National Post (National Edition)
Italian surgeon prepares man for head transplant
An Italian surgeon really, seriously plans to transplant a human head within the next year in a creepy experiment that has skeptics wondering if he’s lost his own head.
Sergio Canavero is already preparing his patient for a “new world” in a new body using a virtual reality machine as a simulator.
Canavero, a flamboyant neuroscientist ethicists have decried as “nuts,” swears he’s ready to perform the world’s first head transplant within the next 12 months.
His patient, 31-year-old Valery Spiridonov, suffers from Werdnig-Hoffman, a rare and devastating form of spinal muscular atrophy that causes muscle wasting and motor neuron death. Spiridonov is confined to a wheelchair, his movements restricted to feeding himself, typing and manoeuvring his wheelchair with a joystick.
This past weekend, Canavero revealed the surgical blade and virtual reality system he plans to use for the operation at a conference in Glasgow. The diamond-cutting blade, designed by a professor of bioengineering at the University of Illinois, will allow for a “clear cut of the spinal cord with a minimal impact on the nerves,” Canavero told reporters.
The maverick surgeon first detailed his brazen plans for a human head transplant last year in the journal Surgical Neurology International.
“The greatest technical hurdle to (a head transplant) is of course the reconnection of the donor’s and recipient’s spinal cords,” he wrote. “It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage.”
Since then, Canavero has paired up with Chinese surgeon Xiaoping Ren, who has been performing head transplants in hundreds of mice, none of which, according to a Wall Street Journal report last year, have survived longer than a few minutes.
Canavero claims his team, led by Ren, has performed head transplants on a monkey as well as human cadavers. The monkey survived “perfectly without injury” for 20 hours before being euthanized, Canavero said in a YouTube video earlier this year, in which he appealed to foreign billionaires like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to bankroll the first head transplant in humans, claiming his skeptics “have been disproven.”
And, last weekend, he announced Spiridonov will spend months preparing for his transition, including any “unexpected psychological reactions” that will come when he wakes up from surgery, attached to someone else’s body, inside a new VR system. “This virtual reality system prepares the patient in the best possible way for a new world that he will be facing with his new body,” Canavero said. “A world in which he will be able to walk again.”
Canavero has dubbed the procedure “Heaven surgery,” as shorthand for its more full name, “head anastomosis venture.” The 36-hour surgery would take a team of 100 surgeons and nurses and cost an estimated $128 million.
Canavero says his special, biocompatible glue will hold the spinal cord together so it can fuse with the donor body. It would have to be strong enough to hold up the head, which couldn’t be allowed to flop, like Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.
Spiridinov would then be put in a drug-induced coma for four weeks to allow time for the connection between head and body to heal. However, according to Extremetech.com, “There’s never been a successful procedure that reattached a fully severed primate spinal cord.”
“The idea that all of the nerve fibres and all of the blood vessels will be connected and working is so unlikely, it seems unimaginable,” said Molly Shoichet, a professor of tissue engineering at the University of Toronto. “We still don’t know how to repair a spinal cord or a brain — the central nervous system itself is so complex that this procedure is really just scary.”