BUILDING BROKEN HEART

BUILDING BROKEN HEART

Wayne mirrison changes people's lives; and surgeons from around the world come to see how does it. Prof. Morrison has been performing plastic and reconstructive surgery and research for almost 30 years, including several high- profile cases involving patients with severe injuries. One of those patients was a young woman whose scalp, forehead, hair and right cheek were ripped off in an accident in rural Victoria. Micro surgeons operated for more than 20 hours to reattach the scalp, an operation performed only once before. Another case developed a pioneering technique whereby a new flap of skin was fabricated to cover a deep hole created on two-thirds of a man's forehead by the removal of skin cancers, micro surgeons reroutes an artery from the armpit to the chest, the blood supply started to grow new vessels and tissue and the skin flap grew under the man's normal neck skin.

Prof. marrison also saved the arm of a Port Arthur massacre survivor, Linda wanders. A bullet blew a 12cm whole through the woman's right forearm, taking with it bone, a radial artery tendons nerves and muscle everything from the elbow to the wrist. Prof. Marrison and his team painstalingly rebuilt the woman's arm in 16 operation offer three years, using bone from her keg, transplanted blood vessels, muscles and skin. Engineering research by prof. Morrison, 62 and his colleague at the Bernard institute of microsugery at st vunceit's hospitals that could change millions of lives. The research had brought together molecular scaffold engineers, chemical engineers and stem cell biologists. Vital heart tissue can be grown using the techniques but scientists. Vital heart tissue can be grown using the technique but socialists at the institute have also grown muscles, tissue and fat the size of human first, with its own blood supply, inside a pig. The technology could one day be used for women who have lost breasts to cancers or people who have lost chunks of tissue in accidents. Beside bone, muscles and cartilage, tissue engineers have grown insulin- secreting pancreas, liver and kidney tissue.

Doctors from around the world come to Melbourne to work with prof Morrison . He heads Melbourne university department of surgery as well as the departments of plastics and reconstructive and hand surgery at sty Vincent's. In 1992 he became directr of the Bernard o'berien institute, a research and tanning institution with a global reputation for re-constructive microsurgery and immediate past president Of the Asia pacific federation of societies for surgery of the hand. He was made a member of the order of austerial.