PARIS: New questions were raised on Sunday over France’s pioneering face transplant operation when a leading medical ethics professor said the surgery had been conducted with undue haste, as it emerged that both the donor and the recipient of the skin graft had attempted suicide.

The medical team that carried out the 15-hour operation eight days ago was accused of ignoring ethical questions in the bid to be first, and of using a rival doctor’s technique. The saga took a further twist when it became clear that the donor and the 38-year-old transplant patient had been involved in suicide attempts.

Transplant patient Isabelle Dinoire, from Valenciennes, north of Amiens, was reported to have overdosed on pills last May following a row with one of her two daughters. As she lay unconscious, part of her nose, her mouth and chin were bitten off by her Labrador-cross dog, Tania.

The donor, whose name has not been released, was said to have been of a similar age and from the same area as Ms Dinoire. She had hanged herself. Permission for the transplant was given by her family after she was declared brain dead.

Yesterday a row broke out after Emmanuel Hirsch, a professor of medical ethics and a member of the Biomedicine Agency — one of the organisations whose approval was sought for the transplant — said his particular committee had not been informed of the surgery. “I have the impression that everything was done in a hurry and that not all the questions involved were taken into account when there was no real urgency,” he told Sunday’s Le Journal du Dimanche. “We are talking about a pure experiment. Personally I would have expressed serious reservation about this transplant. I’d like to know why we weren’t even informed about this operation.”

Carine Camby, the agency’s director, said Professor Hirsch’s committee had not been set up when approval for the transplant was sought. “We received the request in May. The committee was set up in September. It was too late and there was a certain urgency because if we’d waited longer the problems of scarring would have made the transplant impossible,” she told the newspaper.

Prof Hirsch said that many worrying questions remained unanswered. “How was the patient told about this, was it explained to her that she would be undergoing two experiments: the transplant but also a new immuno-suppressing treatment which involves the injection of stem cells from the bone marrow of the donor?

The Sunday newspaper also reported that another French plastic surgeon, Laurent Lantieri, claimed the transplant team stole his technique.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service