San Francisco Zoo
Sloat and The Great Highway
Lakeside
This hippopotamus is not only a wonderful sculpture but a favorite climbing creature in the San Francisco Zoo. Heavyweight was sculpted by Dr. Burt Brent of Portola Valley.
According to a 2007 article in the Almanac:
Dr. Burt Brent, a plastic surgeon with an office in Woodside, has built his career and an international reputation on creating living ears for children born without ears or with deformed ears. He has pioneered a technique for building new ears out of the kid’s own rib cartilage; the ears actually grow as the child grows.
Over the last 30 years, Dr. Brent has provided real ears — and the dignity that goes with them — to more than 1,800 children from all over the world. In 2005 he received the Clinician of the Year Award for lifetime achievement from the American Association of Plastic Surgeons.
Officially, Dr. Brent is an associate professor at the Stanford Medical Center. He does six to eight operations a week as a staff surgeon at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View.
Heavyweight, was donated to the zoo by Dr. Brent.
