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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 2: Open Up and Say...Eeeeeeeew!

Last month an Austrian man had a cancerous tumor on his tongue, so he got a new one. That's right. He got a tongue transplant.

The man was the first person known to get a tongue transplant. The man had smoked cigarettes for many years, and the tumor in his mouth was so big that the man couldn't open his mouth, so doctors had to amputate the whole tongue. They then replaced it with a tongue taken from a donor with a healthy tongue who was already brain-dead.

Doctors were worried that the patient's body would reject the new tongue, and that the transplant would fail. However, the man seems to have healed well in the past month. According to reports, the man is learning to talk and swallow with his new tongue, and he has been released from the hospital in Vienna, Austria where the transplant surgery was performed.

Doctors say that, even though the new tongue has healed, the man still cannot move it or speak normally, and he will probably never be able to taste again.

So we will probably never know if his favorite foods changed with his tongue.

Ick.

--Written by Nia Williams

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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY 1: So Big It's Scary