New Thinking: Face Transplants and Researching Nose Injuries
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Would you change your nose if you could? What about an entire face transplant? Des Fitzgerald speaks to researchers investigating the past and future of facial difference and medical intervention and looks at videos from participants in the AboutFace project, which are being launched as part of the Being Human Festival this November.
Emily Cock, from the University of Cardiff, looks at our relationship with our noses throughout history – from duels and sexual diseases to racial prejudice.
Fay Bound Alberti, from the University of York, talks about a project called AboutFace, which she is running to look at the emotional impact of face transplant surgery, investigating the moral questions it raises, looking at the impact of facial difference in the age of the selfie, and the emergence of facial transplantation as a response to severe trauma. There have been fewer than 50 face transplants globally since the first was performed in 2005 and none in the UK to date. You can find more at https://aboutfaceyork.com/ @AboutFaceYork
Fay is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow from the Department of History at the University of York and is working with Sarah Hall on the launch of new videos as part of the 2020 Being Human Festival https://beinghumanfestival.org/ The BBC has a series of programmes reflecting the anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act UK
Emily Cock is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, undertaking a three-year project Fragile Faces: Disfigurement in Britain and its Colonies (1600–1850). Her book is called Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture
She and host Des Fitzgerald, from the University of Exeter, are New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by the BBC with the AHRC to work with academics to put research onto radio.
You can find a playlist called New Research on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90
This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | This is the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:34.1 | I'm Des Fitzgerald and welcome to an episode of a new thinking, part of our series looking |
| 0:38.4 | at your research in UK universities. |
| 0:42.1 | When you look in the mirror, what looks back? |
| 0:45.2 | On the few occasions I can actually meet my own reflection, I see a face that looks alarmingly |
| 0:49.3 | like my own grandfathers, a receding hairline, a nose that's too small, and a skin flap under my left eye that I should |
| 0:55.8 | probably get checked out. |
| 0:57.9 | When some people look in the mirror, though, and beyond that kind of everyday melancholy, |
| 1:02.4 | they see a face that they feel needs to be changed, perhaps transformed, maybe even reconstructed |
| 1:07.5 | entirely. |
| 1:09.5 | This is a conversation about faces and facial differences, about the history and the ethics |
| 1:14.2 | of removing and remaking facial features. |
| 1:17.5 | It's going to range from the chin to the forehead, from Australia, Turkey and America to Britain, |
| 1:22.3 | and from reconstructed noses in the 17th century to transplanted faces in the 21st. |
| 1:28.4 | So far, there haven't been any face transplants in Britain. |
| 1:31.3 | The world's first full face transplant was in Spain in 2010. |
| 1:35.1 | But how do face transplants actually differ from other transplant surgeries? |
| 1:39.6 | Later, I'll be talking to the historian Emily Cock, who has written a book about nose surgery |
| 1:43.7 | in the 17th century. But let's begin with the About Face Project at the University of York and new research into face transplants. Dr. Fay Alberti is the leader of the project. She's the author of a biography of loneliness, as well as books on the history of the emotions and the history of the body. So what is this new project, which builds on her earlier research into the history of cosmetic surgery, actually aiming to do? |
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