A soldier is going to be the first U.S. penis transplant patient

From 2001 to 2013, 1,637 men among the U.S. military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan sustained injuries to a place people aren't too keen on talking about: their genitals.

Penis transplants, which use organs from deceased donors, are a rare and experimental surgery, The New York Times reports, with only two cases having been reported in medical journals so far. One case failed, but in the other, the patient is now a biological father. Johns Hopkins University doctors now have permission to perform 60 of the 12-hour operations on men injured in combat, with the first one expected within the next year.

"These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear about or read about very often," Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee, the chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, told the Times. "I think one would agree it is as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer, for a young man to come home in his early 20s with the pelvic area completely destroyed."