5 CULTURE
9 OPINION
The NYU Student Bringing Vegan Kefir to the Market
A Semester in Review
7 ARTS
Hip-Hop and Rap Stand Behind Kaep
11 SPORTS
The New School and NYU Collide for Haiku VOLUME LI | ISSUE 15
MONDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2018
At Langone, a Doctor Gives a Gunshot Victim a New Face The second full-face transplant performed at NYU was conducted over a 25-hour period.
‘Moonlight’ Director Talks Latest Project Berry Jenkins warns to never adapt your heroes, but finds “If Beale Street Could Talk” to be a pretty fruitful attempt.
By KRISTINA HAYHURST News Editor and MEGHNA MAHARISHI Deputy News Editor Inside the operating room during a 25-hour face transplant surgery, Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez had time to take just one bathroom break and a quick sip of coffee. The rest of his time consisted of working under the microscope to remove the face of a deceased donor and place it onto Cameron Underwood, who lost the majority of his jaw, lips, nose and chin to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Rodriguez and his team removed the skin, tissue, fat, muscle, all the nerves that move the face and provide sensation, muscles of facial expression, the jaw, the eye sockets, the teeth, the pallet and all the tissue below the tongue of the donor. This process took about 12 hours, after which Rodriguez began to reconstruct the face onto Underwood until the end of the surgery. He connected all the bones with plates and screws, connected the major blood vessels and every single strand of nerve. Then he tailored the skin around the eyelids, around the nose, around the lips, around the neck and in front of the ears. Lastly, he repaired the pallet and the floor of the mouth. “25-hours later, Cameron had a new face,” Rodriguez said. In November 2005, a team of surgeons in France performed the first successful partial face transplant on Isabelle Dinoire, who lost parts of her cheeks, nose, lips and chin after her dog severely bit her earlier that year. Five years later, 30 Spanish doctors carried out the first successful full-face transplant on a man who was injured from a shooting accident. Since 2005, there have been over 40 face transplant surgeries done around the world. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2
RYAN MIKEL | WSN
Barry Jenkins won an Oscar just last year for “Moonlight.” Now, he is gearing up to release his latest project “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
By RYAN MIKEL Arts Editor How does one begin to honor the legacy of James Baldwin but also forge one of their own? This is the question Barry Jenkins, the director of the Academy Award-winning film “Moonlight,” grappled with as he sat down to adapt Baldwin’s 1974 novel “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Jenkins did not have the budget, or the rights, but he had a vision of a pastel-colored Harlem in the summertime and, thus, his writing began. It was the summer of 2013. “Moonlight” was an unpublished manuscript collecting dust on a shelf and besides a San Francisco Film Critics Circle award, Jenkins was virtually unknown. The 34-year-old had traveled to Europe to adapt “If Beale Street Could Talk” into a feature-length film. Despite enduring poverty in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami and previously making a film for less than $15,000, Jenkins called adapting the “Beale Street” script the hardest thing he had ever been through in his life. “They say never meet your heroes,” Jenkins told WSN in an interview. “But I say, never adapt your heroes.” While “If Beale Street Could Talk” is not the f irst book of Baldwin’s that Jenkins read, and it’s def initely not his favorite either, the Harlem romance had a lasting effect on the Floridian since he first finished the 200-page novel back in 2010. A 3D image plan for Underwood’s procedure.
COURTESY OF NYU LANGONE HEALTH
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