Because any transplant depends on public appeals for organ and tissue donors, a recipient is obligated to aid such a procedure's success. But the obligation has to be balanced with a cardinal rule of human experimentation -- that a participant can withdraw from a trial at any time no matter how awkward it may be for the patient or the doctor.

Mr. Hallam reiterated in the interview what he wrote in a note at the request of his doctors explaining why he wanted the hand removed. He said he had taken his drugs only intermittently during the past year and none for the last 60 days.

''Therefore, I am fully responsible for the rejection of this hand, which was satisfactory before I stopped my drugs,'' Mr. Hallam wrote.

Reminded of his earlier desire to become a role model for people with lost limbs, Mr. Hallam said, ''that is probably the saddest part'' of the amputation.

''People have condemned me for not strictly sticking to the directions that the doctors had given me and not totally complying with the medication regimen that they had put me on,'' Mr. Hallam said. But, he said, ''In my own mind I believe that the transplant is not a failure and was not a failure.'' Further research may explain the rejection, he said.

At the outset, Mr. Hallam told his doctors he lost his hand in an industrial accident. Only at the time of the transplant did they learn it had been severed in an accident in a prison in his native New Zealand. They also learned from Australian and New Zealand newspapers that Mr. Hallam had been convicted of fraud.

The transplant team spent months evaluating Mr. Hallam's suitability as a hand transplant recipient and was convinced that he would be a cooperative patient from the extensive interviews and psychological testing he underwent in Australia and France before the operation.