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Surgeon Plans To 'Reawaken' Cryogenically Frozen Brains, Transplant Them Into Someone Else's Skull (nationalpost.com)
Sergio Canavero, the Italian surgeon who plans to perform the world's first human head transplant within the next year, says he is preparing to reawaken cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else's skull. "In an interview with a German-language magazine, Canavero says he will attempt to bring the first brains frozen in liquid nitrogen at an Arizona-based cryogenics bank back to life 'not in 100 years,' but three years at the latest," reports National Post. From the report: Transplanting a brain only -- and not an entire head -- gets around formidable rejection issues, Canavero said, since there will be no need to reconnect and stitch up severed vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles as there is when a new head is fused onto a brain-dead donor body. Canavero allows that one "problematic" issue with brain transplants, however, would be that "no aspect of your original external body remains the same." "Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull," he told OOOM magazine, published by the same company that handles the Italian brain surgeon's public relations. The flamboyant neuroscientist who some ethicists have decried as "nuts" rattled the transplant world when he first outlined his plans for a human head transplant two years ago in the journal, Surgical Neurology International. Bioethicist Arthur Caplan called Canavero's latest proposal to merge head transplants with "resurrecting" the frozen dead beyond ridiculous. "People have their own doubts about whether anything can be salvaged from these frozen heads or bodies because of the damage freezing does," said Caplan, head of ethics at NYU Langone Medical Centre in New York City. "Then saying that he has some technique for making this happen, that has never been demonstrated in frozen animals, is absurd."
Dear Sergio,
All the best to your endeavours.
Yours sincerely
Frank N. Stein
In the US, doing anything that involves human experimentation -- and this is clearly experimentation -- requires approval from an institutional review board (IRB), otherwise no funding agency support the work, and no journal is going to accept the results for publication.
This fellow's plans don't come close to passing the sniff test, let alone IRB-level rigorous examination. And let me tell you from personal experience, getting IRB approval is not a walk in the park.
Who is paying for this work? Why are any of the cryobanks going to allow him access to their ... um ... residents?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Now, let's just say all the problems of tissue damage are somehow magically resolved, you still end up with a horrifying ending. We lack the technology to properly integrate the vast majority of nerves, especially the spine. In the best case scenario, this guy would revive someone to live in a body they cannot control and possibly even be unable to sense anything at all. That's a fate worse than death.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Of all the outstanding medical problems in the world, affecting millions, perhaps billions of people, this is not one of them. This is simply a prima donna surgeon grandstanding with a medically-unlikely, ethically-dubious procedure of use to nearly no-one. Mind you, Italy seems to have a track record on ethically-dubious medical procedures and is unlikely to stop him.
He's already had some very public success. Just look at how he transplanted a whole human onto and orange squirrel's butt!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.