And he hopes to be able to relay the signals wirelessly through a person's skull to a receiver implanted beneath skin on the head, eliminating the need for an open port into the brain.

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Even the hair on Wiens' head, from the mid-scalp area, is part of the donor skin (the hair on the back of Wiens' head is his own).

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He is a serious man with a head full of snow-white hair, light skin, and glacier-blue eyes.

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In the waiting room as we checked into the hospital, his father sat next to my mother and I remember the image of him exactly: olive skin, broad face, and long shiny hair, his head held in his big hands as if it had cut loose from his body.

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"In some cases, we can get four football fields of skin out of one baby foreskin, " said Dr. James McGuire, head of wound management at the Foot and Ankle Institute at the School of Podiatric Medicine at Temple University, in Philadelphia.

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The first source said Jackson's body was "lily white from head to toe, " perhaps the result of vitiligo -- a condition that causes the skin to lose melanin and produce slowly enlarging white patches.

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