National Post (National Edition)
Meet the man proposing THE WORLD’S FIRST BRAIN TRANSPLANT and, perhaps, everlasting life.
MEET SERGIO CANAVERO, THE BRAIN BEHIND THE WORLD’S FIRST HEAD TRANSPLANT — AND, PERHAPS, THE KEY TO EVERLASTING LIFE
Sergio Canavero, the 52-yearold Italian surgeon, relishes being described as “crazy as a bat.” He hasn’t watched television since 1993. He doesn’t own a car. He’s felt a deep affinity with Spider-Man’s nerdy Peter Parker. He has authored a book on the techniques of female seduction, adheres to a strict Mediterranean diet (“no bovine meat”), meditates and refrains from drink. He practises ju-jutsu and, in a recent interview, reflected on his “six-pack.”
Sometime next year, if he can find a hospital that will take him, Canavero will oversee the decapitation of the healthy head of one man and its transplantation onto the surgically beheaded body of another. And he doesn’t plan to stop there. In an hour-long Skype conversation with National Post, the eccentric physician outlined his vision to make us immortal.
“It wasn’t that I just woke up one day and said, ‘I want to do a head transplant’, ” the neurosurgeon said, while laying out his procedure that could, he argued, represent the key to everlasting life.
Canavero is the creator of HEAVEN, the “head anastomosis venture” project. His surgical protocol reads something like this: Two teams of international surgeons working together will swiftly and simultaneously lop off the heads of two men — one, the “recipient,” the other, the “donor,” an accident victim, for example, whose brain is dead but whose body is otherwise healthy. They will then shift the recipient’s head onto the donor body using a custom-made swivel crane, reconnect and stitch up the trachea, esophagus, the carotid arteries and jugular veins, link up the spinal cords, sew up the skin and wait for the recipient to reawaken. And, most hopefully, move. Canavero has his first volunteer: 31-year-old Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from a devastating muscle-wasting disease that has left his body compressed like an accordion.
He has his “fusogen,” a black, waxy, glue-like substance that will be used to try to reconnect the severed spinal cord stumps and coax the axons and neurons to regrow across the gap, like logs aligning in a river. William Sikkema, a brilliant young Canadian chemist from Langley, B.C., who still can’t believe he’s become involved in something so scientifically and ethically outlandish, created it.
Sikkema’s material is dubbed Texas-PEG. It has reportedly succeeded in restoring motor control in a rat, two weeks after its spinal cord was completely severed. Three weeks after surgery, the rat was standing on its hind legs. If Canavero’s human head transplant (or, more accurate, body transplant) works, “it will work because of this,” Sikkema said.
Canavero’s head-grafting venture was initially envisioned as a cure for people living with horrible medical conditions. The field of transplant medicine has evolved light years since the first successful kidney transplant between identical twin brothers in the 1950s. Today, surgeons are transplanting hearts, livers, lungs, wombs, hands, forearms and even faces. Scientists are growing beating heart muscle from stem cells, while advances in immunosuppression have dramatically reduced the risk of rejection.
Still, decapitation is extremely complex surgery. Once severed, surgeons will have less than an hour to re-establish blood supply to Spiridonov’s head before risking irreversible brain damage.
Most significantly, “nobody has been able to repair a spinal cord that’s been fully transected — cut clean through,” said Dr. Atul Humar, medical director of the multi-organ transplant program at Toronto’s University Health Network, where Canada’s first hand transplant was performed last January on a 50-year-old registered nurse who lost her left arm below the elbow in a horrific traffic accident.
According to Canavero, the key to success is a swift, sharp severance of the cords, with minimal damage to the axons in the white matter and neurons in the grey. The typical spinal cord injury is more brutal.
Canavero is a widely published surgeon. He introduced surgical cortical brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease, wrote a textbook on central pain syndrome and has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. He’s been working toward head-body transplants for 35 years.
He insists successful head transplantation will push the science of cloning forward. He envisions a day when humans will be able to grow our own clones made from our own DNA, and transfer our aging brains onto our vibrant young “selves” when our own bodies start to wither and fall apart. The old become young, like Benjamin Button.
He isn’t suggesting creating a “you-child,” letting the clone grow to, say, age 20, and then killing it in order to harvest the body. That would be tantamount to murder, he said. “The cloning I refer to, to become available some time in the 21st century, is an accelerated cloning, whereby you clone yourself up to age 20 in one year, without awakening the clone,” he explained.
“So, when you harvest the body, she will have never lived, and it probably would not be murder.”
To date, no human clone has ever been born, though scientists have cloned a monkey, our nearest relative. And, while ever the optimist, Canavero said cloning won’t become an option anytime soon. Still he sees life extension in HEAVEN. Transplanting an aging head onto a younger but clinically dead body would bathe that old head with fresh, young blood. And he’s not the least bit dissuaded by a newly published study that found young blood doesn’t reverse aging in old mice.
“If you take the head of an aging man, say, 80, like Rupert Murdoch, and you just take his head and connect it with the body of a 20-year-old, look, the head will not have a single drop of Rupert Murdoch’s blood. Not a single drop,” Canavero said.
Instead, the media mogul’s head would be “washed — literally washed, over and over — by this continuously flowing young blood. That is where you can really expect a rejuvenation effect that you will never, ever witness when you simply pop some young blood into the circulation of an old man.”
Indeed, he already sees a ready market in those opting to have their bodies and brains cryopreserved in vats of liquid nitrogen in the hope of one day being “reanimated,” their memories and personalities completely intact.
NOBODY HAS BEEN ABLE TO REPAIR A SPINAL CORD THAT’S BEEN FULLY (CUT CLEAN THROUGH). — DR. ATUL HUMAR, MEDICAL DIRECTOR AT TORONTO’S UNIVERSITY HEALTH NETWORK
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It’s considerably cheaper, and less tricky technically to freeze just a head, rather than an entire body. “And, in order to give them a new life, you have to give them a new body, and a new body means HEAVEN. There will be no other way.”
It’s statements like these that make his critics apoplectic. He is the first to acknowledge he’s been denounced as huckster, phoney and crazy as a bat.
Then there’s the matter of Spiridonov. Aside from the Frankenstein factor, the procedure’s critics argue Spiridonov could end up demented. Or dead.
There is not nearly enough data to support moving into humans, they argue, and even if Spiridonov survives surgery, there’s no basis for the supposition that his transplanted head — and brain — will retain his mind, personality or consciousness once it’s hooked up to its new body.
Modern cognitive science suggests the body plays a key role in the development of the human “self.” In other words, as the New Scientist recently asked, “Who knows whether the person who comes out of the operating room would be the same as the one who went in?”
Canavero admits his plan raises sticky social and bioethical issues. Is the seat of “self” in the head — the brain — or in the flesh and blood? Would Spiridonov be getting a new body, or would the body be getting a new head? Writing in The Conversation, philosopher Quassim Cassam says, “The person with Spiridonov’s head and someone else’s body would be mentally continuous with Spiridonov, and so would be him.”
Canavero, too, has said his “chimera” would carry the mind of the recipient. However, because the gonads (testis or ovary) belong to the body donor, should the new “being” reproduce, any children would carry the genetic inheritance of the donor.
If anything, Canavero sees this as further justification for pushing ahead, because it would mean the emergence of “life from death.”
Renowned bioethicist Arthur Caplan has assailed Canavero’s “noggin exchange program” as scientifically “rotten” and ethically “lousy.”
Put aside that doctors have never succeeded in rewiring a human spinal cord, said Caplan, head of the division of bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, where the most extensive face transplant ever was performed on severely burned Mississippi firefighter Patrick Hardison a year ago. “What’s his rehab plan? You can’t just put a head on somebody and say, ‘oh, look! It stayed on! We’re out of here.’ ”
Caplan and others argue there is every chance of a mismatch between the neurochemistry of Spiridonov’s brain, and the nervous system of his new body. It’s not like screwing a light bulb into someone else’s socket, he argued. “The mechanicals and nerve impulses are going to be different, and I would predict (result in) severe dementia.”
He also wonders, what’s Canavero’s exit strategy should Spiridonov wind up severely mentally disabled in a body that doesn’t move. “Are you going to kill the patient? Are you going to overdose him?”
Nobody can deny that it is risky, Canavero admits. He said Spiridonov remains “absolutely committed” to surgery. “Here you have a patient who is dying, dying, dying, every single day. What is going to happen if I do nothing?”
And he is unrepentant. He said our sense of self is an illusion that can be manipulated at will. He notes every medical and scientific marvel — the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967, the first test-tube baby in 1978 — was initially greeted with moral outrage. French chemist Louis Pasteur was ridiculed when he proposed microbes could generate disease. “It is standard issue criticism you get all along.”
None of us should have to accept death as a “natural outcome,” he has argued. “In the beginning, it will be like saving people like Einstein — intellectually, high-ranking guys who really can give us more. I mean, Stephen Hawking? Everybody in Britain said, ‘what about Stephen Hawking? Would you save him?’ I said, ‘why not?’ But this is not for me to decide. It’s for you, for society. I’m just a man. I’m a technician. What to do with this, that’s up to you.”
Canavero draws parallels to the ethical drubbing Robert White faced in 1970, when the pipe-smoking American neurosurgeon succeeded in transferring the head of one monkey onto the body of another. The monkey, whose spine was severed at the neck, could still hear, smell and follow objects with its eyes. It lived eight days.
Colleagues at Case Western Reverse called the experiments barbaric. Still, before he died in 2010, White predicted that “what has always been the stuff of science fiction — the Frankenstein legend, in which an entire human being is constructed by sewing various body parts together — will become clinical reality in the 21st century.”
Canavero, who is in contact with White’s granddaughter Samantha, claimed to have received more than 1,000 requests from surgeons worldwide, including from Canada, volunteering to participate in HEAVEN, and said he’s now shopping for a suitable venue. “Right now, I can tell you that I’m working hard on several people who might want to see this happen in their own country.”
“It’s no longer only about me. It’s no longer ‘loony Sergio.’ Now, we are many loonies around the world working on this.”
He sees the first transplant as a learning experience. When South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the first humanto-human heart transplant in 1967, the patient died after 18 days. The second patient lived 18 months.
He hinted the first headbody swap could occur in the United States. “It might, it might. I can’t tell you anything that is solid enough to publish, and there are people involved right now who don’t want to be made known publicly.”
In the meantime, he’s pitching his plans, working the West, and attending medical conferences, like last month’s meeting of brain scientists in Glasgow, where Canavero unveiled the super-sharp, diamond-cut surgical blade and virtualreality system he plans to use. He’s reading his comic books. Even today, he’s a big fan. “They open your mind,” he said. “You think, ‘hey, this man is flying! This man is doing stuff.’ But, is it really so impossible?”