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.

Comments

Re:"Simple" proof

[TWX]

Even showing the results of the procedure on an animal would be helpful, assuming that the subject lived long enough to justifiably call it successful.

I'm no medical man, but aren't there rather severe problems with tissue rejection even when transplanting things as simple as kidneys and other organs? Aren't there also some severe complications rising from the autonomic functions that the brain stem controls in the body? How would the body handle losing that stimulus and regulation?

Can't remember if it was this good doctor or someone else that had showed a "iiving" head of one animal attached to the body of another animal, but while blood vessels were connected and blood flow to the head was sustained by the beating heart of the body, there was no control of that body by that head and the body instead had to be controlled artificially. The result didn't live long anyway.

If the good doctor's intentions are indeed above-board then it's noble to want to help people, but what he researches is so niche that it's difficult to see how much benefit would be brought even if the subject survived the procedure and with nerve damage problems we already can't treat, how that patient would be anything more than a head attached to an entirely paralyzed body. Given the number of conditions that could benefit from research, where significant numbers of patients could really see improvements in quality of life in addition to mere survival it seems like his pursuits are at-best misguided. What he proposes reminds me of the discussion in Mel Brooks' film Young Frankenstein when the medical student is arguing with Gene Wilder's character about the reanimation of tissue and Wilder's character responds how the work with kidneys etc are tinker-toys compared to the central nervous system.