Back in February of this year, Italian surgeon and neuroscientist Sergio Canavero shocked the world when he announced that he could (and fully intended to) perform a head transplant on a human being. Following this announcement, Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian man afflicted Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a muscle-wasting condition, volunteered to be the first human to be decapitated and have his head attached to another body.
This controversial surgery is scheduled to be performed in China in 2017.
A shaky past
“When I realized that I could participate in something really big and important, I had no doubt left in my mind and started to work in this direction,” Spiridonov, a Russian computer scientist, told CEN. “The only thing I feel is the sense of pleasant impatience, like I have been preparing for something important all my life and it is starting to happen.”
He added that while the procedure is on the books for two years from now, he’s confident that Canavero will take as much time as he needs to make sure the surgery can be performed successfully.
“According to Canavero’s calculations, if everything goes to plan, two years is the time frame needed to verify all scientific calculations and plan the procedure’s details. It isn’t a race. No doubt, the surgery will be done once the doctor and the experts are 99 percent sure of its success.”
Canavero also announced this week that he’s partnered with Chinese surgeon Ren Xiaoping from the Harbin Medical University to perform the procedure.
Xiaoping has lots of experience with head transplants—since 2013 he’s performed 1,000 of them on mice, each requiring a 10-hour operation. Of course, none of them have lived for longer than a few minutes. He already has plans to start experimenting on primates later this year.
The first successful head transplant was performed in 1970—a monkey had its head removed and attached to the body of another. It lived for nine days after the operation, but was paralyzed from the attachment point down and required a ventilator to breathe.
Given that none of these such experiments have resulted in a “hybrid” that lives for longer than a little over a week—and more often than not, only a few minutes—and that the surgeon and patient both seem determined to go through with the operation, we can only hope that Canavero and Xiaoping can refine the procedure enough in the next couple of years to successfully transplant Spiridonov’s head to a new body with no complications.
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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