Valery Spiridonov of Russia wants a raw body . His body ’s muscles are wasting away from a uncommon disease shout Werdnig - Hoffman disorderliness , which kills most people by age 20 .
Dr. Sergio Canavero of Italy is bear to announceat theannual conferenceof the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons ( AANOS ) in Annapolis , Md. , in June that he ’ll attempt to give him one .
This Neuroscientist Says He ’ll Do a Human Head Transplant Very shortly
“ We are now at a point when the expert aspects are all feasible , ” Canavero , who compare the subroutine to edit out a banana with a really astute knife at a TEDx talk , told New Scientist . He has published a few article , such as this one , in small daybook .
When contact by Discovery News , Canavero said he was not currently talking to the press .
The medical and scientific communities , however , beg to take issue . In fact , to attempt such a surgery with today ’s engineering science has so many elements of science fiction it ’s hard to say which is the most nonsensical : Is it the fact of the 20 or so face transplants done so far , almost all the patients have suffered at least one bout of rejection requiring hospitalization , and one has died ? That reattaching the spinal cord is akin to reattaching a bundle of hair that ’s been sliced in half , and expecting each individual hair to reconnect with its original half ? Or that the Einstein can not tolerate more than four minutes without O ?
When Dr. Gordon Lee , Director of Microsurgery at Stanford Health Care , first get a line of Canavero ’s marriage offer , he figured it stemmed from an Onion article . But he and other open - minded brain surgeon give Canavero credit entry for dreaming , and are willing to speculate about whether the operating room will one mean solar day be executable .
“ I ’m a very open mortal to novel ideas ; I would love to be able to speak to him , ” Lee said . “ But there are some things that are more … far - fetched … than others . ”
Before the surgery could move from Star Trek to real living , several thing would have to bump . For exemplar , surgeon have been doing various graft for over 100 years and still have not completely solved the problem of organ rejection .
Of the 100 or so hand transplants that have been performed worldwide , Lee suppose , there have been a “ tremendous issue of knottiness , ” and some have had amputation .
Spinal corduroy injuries continue to frustrate moderate doctors in the field . The spinal cord regenerate at a rate of 1 millimetre a day , Lee points out . “ So if you take a rule and measure from your neck to your hands , it would take years before body parts would begin to go . ” That is , IF it were possible to mix the spinal corduroy , and IF the body did n’t turn down the caput .
adopt the payoff of transplant rejection and reclaim the spinal corduroy could be solved , protocol calls for hone the surgery in much simpler brute first .
Canavero points to the 1970 graft of a rascal ’s caput , but that surgical procedure resulted in a imp that subsist , paralyzed , for nine days before its immune system rejected the head . There was no endeavor to join the spinal cords . Amphibians have an prosperous prison term regrowing the spinal corduroy , but it ’s much trickier in mammalian .
“ You ca n’t stick the ends together and expect them to work , ” aver Dr. Peter Nakaji , a neurosurgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix . “ opine take a bundle of hair and then attempting to squash it back together to find the original hair it came from . Even if they could , the chance of them sneak up in the correct situation is not just 1 in a billion , it ’s 1 in a zillion billion . ”
But is there a time in the futurity when some machine might be able-bodied to sew or meld the right nerves back together ?
“ It ’s not beyond notion , but it ’s not anytime in our life-time , ” Nakaji pronounce . “ I ’m all in favor of the big dream ; that ’s how we move forward . I would n’t want to be one of the citizenry make water fun of the Wright brothers . The time may come when we have the technology to do such things . ”
Canavero has also compared the operation to the first flight .
“ I agree with the critics , this first one will be more like Kitty Hawk than a Boeing 747 , ” Canavero told Motherboard . “ Then it will be streamline , perfected . It ’ll be faster , you wo n’t require 150 persons , it wo n’t last 36 hours , it ’ll be done in a hospital next to your edifice . ”
The motivation is there , Nakaji said .
“ Will there be a future in which we could swap multitude around in bodies ? ” Nakaji said . “ It raises the question of who we are , and some very skill fiction - atomic number 39 type question that we do n’t know the answers to . But it ’s interesting to remember about the other crazy ideas that could go on in the future . ”
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