Controversial Neurosurgeon Says He’s Ready To Perform A Human Head Transplant

Italian neurosurgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero has been working for more than a decade trying to figure out how to successfully perform a human head transplant. Today, he thinks he has it figured out.

He had originally planned to do a head transplant on an actual live human being in 2017, but Canavero’s patient changed his mind and decided not to go through with it. Which was a good idea, based on what Dr. Hunt Batjer, president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons in 2015, said about the idea.

“I would not wish this on anyone,” said Batjer. “I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death.”

Or what Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, said about it, warning that human head transplant patients “would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are used to and they’d go crazy.”

So, instead, Canavero and his medical team have been busy performing head transplants on rats, monkeys, dogs, and human corpses.

Canavero, who claimed in 2017 that he and his medical team in China had successfully performed a head transplant on a corpse. He said the procedure took 18 hours, but they were able to reconnect the spine, nerves and blood vessels between one person’s head and another person’s body.

According to a new report by Popular Mechanics, “Canavero’s proposed head transplant procedure would rely on a ‘specially fashioned’ and ultra-sharp knife that would minimize fraying of the spinal cord, and polyethylene glycol, which would accelerate its fusion with a donor’s spinal cord.”

Allen Furr, Ph.D., professor emeritus of sociology at Auburn University, who wrote a book, A Test of Morals: The Surgical, Ethical, and Psychosocial Considerations in Human Head Transplantation, claims a human head transplant patient would be in for “a lifetime of chronic pain as well as some kind of paralysis” and their “quality of life would be tragic.”

Then there is the “excruciating” amount of pain they would experience in the immediate aftermath of the procedure. Furr also points out that there can be “no informed consent because the patients cannot have all the information they need—because no one has it.”

Meanwhile, as Dr. Canavero waits to find out when he can perform a head transplant on a living human being, he now says he wants to transplant an “old brain into a young immunoconditioned body” or into a “nonsentient clone.”