When I heard that, I had ten million questions. First and foremost, is that even possible?! Then, who's going to donate their head and/or body? (Don't we kind of need both to live?) What about all the nerve endings and the spinal cord - how are they going to reconnect all of that stuff and make them all work again? Has anything like this ever been tried successfully before? Are the various associations for neurological surgeons okay with them doing this (i.e. is such a thing legal)? Also, the guy having the procedure done to him is a 30-year-old Russian man named Valery Spiridonov, who has Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, and obviously I'm no doctor, but doesn't muscular atrophy stem, at least in part, from offbeat brain synapses? So how is getting a new body going to help him any, if his disease will transfer in via the brain transplant that you would think has to accompany such a surgery, right? I may be totally off with that last question since I really know nothing about muscular atrophy and/or how it works, aside from having worked on a volunteer basis with the Muscular Dystrophy Association in the past. But either way, with so many questions quickly filling my mind, I decided to read up on it some more.
Here are a few key points that I found:
• The surgery will be performed in China by Sergio Canavero, an Italian surgeon and neuroscientist who leads the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, with help from Ren Xiaoping, a controversial Chinese surgeon from China's Harbin Medical University.
• The procedure is expected to last up to 36 hours, and it will require Spiridonov’s head be cooled as well as the donor’s body to extend the period during which the cells can survive without oxygen.
• The head being transplanted will be that of Mr. Spiridonov, and the body that it will be getting transplanted onto will more than likely be the forced donation of a Death Row inmate, which will surely elicit public scrutiny, so that part of the plan they've yet to confirm.
• In 1970, the head of a monkey was placed onto the body of another at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in the U.S., and this hybrid was able to live via assisted breathing for nine days. That was the last "successful" - and clearly, I'm using that word very loosely here - head transplant.
• As for the surgeons involved with this particular surgery, only one of them has performed this sort of procedure before. Ren Xiaoping has conducted 1,000 head transplants on mice and has announced plans to perform the same operation on primates later this year, this despite the fact that his 10-hour operations have yet to result in any hybrid mice living longer than a few minutes. However, not to be a total Debbie Downer here, he has been "successful" in getting them to breathe, drink and see during that short span of life that remained for them.
• In regards to the spinal cord reattachment, Helen Thomson described the procedure Canavero intends to use at New Scientist back in February: "The recipient's head is ... moved onto the donor body and the two ends of the spinal cord - which resemble two densely packed bundles of spaghetti - are fused together. To achieve this, Canavero intends to flush the area with a chemical called polyethylene glycol, and follow up with several hours of injections of the same stuff. Just like hot water makes dry spaghetti stick together, polyethylene glycol encourages the fat in cell membranes to mesh."
• The test subject has a muscle-wasting disease, so there's also a very real chance that he might not even make it to December 2017.
This is, for all intents and purposes, an experiment that almost no one wants to see happen due to the low probability of success, despite what it would mean for the world of medicine should it work itself out to the best possible outcome. Thankfully, Ren is quoted as having said that "a lot of media have been saying [they] will definitely attempt the surgery by 2017, but that’s only if every step before that proceeds smoothly,” and right now that is looking very not likely considering all the complications that could arise from a surgery such as this one. Valery is essentially a guinea pig in this thing, but according to The Daily Mail, he's already been quoted as saying that "[his] decision is final and [he] do[es] not plan to change [his] mind.”
So with that, I say, good luck to you, sir, and just in case things don't go quite as planned, may GODSPEED! But just know, there are things out there that are far worse than death, so I really hope you'll reconsider before December 2017 or whenever this surgery finally comes to fruition.
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