Saving Face

Harvard-based New Zealander Simon Talbot leads a team of surgeons performing astonishing hand transplants and plays a part in operations that give patients a new face.

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In 2009, Charla Nash was horrifically injured when her employer's chimpanzee attacked her in Stamford, Connecticut. Her face and hands were torn off and she lost her sight. The savaging became global news after the release of a recording of the emergency call seeking help for Nash in which the chimp can be heard screeching in the background.

Enter Simon Talbot, a New Zealand born, US-based surgeon. In 2011, Talbot and his team operated on Nash, giving her a new face and new hands. She now lives a mostly independent life, despite medical setbacks. Talbot has helped give new faces to seven patients, and hands to five others.

He grew up in Hamilton in a medical family – his father, Richard, a doctor, his mother, Mary, a nurse. He and his twin sister, Sarah, are both doctors. Their older brother, David, did law and Talbot credits him with inspiring his own study habits.

Talbot is married to US doctor Elizabeth Morgan; both work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Talbot is also an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He recently returned home to visit family and friends and to receive a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Auckland.

You’re doing pioneering surgery. Do you think being a Kiwi, with the No 8-wire mentality, has helped you in this risky and specialised work?

It’s all about the No 8 wire. It’s ingrained in us, as New Zealanders, to think outside the box and to be innovative and inventive. That is a huge part of taking on this kind of work. Another aspect, which I hadn’t much appreciated until I got into this, was how good New Zealanders are at teamwork. My job is keeping everybody working well together as a team and doing their part.

Family life also played a big part in your decision to go into medicine.