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An Israeli surgeon's dexterity treating the largest and most serious wounds has brought him to Sichuan province again and again, he tells Liu Zhihua. Moris Topaz finally had a good sleep on the flight from New York to China recently. The 63-year-old usually sleeps only three hours a day but that's enough, he says, to give him plenty of energy for his work. Topaz heads the plastic surgery unit of the prestigious Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera, Israel. He also serves as the secretary-general of the International Committee for Quality Assurance and Medical Technologies and Devices in Plastic Surgery. On this, his most recent trip to China, he was part of a delegation led by Ronni Gamzu, director-general of Israel's Ministry of Health, which aimed to strengthen the cooperation of health communities in the two countries. While "cooperation" may sound vague to outsiders, Sichuan resident Gong Fangxue has a very clear idea what that word means to ordinary people. If not for TopCloser, a groundbreaking method for closing large wounds that Topaz applied in her operation, Gong probably would have died from a huge malignant tumor. "It was a unique case over a very big tumor. Usually with these kinds of tumors, we have to do complicated surgeries with skin grafts or flaps," Topaz says. "This time, we actually stretched the skin in a way we hadn't done before." Gong, 40, found a suddenly fast-growing bump on her right shoulder in 2009. The resident of Deyang was diagnosed with a malignant spindle cell tumor. | 
