Stories of transplanted tissue and body parts go far back in myth and legend. Chinese folklore tells of organ transplants; in the sixth century A.D., the Western patron saints of medicine, Cosmos and Damian, supposedly replaced the cancerous leg of a white man with the healthy leg of a recently-deceased black man. Records of transplants begin in India in the sixth century A.D. with skin grafts to replace amputated noses (the penalty for adultery). This practice was introduced to Western medicine in the sixteenth century by Italian surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi who grafted to a patient's nose a flap of skin from the forearm. Portion of this flap was left in tact on the arm until the graft took several weeks later when the flap was severed and the arm released. Tagliacozzi used a patient's own skin because he felt that an individual's "force and...