Health Check: What Price Would You Pay for a Limb Transplant?

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RIVALRY IN medicine is no different from that in any other field of human endeavour.

Who remembers the second person to climb Everest or walk on the moon - and who will bother to record the second transplant of a human hand? The race to be first involves risk but it is the driving force that brings scientific advance, social progress and, er, research grants.

Except that medical advances involve two people - and it is the patient, not the doctor, who takes the risk. Many men died trying to climb Everest but they were a danger only to themselves. The team that last week claimed the world's first transplant using a donor hand put their patient, Clint Hallam, a New …