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The Story of the First Human Head Transplant Won't Die (theoutline.com)
Stories about the first human head transplant operation, supposedly coming in December 2017, are circulating again. From a report on the Outline: But despite what you might have read or seen, humanity is not much closer to transplanting a human head to a new body than we were last year. Sorry to disappoint anyone looking to get their head transplanted. The story is based on the work of one man: Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero. Canavero started making headlines in 2013 with ambitious claims about the process he designed for a transplant of a human head -- as in, moving a healthy human head from a subject with an unhealthy body to an otherwise-healthy, brain-dead donor body. Canavero's claims have been alternately regarded as sensationalist, spurious, and ethically murky. Since then, the doctor has periodically resurfaced in the news. Once, when he found a willing patient in Valery Spiridonov, a Russian man with spinal muscular atrophy in the form of Werdnig-Hoffmann disease; other times when he published papers, including two proof-of-principle studies last year as well as articles reviewing preliminary work on animals relating to his proposed procedure. Though published in the internet-only journal Surgical Neurology International, an important distinction here is that none of these actually involve a successful full transplant of any kind despite his claim to have successfully transplanted a monkey's head. The papers addressing work with animals are, broadly speaking, about treating spinal cord injuries and issues.
It's obviously a body transplant, not a head transplant. The donor donates the body, not the head.
I think the main problem with a head transplant is how do you reconnect all the nerves you've broken. They've found that broken nerves don't tend to reconnect. Nerves aren't exactly like wires, they're more like a living tree. If you chop down a tree but change your mind, you'll need to glue the tree together and hope that it grows back together. If it doesn't want to do that like as in nerves, that is not going to work.
Having your head disconnected from the body (even if you have all the blood vessels in place) is a problem. A lot of functions like breathing, heatbeat, and processing food is controlled by your brain and the lack of one isn't going to be great for the body.