DOD leads the way in face transplant research James Maki doesn’t
remember exactly how he lost his face. The 60-year-old fell onto
an electrified subway rail in Boston in June 2005, leaving him
without his nose, upper lip and cheeks and destroying the roof
of his mouth. For four years, Maki ate through a tube and
endured the whispers and stares of people who fixated on the
gaping hole where his nose once was. All the while, progress was
being made on a historic medical procedure that would change his
life — one that could hold the key to making some of the most
severely damaged U.S. veterans feel whole again. Maki received a
face transplant, only the second in the United States, in April
2009 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. By the end of
the year, his surgeon would be leading a $3.4 million Defense
Department-funded initiative for Iraq and Afghanistan war
veterans. “We really want to help them,” Dr. Bohdan Pomahac,
head of the Brigham face transplant team, said at the time.
“They have given up their