The first recipient of a hand transplant has appealed to his London surgeons to cut it off, it emerged last night.
Mr Clint Hallam, from New Zealand, who received his new limb in a revolutionary operation in 1998, said his body and mind had said "enough is enough" and it should be amputated.
Mr Hallam told BBC's Newsnight that for the first 12 months after the transplant his new hand, which had belonged to a motorcyclist killed in an accident, had functioned well.
"I had enough strength to hold a knife. There was no pain. I had normal sensations."
But since then there had been constant "pockets of rejection" that have covered it in scabs.
Mr Hallam denied that the rejection was sparked by his failure to take his medication.
He said that he only gave up taking the medicine several months later so that his body could recover from a bout of flu.
He said the doctors he had spoken to outside the transplant team had recommended that it should be removed as quickly as possible, but that team would like him to go through another period of anti-rejection treatment.
He added he was "quite sure" that even at this stage there were drugs that he could take that would make his transplanted hand look as good as the hand he was born with, but that there were no guarantees that the new hand would recover to be "functionally useful".
Last year Mr Nadey Hakim, a surgeon at St Mary's Hospital, London, said Mr Hallam was struggling to meet the £10,000 yearly drugs bill for the anti-rejection therapy.