Doctor: Human head transplant imminent
Groundbreaking yet risky surgery planned in China
An Italian doctor announced Friday that he will soon perform the world’s first human head transplant in China because medical communities in the United States and Europe would not permit the controversial procedure.
“The Americans did not understand,” Sergio Canavero told a news conference in Vienna.
Canavero said the Chinese government and Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese doctor partnering with him on the procedure, would confirm the surgery’s date “within days” to signal the goal of becoming a world leader in all fields, including medicine.
In a phone interview with USA TODAY, Canavero decried the unwillingness of the U.S. or Europe to host the surgery.
“No American medical institute or center would pursue this, and there is no will by the U.S. government to support it,” he said.
Canavero would not divulge the identity of the Chinese donor or recipient. The donor will be the healthy body of a brain-dead patient matched for build with a recipient’s disease-free head.
Canavero estimates the procedure will cost up to $100 million and involve several dozen surgeons and other specialists.
He will simultaneously sever the spinal cords of the donor and recipient with a diamond blade.
To protect the recipient’s brain from immediate death before it is attached to the body, it will be cooled to a state of deep hypothermia.
The recipient and donor will be in a sitting position to facilitate what’s expected to be more than 24 hours of laborious work to separate and then reconnect vertebral bones, jugular veins, the trachea, esophagus and other neck structures.
Machines will help the recipient breathe, pumping blood through the body. The patient will be kept in a drug-induced coma for an unspecified recovery time.
Michael Sarr, a former surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the editor of the journal Surgery, said Canavero’s procedure is radical.
“What Canavero will do differently is bathe the ends of the nerves in a solution that stabilizes the membranes and put them back together,” Sarr said. “The nerves will be fused, but won’t regrow.”
There has been some success using Canavero’s proposed technique on mice and dogs.
Canavero said his team has “rehearsed” his technique with human cadavers in China, but there are otherwise no known human trials.
Most medical experts say it’s a long shot, but even if the operation works the biggest obstacle may be whether it should happen at all.
James Giordano, a professor of medicine and neurosciences at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, said not enough rigorous study has been done to support a procedure with so many risks.
He said patients might be better served if Canavero focused on spinal reconstruction, not transplants.
“No American medical institute or center would pursue this, and there is no will by the U.S. government to support it.” Dr. Sergio Canavero