He’s off his head! Surgeon plans transplant

The surgeon works on the man, carefully slicing away until he has removed the man’s still-conscious head, ready to move onto the next step of re-attaching it to another body.

It sounds like a scene from a horror film but, this June, it will hopefully become reality as a team of surgeons and researchers attempt to perform the first ever head transplant.

Earlier this year, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero outlined his proposal for the transplant technique (a procedure that is liable to take 36 hours and require the assistance of a team of 150 doctors and nurses), following on from the first ‘successful’ head transplant of a monkey in 1970. Scientists were unable to fuse the spinal cords, meaning the monkey was unable to move its head, and it required assistance to breathe, eventually dying nine days later after the immune system rejected the new head.

Canavero’s solution to this is to flush the cords with polyethylene glycol and keep reapplying it, which will encourage the fat membranes to mesh in a similar manner to the way that ‘hot water makes dry spaghetti stick together.’ The body and head will be cooled so the cells won’t die when deprived of oxygen. When the head is attached, the muscles and blood supply will be stitched up, with a medically-induced coma of approximately four weeks allowing the body time to heal.

Embedded electrodes will stimulate the spinal cord and strength the nerve connections. Drugs will be used to prevent the head being rejected.

Canavero did not expect to be able to perform the surgery until 2017 at the earliest, but he was able to move the date forward after acquiring a head donor – a 30-year-old Russian man named Valery Spiridonov.

As for the body, it will most likely come from an accident victim or a person who has been sentenced to death. Spiridonov is not particularly fussy, describing choosing a body as an ‘impermissible luxury’. Spiridonov suffers from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a rare form of spinal muscular atrophy, which is causing his health to decline rapidly. He has volunteered for the incredibly experimental surgery in the hope that it will ease his suffering and improve his quality of life.
Of course, this unprecedented procedure comes with a number of risks. Aside from the obvious risk of death, there is a considerable chance that the body will reject the head, leading to many more complications. There are also the psychological aspects to consider: being a disembodied head and then being attached to a new body and encountering all the chemicals and connections that the brain will have to contend with will surely lead to psychological disturbances that we cannot possibly imagine. The frontier nature of this research means that there is no possible way to mentally prepare Spiridonov for this.

Dr Hunt Bajier, the president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons, has said that he would not undergo the surgery himself, saying that ‘there are things worse than death’ and that he wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
If the surgery succeeds, it will be a landmark event in medicine – Canavero envisions a society in which people who suffer from diseases that affect their bodies will be able to get new ones.

Opinion is certainly divided, with a lot of people eagerly waiting to see how the procedure will pan out.