In the Footsteps of the Minotaur: The Organ Factory Explored as an Imaginary Outcome to Transplant Surgery

Using the mythological metaphor comparing the legendary figure of Jean-Michel Dubernard to that of the Minotaur locked in the walls of the labyrinth of immunity, this tribute to his surgical work follows the transgressive ruptures he caused by successively opening the clinical history of human hand and face transplants. At the end of the Ariane’s thread running along this path that we have discreetly followed in his shadow, we open the future perspective of a biofabrication of allocompatible organs, obtained from extracellular matrix grafts, decellularized and then recellularized with stem cells arising from the recipient himself. The results of our experiments demonstrate that this strategy has now reached the scientific maturity of a well-established proof of concept, recorded on many animal and human models of increasing complexity. This imaginary outcome to conventional transplantation surgery questions, beyond the technological obstacles that it still has to overcome, the 4 fundamental pillars of the biological, morphological, existential and symbolic determinants of human identity, the hidden levers of which are fully revealed in the course of visible organ transplants, including hands and face as vectors of autonomy and restored humanity.