What do YOU do in your spare time?

Irish surgeon and plastic surgery maestro Mr Peter Butler, famous for spending fifteen years determinedly working towards performing the world’s first full face transplant, has found time to help develop a “miracle” healing gel for plastic surgery scars.
Called “Heal“, the gel is being heralded as a new breakthrough in minimising surgical scars and reducing bruising.
Mr Butler, born in Cork and trained in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), along with four other plastic surgeons, “stumbled” upon the formula while looking at ways to speed up patient recovery time.

In other words, they’ve accidentally developed a magic skin cream — in between trying to perform a radical and controversial surgical procedure that only received ethical approval in the UK in 2006.
Mr Butler and his 30-strong team at the Royal Free Hospital in London have been searching for suitable face transplant donors for years, well before the French team performed the partial face transplant on Isabelle Dinoire, who lost her cheeks, lips, chin and much of her nose when she was mauled by her dog while sleeping (the exact details of the incident remain slightly confusing).
Mr Butler very recently told the British Medical Journal that the operation will “probably” be done this year.
He said they have approval to do four full face transplants, and are still screening patients looking for the right donor.
“It’s a long process,” Mr Butler told the BMJ. “It will probably be this year, but we are not sure. There are about four or five patients that are ideal but they don’t want to be the first.”
This is apparently because of the intense media scrutiny surrounding Mr Butler and the whole procedure. And also maybe because of the lingering criticism directed towards facial transplantation, although some of this has abated since Ms. Dinoire’s operation proved a success.
Back in 2006, Mr Butler was in Dublin for a plastic surgery conference and spoke to IMT about his plans. Even then he was hesitant about discussing them, although he was also adamant that to deny someone the opportunity of a transplant was wrong.
“The ethical argument is used by some people as a block or a barrier, but really it should be used to summarise all the pluses and minuses and bring them together. Ethics is a way of framing the argument for face transplants,” he told IMT.
“The important thing to remember is that this is about the patients. We have a chance to improve their lives. That’s where we start the ethical argument. We haven’t moved that far forward since the 40s and 50s in the aesthetic result of full facial reconstruction. What we end up with is a slab of meat on the side of a face, and we slap ourselves on the back and say we’ve done a good job. We’ve reached the end of the reconstructive ladder. We want to give these patients what they’re missing and replace like with like. We can do that now.”
Let’s hope 2008 is the year — fifteen years is an awful long time to spend on something with no results, even if you do discover a breakthrough skin gel in the process.