Real-life Frankenstein DOCTOR plotting human head transplants
What with ‘designer’ babies and genetic engineering, we have become accustomed to developments that previously would have been banned as ‘Frankenstein science’. Nevertheless, the revelation this week that a monkey has received a head transplant using a technique that is almost ready to be tried on humans retains its power to shock.
Neuroscientists in China are said to have taken a major step towards that goal by decapitating two rhesus monkeys and connecting the head of one animal to the other’s body.
the news was publicised by Sergio Canavero, a controversial Italian neurosurgeon and associate of the Chinese team, who said the success of the new method used paved the way towards a repeat operation — involving humans.
‘the news is not so much the monkey transplant,’ he said. ‘Everyone in the media is saying: “hey man, it’s a head transplant on a monkey” — but this has already been done 40 years ago.
‘the important news here is that the critics of this new method have been totally disproven.’
Why is this significant? Because Dr Canavero is the same man who sparked a global storm last year when he revealed his determination to attempt a human head transplant.
he is planning to remove the head of a patient with muscular atrophy and attach it to a freshly decapitated donor body, to give his volunteer a physically fit body.
British experts in surgery and ethics were quick to condemn the proposal. however, Dr Canavero declared: ‘the world will never be the same again.’
Beyond using the technique to help people with severe illnesses or bodily paralysis, Dr Canavero predicts that people could in future get healthy new bodies at will, potentially extending their lives indefinitely, with an ever-older head on young shoulders.
If this were not disturbing enough, the truth is that the Italian neurosurgeon’s proposal is only the latest attempt to turn a twisted dream from the darkest days of Communist Russia into reality. In the Fifties, at the height of the Cold War, Russia and the West were locked in scientific battles to achieve domination over each other — most famously in the arms race and the space race.
Behind the Iron Curtain, Stalin decided to open a new front: the medical race.
One night, in 1954, one of his leading experimenters, Vladimir Demikhov, and a team of surgeons operated on two stray dogs — one fully grown, the other a puppy.
the following morning, Demikhov, a veteran of the Red army hospitals in World War II, unveiled a creature too appalling for even a Fifties science-fiction B-movie. he had stitched the head and upper-body of the puppy onto the neck of the larger dog, connecting their blood-vessels and windpipes.
LOOkINg every bit the mad scientist, Demikhov declared on film: ‘You know the saying: two heads are better than one.’ astonishingly, both dogs’ brains appeared to be fully working — a first of sorts. the world was both amazed and appalled by Russia’s latest propaganda coup. But not everyone in the West reacted with disgust.
By the mid-Sixties, Demikhov had fallen from favour in Russia, but an ambitious young american scientist, Robert White, ploughed on.
In 1970, he decapitated two rhesus monkeys, and attached the head from one to the body of the other. the results were appalling to see. When the ‘ new’ monkey came out of the anaesthetic, it could move its facial muscles, eat and follow movements with its eyes. But it was paralysed from the neck down.
the primate’s spinal cord, with its myriad nerve endings, was too complex to be re-attached. For breathing, the creature had to depend on a lifesupport ventilator. the monkey died nine days later.
White performed another monkey head-swap in 2001, before his death six years ago.
Of his primate subjects, he said: ‘they followed you around the room with their eyes. they’d try to bite your finger off. there was every indication that the brain was functioning as it was when it was on its own body.’
But White never succeeded in re- joining the primates’ spinal cords. Nor has the Chinese team. Dr Canavero sees their experiment as a crucial step, however, because he says the techniques allowed the monkey to survive without suffering a brain injury, before it was euthanised 20 hours later.
the volunteer he has selected for a human head transplant is Valery Spiridonov, a computer scientist from Vladimir, 120 miles east of Moscow.
Mr Spiridonov has a fatal muscle wasting disorder called Werdnighoffman disease that has left him wheelchair-bound with a tiny body.
‘I am now 30 years old, although people rarely live to more than 20 with this disease,’ he said last year. ‘I can hardly control my body now. I need help every day, every minute.’
While few countries would ever grant ethical approval f or the operation, he argued: ‘I consider it to be as ethical as the transplant of the heart or kidneys. at some point of time this was considered to be unethical as well.’
the planned procedure would involve decapitating both Spiridonov and the donor body — which would probably be that of a brain-dead but otherwise healthy adult man.
Spiridonov’s head would be cooled down to 10c — to forestall brain damage — plumbed into machines that supplied it with a flow of blood, then severed at the neck and attached to the donor body. after the operation, Spiridonov would be put into a coma for a month to stop him moving while he healed. On waking, he would, it is hoped, be able to move his face and even speak with the same voice. Powerful i mmunity- suppressing drugs would be given to stop his head and new body rejecting each other.
the single greatest risk is that Mr Spiridonov — if he survived at all — would be left completely paralysed, with his spinal cord remaining unattached to the donor body. he would then be condemned to a brief existence on a life-support ventilator.
this outcome is considered inevitable by experts in the field, but Dr Canavero claims that regrowing a patient’s spinal cord is not the obstacle they believe it to be.
he says the brain needs to be connected to the body by only 10-20 per cent of the nerves in the spinal cord to enable the body-brain link to be viable. the ‘extremely sharp knife’ that he would use to sever the donor body from its brain would enable these nerves to be preserved and connected to the patient’s head, he claims.
Dr Canavero says, too, that bathing the spinal cord in polyethylene glycol could provide sufficient stickiness for a repair to ‘take’.
Before he puts scalpel to neck, however, he faces opposition worldwide.
Back in 1987, Chet Fleming, a lawyer in St Louis, america, took out a patent on a machine designed to keep severed heads alive. although he had never built the machine, he explained that he acquired his patent to prevent anyone from wielding such technology without a full public debate.
a critical ethical question, he felt, is whose life should be extended. ‘Is it going to be nice guys like Einstein, or guys like hitler and Stalin? Who would decide?’
Dr Canavero wishes to push the boundaries of ethical debate much further. he says that in future elderly people might even clone their own bodies, creating a younger copy of themselves onto which their head could be stitched.
he has named his procedure hEaVEN, an acronym for ‘ head anastomosis venture’ — anastomosis being a term f or the surgical connecting of two parts.
But it sounds more like hell to Britain’s leading transplant expert, Simon kay, who led the team that performed the Uk’s first hand transplant operation in 2013. technically, it is entirely possible to transplant a head, he says.
‘there are some mechanical and technical issues about maintaining bloodflow to the brain, but you could quite feasibly attach it to a donor body,’ he explains. ‘there would be no great risk of rejection by the body’s immune system.’
he says that the insurmountable problem, however, is the current impossibility of reattaching a severed spinal cord: ‘there is simply no way for the foreseeable future of repairing the spinal cord at the neck.’
therefore, he argues, ‘you would end up with a head that had vision and hearing and facial movement, but i t would have no bodily movement, so it ( a transplant) would really only be a way of keeping the head alive by maintaining bloodflow.
‘It really sounds like a nightmarish existence.’
Britain’s leading expert in medical ethics, Professor Richard ashcroft, adds: ‘the proposal raises serious issues around personal identity, both for the person whose head is being transplanted, and for the relatives of the dead person whose body is used.’
the new body would look no different to how it did in its previous ‘life’.
‘We have grown accustomed to the idea that the brain is the centre of the person. But it is not so simple,’ he adds. ‘Changes in the body change the way your brain works. the psychological adjustment would be enormously difficult coming to terms with that.’
Despite all these qualms, we could soon see the day when Stalin’s dream is at last realised — as an horrific nightmare for mankind.