This is Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon who has announced plans to transplant an entire
human head onto a different human body at the end of 2017…yep.
Whole head transplant?
How possible is this?
Why hasn't this been done before?
And maybe most importantly, why are people calling him crazy?
Unlike other organs, your brain and spinal cord are extremely sensitive to damage and
resistant to repair.
This is why injury to the neck or spine often results in permanent injury and complete reattachment
of heads severed from their bodies has remained the stuff of science fiction and fantasy.
That's not to say that scientists aren't working diligently to develop techniques to
aid in spinal cord repair.
Current approaches include stem-cell therapies that encourage growth of new neurons and biological
"glues" that work like electrical tape to patch severed fibers back together.
But these approaches are far from helping patients fully recover after trauma.
If we could do that, it would be a sensational step forward in the field of medical science.
Which brings us back to Sergio Canavero and his plans to transplant an entire human head.
The procedure proposed by Canavero and his team requires cooling of both the donor head
and recipient body to increase the amount of time both can survive without blood circulation.
Next, the major blood vessels in the neck would be dissected and reconnected.
Once the head is moved over, the neuronal fibers of the spinal cords would be fused
and the blood vesicles and muscles would be sewn together.
They would be kept in a coma for several weeks for recovery and electrodes would be used
to electrically stimulate the nerve fibers to encourage connection.
But who would he be when he woke up?
He would be an entirely new patient.
As a neuroscientist, I am incredibly excited about what head transplants could teach us
about consciousness, identity, and the brain's conception of the "self", not to mention
the millions of patients whose live will be changed by improving techniques for spinal
cord repair but I have some questions: mainly why do we think we can do this?
And: should we?
Canavero and his Chinese Collaborator Xiao-ping Ren have been reporting progress on development
of head transplantation techniques to journalists and the media for several years.
They have claimed progress in transplant and/or spinal cord repair in rodents, dogs, and primates.
But only their work on rodents has been accepted and published by scientifically credible sources.
The scientific community in general likes careful, validated, incremental progress,
and every time Canavero and his team announce a result via Press Release instead of peer-reviewed
journal, the claim is met with skepticism and disbelief.
This is in part due to 1) poor scientific technique in their experimental design (small
sample size, poor controls, and limited data on "patient" outcomes), 2) their approach
of bypassing peer review and the options of experts in favor of media coverage, and 3)
the fact that no other surgical team has yet reproduced their results.
If scientific understanding is to move forward, we cannot refuse to try new things on the
basis that we have never done it before.
And it is my belief that the scientific community would be thrilled to accept a more conservative
approach driven by multiple successes in animal models and less dramatic spinal cord repair
in humans before attempting whole head transplant.
But that leaves the question of whether we should be transplanting heads at all.
In 2015 when Canavero first announced his plan for whole head transplant of a human
patient, an article in Newsweek quoted then president elect of the American Association
for Neurological Surgeons, as saying "I would not wish this on anyone.
I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death."
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Ok, so head transplants may be a little ways away, but organ transplants are not!
Doctors do them all the time, but what happens to your body after you donate your organs?
Find out in this video here.
Would you sign up for a head transplant without knowing how it could affect humans?
Let us know in the comments, like this video and don't forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching
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