Do Surgical Teams exist? - methodology

Question

Has anybody been in or has seen a kind of "Surgical Team" as described in The Mythical Man Month? Have you heard of somebody actually implementing "Mill's Proposal"?
There is a lot of detail about the various roles in the book itself, but for those who haven't read the book, I found a website and a blog post which give a good summary. I've quoted the roles from the website below:
The Surgical Team
The surgeon is the chief programmer and the el-presidente of the whole
team. He produces all the
specifications, codes the entire
system the team is responsible for,
tests it, and drafts its supporting
documentation.
The copilot is the surgeon’s assistant. His main purpose is to
share in the thinking about design
issues – to serve as a sounding board,
as it were. The copilot represents the
team in meetings with other teams. He
knows the code intimately, and serves
as insurance in case of disaster to
the surgeon.
The toolsmith supports the surgeon and builds specialized utilities and
tools as may be required by his
surgeon. Each team has its dedicated
toolsmith in addition to any central
services provided by the rest of the
project infrastructure. The tester is
responsible for maintaining test cases
for testing the surgeon’s work as he
writes it. He is both an adversary who
devises test cases to measure against
the formal specs and devises test data
to be used in debugging.
The language lawyer, which can serve several surgeons, I a widely consulted
specialist who delights in the mastery
of the intricacies of the programming
languages and the operating systems
upon which the software must perform.
The administrator handles money, people, space, and machines. The
surgeon is the ultimate boss, with the
last word on all these issues, but the
day to day management of the issues
and interfacing with the
administrative machinery of the
project is the role of a professional
administrator. One administrator may
serve more than one team.
The editor edits and revises the documentation as drafted or dictated
by the surgeon and oversees the
mechanics of its production.
The program clerk, trained as a secretary, is responsible for
maintaining all the machine-readable
and human-readable technical records
generated by the team. All the filing
and indexing is the responsibility of
the program clerk.
The secretaries handle the project correspondence and non-project files.

Answer 1

We did use the surgical team approach of Brooks' at a startup we set up about 10 years ago. We were five people at the company plus a few others at the uni lab supporting us. The experience was technically great, but it didn't last long for business reasons. :-)