Back in 2015, Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon has described the procedure of Head Transplant Surgery which can be realistic with improved technology and the accurate ability to keep the neural tissue suffused. He claims to perform the surgery by the end of 2017, in either united states or china. While no one has claimed to carry out such a procedure till date, Sergio Canavero has claimed to do so, and he is confident about it. After having the dedicated 30 years of researching the procedure, he has come up with two part procedure for the transplant, which is HEAVEN (HEad Anastomosis VENture) and GEMINI (subsequent spinal cord transplant).
The Donor For Head Transplant Surgery
Prof. Sergio Canavero told that he is got lots of volunteers who wants the head transplant surgery from the UK. Despite such a great risk having the procedure, Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian programmer with Werdnig-Hoffman disease has volunteered his head for the study. The donor has to be chosen by screening the similarities like height, build, and immunotype.
Procedure For Head Transplant Surgery
This procedure will take 36 hours to complete at a cost of $20 million involving at least 150 people, which includes doctors, nurses, technicians, and virtual reality engineers, in an extremely equipped hospital. There will be two teams working, they will make a deep incision around the patient’s neck which will be exposing the carotid, vertebral arteries, and spine. The muscles would be colored as a code for linkage. For spinal stabilization and access to carotids, three more cuts will be done. Next part will be cutting the spinal cord with using a $200,000 diamond nanoblade with an operating microscope, two spinal cords will be cut simultaneously for the separation. When the recipient’s head is separated, within an hour, it must be transferred to the donor’s body and get connected to the tubes for the donor’s blood circulation. This process should be done within an hour to secure the minimal brain damage. The cords have to be adjusted in 1-2 minutes with chitosan-PEG glue infused in the blood stream. The trachea, vagi, esophagus and phrenic nerves should be connected the same way spinal cord was attached. Then the muscles should be connected accordingly to the markings. The skin should be sewn by a surgeon with maximal cosmetic results. After this procedure is finished, the recipient will be kept in ICU with a cervical collar for 3 days to provide the medication for suppressing the immune response.
Once the recipient is awakened, the rehabilitation will start including the virtual reality training. Canavero predicts that the patient will be able to walk within 3-6 months after surgery.
Sergio’s collaborator, Xiaoping Ren of Harbin Medical University in china had completed a monkey’s head transplant recently. And his colleague, C-Yoon Kim of Konkuk University School Of Medicine South Korea has published a video of a study showing how his team carried out motor movements in a mice whose neck had been severely cut at the time of emergency.
Opinions on Sergio Canavero
Dr. Michael Sarr has accepted one of Sergio’s head transplant papers for the publication. He said: he might sound a little bit fantastic, but he is serious about his work. This is not fiction, this is real science, there are experimental works which support the concept of nerve membrane fusion. Sarr showed interest in how this procedure could be applied more widely so to treat the traumatic spinal cord injury patients also.
Dr. John Adler says Sergio’s method is capable of a strictly technical sense, but it involves a great risk of failure, Spiridonov can be paralyzed or dead. There are many changes in the procedure, the axons in the joined section of spinal cords should form a connection or there is a possibility that the brain will suffer irreparable damage when there is no blood flow. Dr. Lorenzo Pinessi says, the procedure is not at all feasible, it is demented.
Well as we have already arrived in 2017, let’s wait for Dr. Sergio Canavero to perform the world’s first human head transplant surgery and see the result.
