Doctor plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body using procedures he believes will soon be ready Doctor plans to attach a living person’s head to a donor body in operation he says is not far off.
A surgeon says full-body transplants could become a reality in just two years.
Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to
graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the
procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off.
Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a
project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in
Maryland this June.
He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the
point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has
caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.
The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.
“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want
it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere
else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before
going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”
Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a
living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the
reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of
unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.
The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed.
The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely
new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical
ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in
primates to test whether the procedure works.
But Canavero wants to provoke a debate around these issues. “The real
stumbling block is the ethics,” he told New Scientist. “Should this
surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who
disagree with it.”
The idea of body transplants – or head transplants, depending on the
perspective – has been tried before. In 1970, Robert White led a team at
Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, US, that tried to
transplant the head of one monkey on to the body of another. The
surgeons stopped short of a full spinal cord transfer, so the monkey
could not move its body.
A lull in attempted body transplants followed White’s experiments,
but last year researchers at Harbin Medical University in China made some headway with mice.
They hope to perfect a procedure they claim “will become a milestone of
medical history and potentially could save millions of people”.
Despite Canavero’s enthusiasm, many surgeons and neuroscientists
believe massive technical hurdles push full body transplants into the
distant future. The starkest problem is that no one knows how to
reconnect spinal nerves and make them work again. Were that possible,
people paralysed by spinal injuries could have surgery to make them walk
again.
“There is no evidence that the connectivity of cord and brain would
lead to useful sentient or motor function following head
transplantation,” Richard Borgens, director of the Center for Paralysis
Research at Purdue University in Indiana, US, told New Scientist.
According to the procedure Canavero outlined this month, doctors
would first cool the patient’s head and the donor’s body so their cells
do not die during the operation. The neck is then cut through, the blood
vessels linked up with thin tubes, and the spinal cord cut with an
exceptionally sharp knife to minimise nerve damage. The recipient’s head
is then moved on to the donor’s body.
The next stage is trickier. Canavero believes that the spinal cord
nerves that would allow the recipient’s brain to talk to the donor’s
body can be fused together using a substance called polyethylene glycol.
To stop the patient moving, they must be kept in a coma for weeks. When
they come round, Canavero believes they would be able to speak and feel
their face, though he predicts they would need a year of physiotherapy
before they could move the body.
“This is such an overwhelming project, the possibility of it
happening is very unlikely,” Harry Goldsmith, professor of neurological
surgery at the University of California, Davis, told the magazine.
