Battleland

War’s Benefits: A Face-Saving Gift

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There are ancillary upsides to waging war and the defense spending that fuels it. It happens in technology – think the Internet and GPS, for the two most recent significant Pentagon-sparked advances – and medicine, too.

The Office of Naval Research has funded work into vascularized composite transplantation that led to a vascularized composite allograft – a face transplant – for a 37-year old Virginia man at the University of Maryland a week ago. There are some 200 U.S. veterans who might benefit from such an operation.

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