facial recognition technology, history and the meanings of the face

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