REVOLUTIONARY

Woman Debuts First U.S. Face Transplant

Thanks donor family for allowing her to eat again.

Five years ago, Connie Culp’s husband shot her point-blank before turning the gun on himself, leaving his wife with a hole in her face that doctors attempted to fix—to no avail, even after 30 operations. In December, Culp received the first full face transplant in the U.S. Doctors graphed a face donated from a dead woman onto Culp’s, and now she can eat, speak, and breathe on her own. Until Tuesday, when Culp debuted her new face, her identity was kept secret. “I guess I’m the one you came to see today,” she said at a news conference. But she added: “I think it’s more important that you focus on the donor family that made it, so I could have this person’s face.”