Sergio Canavero shocked the world when he announced he would perform the world’s first human head transplant. This week Canavero announced the procedure is scheduled for December 2017, and he has recruited a head surgeon to lead the controversial procedure. This operation may sound like something out of a horror movie, but one man is hoping it will improve his quality of life.
A 30-year-old Russian man, Valery Spiridonov, volunteered for the procedure in the hope of living a more normal life. The computer scientist suffers from a rare motor neuron disease known as Werdnig-Hoffmann Disease. The disease causes motor neurons – the nerve cells responsible for sending signals from the central nervous system to your muscles – to deteriorate, which leads to muscle atrophy and in severe cases, difficulty swallowing and breathing. Currently there is no treatment for this disease.
Spiridonov is not the only person who has volunteered to be the first potentially-successful head transplant patient. Nearly a dozen others, including a man whose body is full of tumors, have approached the doctors asking to go first,
the Atlantic reported.
"As a neuroscientist, I would really like the general public to be reassured that neither I nor any of my colleagues think that beheading people for extremely long shot experiments is acceptable."
His latest experiment published in the journal CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, saw him attach the head of a rat to another to make a two headed rat.
At a conference in Vienna on November 2017, Italian Professor Sergio Canavero claimed that the world's first human head transplant had been carried out on a corpse in China in an 18-hour operation, performed by Dr Xiaoping Ren and his team at Harbin Medical University. Ren famously grafted a head onto the body of a monkey last year.
During the conference, Professor Canavero said the first human head transplant had been "realised" and said an operation on a live human is sert to take place "imminently". However, the claims have not been fully confirmed.
Canavero added: "The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done. A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage. This is the final step for the formal head transplant."
When lead doctor Canavero made his initial proposals in 2016, he said he planned to have the surgery completed before the end of 2017, and most likely in December.
Earlier this year, the proposed first patient for the surgery – Valery Spiridonov – pulled out, saying he would no longer be taking part in the experiment after Dr. Canavero admitted he couldn't promise the surgery would help Spiridonov walk again. Spiridonov has Werdnig-Hoffmann Disease, a genetic disease that breaks down muscles and kills nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord.
Instead, Dr Canavero said he would be looking for a Chinese volunteer in April, after signing up Chinese surgeon Dr. Xiaoping Ren of Harbin Medical University to help him carry out the procedure, and this is said to have delayed things. The surgery is now not expected to take place until early 2018. These reports have not been confirmed, though, and
Alphr has contacted Dr. Canavero's press team for clarification.
Reference :
http://www.alphr.com/science/1001145/human-head-transplant
