The first face transplant to also include an eyeball was a surgical coup — but restoring vision remains a challenge.
For Aaron James, it still hasn’t quite sunk in that he received the first successful whole-eye transplant in history. “It just blows my mind being a part of something this big,” says the 47-year-old father from Hot Springs, Arkansas.
In 2021, James was injured in an electrical accident while working as a high-voltage lineman. He lost his dominant left arm, left eye, chin and nose. For two years, he was unable to eat solid food, taste, smell or talk normally.
In May 2023, he received the first whole-eye and face transplant at New York University (NYU) Langone Health in New York City. More than a year after the surgery, his transplanted eye remains healthy — the retina can even respond to light — but James cannot see out of it.
“It is a technically brilliant operation,” says surgeon Bohdan Pomahač at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who in 2011 performed the first full facial transplant in the United States, but was not involved with James’s case.
A large medical team transplanted the whole left eye, the bony socket around it, the nose, a piece of chin bone and the associated muscles, nerves and blood vessels to James from a donor whose brain showed no functional activity. The surgery took about 21 hours.
Doctors never expected James to regain sight in the transplanted eye, says Daniel Ceradini, a surgeon at NYU Langone Health and first author of the study. That’s because there was no evidence that the donor’s optic nerve could successfully reconnect to James’s brain. The optic nerve, which sends information from the retina to the brain, is part of the central nervous system, and how to regenerate that system is a mystery. But the operation does take researchers a step closer to an eye transplant that could one day restore vision, which, Ceradini says, has been “considered a holy grail”.
For Aaron James, it still hasn’t quite sunk in that he received the first successful whole-eye transplant in history. “It just blows my mind being a part of something this big,” says the 47-year-old father from Hot Springs, Arkansas.
In 2021, James was injured in an electrical accident while working as a high-voltage lineman. He lost his dominant left arm, left eye, chin and nose. For two years, he was unable to eat solid food, taste, smell or talk normally.
In May 2023, he received the first whole-eye and face transplant at New York University (NYU) Langone Health in New York City. More than a year after the surgery, his transplanted eye remains healthy — the retina can even respond to light — but James cannot see out of it.
“It is a technically brilliant operation,” says surgeon Bohdan Pomahač at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who in 2011 performed the first full facial transplant in the United States, but was not involved with James’s case.
A large medical team transplanted the whole left eye, the bony socket around it, the nose, a piece of chin bone and the associated muscles, nerves and blood vessels to James from a donor whose brain showed no functional activity. The surgery took about 21 hours.
Doctors never expected James to regain sight in the transplanted eye, says Daniel Ceradini, a surgeon at NYU Langone Health and first author of the study. That’s because there was no evidence that the donor’s optic nerve could successfully reconnect to James’s brain. The optic nerve, which sends information from the retina to the brain, is part of the central nervous system, and how to regenerate that system is a mystery. But the operation does take researchers a step closer to an eye transplant that could one day restore vision, which, Ceradini says, has been “considered a holy grail”.
TFS 
