Warren C. Breidenbach

Warren C. Breidenbach III is an American hand surgeon best known for leading the team that performed the first long-term successful hand transplant in the world, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. He and fellow hand surgeon Tsu-Min Tsai, both of the Kleinert, Kutz and Associates Hand Care Center, directed a team of surgeons who attached a donor left hand to replace the left hand of Matthew Scott. The Louisville team went on to carry out further hand transplants between 1999 and 2011, when Breidenbach moved to the University of Arizona in Tucson to start a Composite Tissue Allotransplantation center at its medical center. He credits the success of the first operation to feasibility studies and a review of the medical literature carried out before the clinical procedure, and he graduated from the University of Calgary.