It’s not exactly standard medical practice to call up a patient’s rap sheet before prepping him for surgery, so you can hardly blame the doctors. Besides, a criminal past is no reason to deny someone medical treatment–even a treatment that is purely experimental and has nothing to do with saving lives.
Still, surgeons who perform radical, headline-grabbing operations know the value of good publicity. So it was something of a shock to an international team poised to perform the world’s first successful hand transplant to discover that they had chosen a man with a record as long, so to speak, as his arm.
In the two years he had been under evaluation for the long-planned operation, Clint Hallam passed himself off as an Australian businessman who had lost his right hand and forearm in a logging accident. Turns out he really lost it using a power saw in a New Zealand jail, where he had been locked up for fraud. Hallam finally came clean two days before the operation, which was performed late last month in a French hospital. A Perth newspaper later reported that he has a court date in Australia in January on seven more fraud charges.
Embarrassed as they might have been, the surgeons had no grounds for canceling the operation–especially given how badly Hallam wanted that arm. He was so eager to be a guinea pig, in fact, that he’d also registered with a U.S. group that had hoped to be the first to transplant a hand. The winning team insisted they were not in a race with the Americans or anyone else, but they couldn’t help crowing last week. “They may well be in a race with us,” Australian microsurgeon Dr. Earl Owen told the New York Times, “but they will never catch up.”
–By Michael D. Lemonick
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