In the wake of the announcements by 
surgeons at the University of Louisville (in the pages of The American Journal of Bioethics) that they planned to conduct a face transplant and hold it to be ethical to do so, and subsequent announcements to the effect that Cleveland Clinic was going ahead with the same procedure, there is lots of new coverage of progress on face transplantation and the associated ethical issues. In fact hundreds of papers around the world are playing pun games with face transplantation (Face/off, Facing the Impossible, Faced with Ethical Issues, Faces of Death). An example is the Marilynn Marchione AP story that has run three hundred times at last count, seen here in the Seattle Times:
CLEVELAND 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 has 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 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…
Matthew Teffeteller, who lives south of Knoxville, Tenn., might seem like an ideal candidate. Three years ago, he was burned in a car crash that killed his pregnant wife. Despite many surgeries, his face still frightens children. Yet he wouldn’t try a transplant.
“Having somebody else’s face … that wouldn’t be right. I’d be afraid something would go wrong, too. What would you do if you didn’t have a face? Could you live?”
Bioethicist Carson Strong at the University of Tennessee wonders, too.
“It would leave the patient with an extensive facial wound with potentially serious physical and psychological consequences,” he wrote last summer in the American Journal of Bioethics.
Consequences he just could not face.