Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Biologists, can this work?

I have a very limited education in biology so I welcome any ridiculing.

If someone who was physically simialr to me had had their arm cut off years ago and the wound was fully healed, and I decided to give them an arm, could this happen:

I cut off my arm at a specific point, their stump is cut off at the same point, surgeons simply attach my arm to them? -Assuming I have the same blood type etc...

P.S. In case you are wandering, I am not giving my arm to anyone.

In theory it would work if the TSTA's were right and well enough matched. Otherwise you might get Host-vs-graft disease and end up killing the recipient. It would take an enormous amount of skilled stitching to hook up enough blood vessels and get the nerve tracts aligned so that they could nourish the graft. I doubt that it could be successfully carried out because of the complexity of the work to hook up the blood vessels, though.

It's been done...

Real Handy

Nice find, Eduardo. Thanks for posting it.

Forget hands, it's face transplants that have stumped surgeons for so long. But a SAGG article, Face Transplants - Here\'s Looking At You , shows that a bunch of guys have been wanting to try it for years.

Soon after this story a partial face transplant was attempted successfully: Woman has first face transplant



video explaining procedure (WARNING! Advertisement precedes news clip)

Apparently the woman is happily smoking again ... Phew! What a relief.

Unlike Clint Hallam (pictured below), however, I doubt she'll be requesting that her transplant be removed.

Thanks Am. (Hope ya don't mind if I call ya that)
It's your positive responses that have made me stick with this forum.
And you know what? I'm glad I did!
OK enough of the creepy stuff.
Back to the action...ta ta.

hmmm, could I then replace my human hand with... say, a bears paw, or are the differences in bone structure etc. between us and them too different for it to work?

Not only bone structure but also TSTA's (tissue specific transplantation antigens) would be so different that the rejection problem would likely be insurmountable. It's not likely to happen in the real world. Now, science fiction, well, maybe....

Yeah well it means that only skin can reject other skin.But it needs a lot of other ingredients (for adhesion, blood vessel circuit..etc) for the transplanted skin to develop and finally the immune system should have to accept the growing skin's antigen..as Amaranth says..