In the next few weeks, five men and seven women will secretly visit the Cleveland Clinic to interview for the chance to have a radical operation that’s never been tried anywhere in the world. They will smile, raise their eyebrows, close their eyes, open their mouths. Dr. Maria Siemionow will study their cheekbones, lips and noses. She will ask what they hope to gain and what they most fear.Then she will ask, “Are you afraid that you will look like another person?"Because whoever she chooses will endure the ultimate identity crisis.Siemionow wants to attempt a face transplant.This is no extreme TV makeover. It is a medical frontier being explored by a doctor who wants the public to understand what she is trying to do.It is this: to give people horribly disfigured by burns, accidents or other tragedies a chance at a new life. Today’s best treatments still leave many of them with freakish, scar-tissue masks that don’t look or move like natural skin.These people already have lost the sense of identity that is linked to the face; the transplant is merely “taking a skin envelope” and slipping their identity inside, Siemionow contends.
