Posted Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005; 1:57 a.m.

PARIS -- Surgeons in France have for the first time performed a partial face transplant, a surgeon who led one of the two teams that performed the operation said yesterday.

The recipient of the transplant was a 38-year-old woman who had been severely disfigured in an attack by a dog, said the surgeon, Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard of Lyon. The operation was carried out in Amiens on Sunday.

Hospital officials said the woman who received the transplant did not wish to be identified. They gave no details about what measures, if any, had been taken to reconstruct her face short of a transplant. "The patient is well and fine, and the graft is O.K.," Dr. Dubernard said. He said a news conference would be held tomorrow in Lyon to discuss the case.

Ethics committees in France and England have rejected proposals to perform full face transplants until more research is done. The committees were concerned about the unknown risks of the long-term use of large doses of immunosuppressive drugs for a procedure that does not save lives. The aim of face transplants is to improve the quality of life for patients who have suffered severe injuries from burns, accidents and shootings, for example.

The French committee did approve partial face transplants of the type performed on the woman in Amiens. But the committee cautioned in a report last year that even a partial transplant - the mouth and the nose, for example - was "high-risk experimentation."

Room for Improvement
Dr. Dubernard said his team planned to do another transplant - of bone marrow - on the woman while she was in the hospital in Lyon. Although bone narrow transplants are a standard treatment for some conditions, in this case the hope would be that it would increase the patient's tolerance to a graft.

Dr. Lantieri said if a bone marrow transplant was carried out on the patient it would mean that she would be undergoing two experiments at the same time. The extra experiment would be unethical, Dr. Lantieri said, because "every ethical committee says that only one experiment should be carried out at a time. That is a basic rule of clinical research."

But, he added, "I really hope the partial face transplant will work."