Ever since I was a young medical student and assisted at my first operation, I have loved surgery – the skills, the life-and-death decisions, and the ability to repair even the most severely damaged bodies.
I have seen a lot of extraordinary operations in my time, but nothing that quite matches what is currently going on in the world of transplant surgery.
A few months ago, as part of my new BBC1 series, Inside The Human Body, we filmed the most radical double hand transplant yet attempted.

Dr Richard Edwards, 54, a chiropractor from Oklahoma, had both his own hands cut off and then replaced by someone else’s.
Richard’s hands had been badly damaged in a fire. He survived, but 30 per cent of his body was severely burnt. Most of his injuries healed but his hands were too badly damaged to recover.
‘I couldn’t do anything that required a delicate touch. I couldn’t do up buttons, fasten or unfasten a zip,’ he says.

Richard was so frustrated that he volunteered for a double hand transplant.
The operation was co-ordinated by Dr Warren Breidenbach at the Jewish Hospital Hand Care Centre in Louisville, Kentucky.
It took two teams of surgeons more than 18 hours of painstaking surgery to first amputate Richard’s damaged hands then connect the donor’s hands.

Now, nine months later, Richard has good control of what were once a stranger’s hands. Such operations are more than just incredible surgical achievements. They illustrate the extraordinary adaptability of the human body, the fact that it can be persuaded to accept part of someone else as part of itself.
For many years surgeons have been transplanting internal organs. Now they are transplanting parts of the body that are much more visible, such as hands, eyes and faces. The next step is likely to be a leg.
Transplanting a heart is technically quite simple. It’s basically a pump. All you really have to do is connect up the major arteries and veins that go in and out.
Limbs are much more complicated. In the case of hands, you have to connect up 54 bones, 56 muscles and quite a few nerves.
Another real problem is the ethical qualms of doctors. A heart transplant could save your life. A new limb will improve quality of life, but the immune-suppressing drugs needed to stop the body rejecting the transplant will almost certainly shorten it. Limb transplant candidates must not just be physically suitable, but also psychologically ready.

There is much to be learned from the case of Clint Hallam, the recipient of the first hand transplant in 1998. Surgeons in France paraded Clint before the world’s Press. The operation had pushed the boundaries of what medics had believed was possible.
But soon after the initial euphoria it became clear that things were not quite what they had once seemed. Clint, who claimed to have lost his hand in a car accident, had in fact lost it in while he was in prison, serving time for fraud.
Far from being a successful businessman as he claimed, he struggled to pay the costs of the drugs he needed to prevent his new hand rejecting. I crossed paths with Clint by accident two years after his operation. He was flying to London in the hope of finding a surgeon who would remove his transplanted hand.

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