Marco Lanzetta, the record-breaking surgeon enchanted by Africa
Rome - It all goes back to a trip taken in 1981 when a medical student, part-time basketball coach, arrived in Africa to visit a hospital.
This is the beginning of Marco Lanzetta’s career story. Dr. Lanzetta is the first Italian surgeon to perform a hand transplant operation, first in Lyon (France) in 1998 and then in Italy in the year 2000.
“During my first trip to Africa I became aware of a dramatic situation and understood what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a surgeon”.
This was a true calling and Africa remained in the heart and the mind of the man and the doctor. As a man, Dr. Lanzetta often returns to Africa as a traveller and as a doctor he founded the non-profit Gicam (www.gicam.it) which is responsible for the start-up of medical projects in Sierra Leone.
In the meantime, the record-breaking surgeon continues to practice his hobbies first of all travelling.
“I go to Northern Africa but also Polynesia, the important thing is to travel free and not with organized tours”. Then he loves sports.“I get on a mountain bike every time I can in all periods of the year. Generally I like biking on the pre-Alps around Monza but I also bike when I’m away for work or on vacation”.
Dr. Lanzetta doesn’t leave a lot of spare time to his “super-surgeon” side, an Italian that emigrated abroad “for the whole of 8 years” but then returned to Italy in 1995. “I’m not sorry for the fact that I chose to return to my country, also because I have maintained numerous contacts with colleagues working abroad”.
Outside of Italy, Dr. Lanzetta learned the “international mentality which says you have to go ahead”. This is the same mentality that allowed him to accept the challenge of the pioneer hand transplant operation.
The history of the operations is well-known: the first hand transplant operation in the world was carried out in Lyon in 1998, then in January 2000 he executed the first simultaneous transplant operation of both hands in the French city and then the first operation of this type in Italy in October 2000.
Dr. Lanzetta is now preparing to reach new goals: face transplant operations already carried out again in France. “There are ideal candidates also here in Italy, people that have no other option than deformity.
Of course, we have to see how the first face transplant operation goes but we currently know a lot and that it is something feasible”. Dr. Lanzetta believes that the main issue is one and one alone: finding ideal patients, capable of fully understanding what they are doing.
This is one of the most controversial aspects of this type of transplant operation.
“Ethics is best left to the ethics specialists, even though collective reasoning is necessary in particular situations, which should be entrusted to bioethics and so the Bioethics Committee”.This is an unsurpassable limit which adds on to a personal one. “I would never carry out an organ or tissue transplant relative to the identity of the person so I totally exclude brain or genital organ transplants.
In the first case, there is the uniqueness of each and every one of us and in the other, it is our biological signature.
10631 Vinedale Street, Sun Valley, CA 91352 - Phone (818) 767-3413 - Fax: (818) 767-1410