In what might be the most bonkers medical claim of the century, an Italian neurosurgeon reckons he's ready to perform the world's first human head transplant.
While social media has been filling up with realistic videos of head transplants, at this point it's still pretty far away from ever becoming a reality.
However, neurosurgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero has been hot on the topic for years, claiming he's already successfully transplanted heads on monkeys, dogs, and human corpses. His next move involves taking a person's head from their diseased body and attaching it to a healthy donor body from someone who's brain-dead.
It sounds like something inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—and medical experts seem to agree on the impracticalities of the procedure.
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Canavero's journey into the space started when he was working on central pain research. Talking to Carlo Alberto Pagni, a world-class expert on central pain, he said: "I want to do head transplants."
Canaverso remembered: "And the guy didn’t lose his composure.”
After working on pain research and publishing a book in 2011, Canavero became convinced that science had advanced enough to make head transplants possible. “I was ready. But how would I break it to the world?” he said.
While Canavero claims that he has already successfully transplanted the heads of monkeys, dogs, and human cadavers, his hopes to complete the same controversial work on humans are far from possible, scientists say.
A wealth of unsolvable surgical, legal, and ethical conundrums, prevent this kind of work happening to humans. Despite this, in 2012, Canavero announced his plans for a head transplant, which he dubbed HEAVEN.
A year later, he had his first volunteer - a Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann disease (a degenerative condition that destroys muscles and nerves in the brain and spinal cord).
But while Canavero was fine-tuning his procedure over the years, Spiridonov married and had a family and no longer wished to proceed with the surgery.
Pretty much every expert who's looked at Canavero's claims has said it's nonsense that could never work in practice, one of which is Allen Furr, Ph.D.
According to Furr, who wrote 'A Test of Morals: The Surgical, Ethical, and Psychosocial Considerations in Human Head Transplantation,' the problem is that it 'simply cannot be done.'
“Where there is skepticism and outright disbelief in [Canavero’s] proposal is reconnecting the spinal cord,” Furr explained, adding that if it was possible, scientists would already be doing it. “There are around the world 250,000 spinal cord injuries a year, and we cannot treat them. There are a few experimental treatments, but with very, very low numbers of success.”
There are experimental treatments for spinal injuries, but success rates are absolutely tiny.
During the operation, surgeons would need to keep blood flowing to both the donor body and the recipient's head while performing the most complex surgery ever attempted.
The recipient's immune system would also need to be completely suppressed to prevent the body from rejecting the new head.
“We just have no experience decapitating a living person and bringing that person back to life in any capacity,” Furr continued.
Even if the surgery was somehow successful, the recipient would likely experience 'excruciating pain' as well as 'some kind of paralysis.'
Furr concluded: “The quality of life would be tragic.”