Chinese surgeons have performed the world's first penis 
transplant on a man whose organ was damaged beyond repair in an accident this 
year. 
 
 The incident 
left the man with a 1cm-long stump with which he was unable to urinate or have 
sexual intercourse. "His quality of life was affected severely," said Dr Weilie 
Hu, a surgeon at Guangzhou General Hospital.
Doctors spent 15 hours attaching a 10cm penis to the 44-year-old patient 
after the parents of a brain-dead man half his age agreed to donate their son's 
organ. 
The procedure, described in a case study due to appear in the journal 
European Urology next month, represents a big leap forward in transplant 
surgery; it required complex microsurgery to connect nerves and tiny blood 
vessels. 
The surgical team claims the operation was a success. After 10 days, tests 
revealed the organ had a rich blood supply and the man was able to urinate 
normally. 
Doctors have previously succeeded in reuniting men with their sexual organs 
after traumatic accidents or attacks, but the Guangzhou operation is the first 
in which a donor penis has successfully been attached to another man. 
Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to 
remove the penis two weeks later. "Because of a severe psychological problem of 
the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut 
off," Dr Hu said. An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being 
rejected by the body. 
 
 Jean-Michel Dubernard, the French surgeon who performed the world's 
first face transplant on a woman who had been attacked by a dog 
this year, said psychological factors were a serious issue for many patients receiving certain "allografts", 
or organs from donors. 
 
 
 
 "Psychological consequences of hand and 
face allografts show that it is not so easy to use and see permanently a dead 
person's hands, nor is it easy to look in a mirror to see a dead person's face," 
he wrote in the journal. "Clearly, in the Chinese case the failure at a very 
early stage was first psychological. It involved the recipient's wife and raised 
many questions." 
In 2001, surgeons were forced to amputate the world's first transplanted hand 
from Clint Hallam, a 50-year-old New Zealander, who said he wanted the "hideous 
and withered" hand removed because he had become "mentally detached" from it. 
The original transplant was conducted by Prof Dubernard's team at the Edouard 
Herriot Hospital in Lyons, who have since performed the world's first double arm 
transplant. 
Andrew George, a transplant expert at Imperial College, London, said: "Doing 
a penis transplant should be no more complex than anything else. But it takes 
time for nerve sensations to kick in and it's not clear whether the patient 
would ever be able to have sex with it. The question is whether it's right to be 
doing a transplant for what may be seen as cosmetic reasons."