Texas doctors hail first successful skull and scalp transplant

Texas doctors say they have done the world’s first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man with a large head wound from cancer treatment. MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist Hospital doctors announced Thursday that they did the operation on May 22 at Houston Methodist. The recipient — Jim Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer from Austin, Texas — expects to leave the hospital Thursday with a new kidney and pancreas along with the scalp and skull grafts. He said he was stunned at how well doctors matched him to a donor with similar skin and coloring.

It’s kind of shocking, really, how good they got it. I will have way more hair than when I was 21.

Boysen joked in an interview with The Associated Press

Last year, doctors in the Netherlands said they replaced most of a woman’s skull with a 3-D printed plastic one. The Texas operation is thought to be the first skull-scalp transplant from a human donor, as opposed to an artificial implant or a simple bone graft. Over the last decade, transplants once considered impossible have become a reality. More than two dozen face transplants have been done since the first one in France in 2005; the first one in the U.S. was done in Cleveland in 2008.

Science scalp transplant