LONDON, United Kingdom. Medical experts have told Sky News that plans to carry out a head transplant on a Russian patient are “highly questionable”, despite the operation being technically possible.
Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero says he hopes to perform a transplant on patient Valery Spiridonov as soon as 2017.
Mr Spiridonov suffers from a muscle wasting disease and says he is not frightened about having the operation.
But in an interview with Sky News, Matthew Crocker, a consultant neurosurgeon at St George’s Hospital, said he fears Mr Spiridonov is being involved in a “publicity stunt”.
He said while each step of the proposed transplant is “entirely possible”, there are unexamined practical and ethical considerations.
“Technically, every bit of this operation sounds entirely possible,” he told Sky’s Adam Boulton.
“But whether it’s been done correctly and in the appropriate manner is highly questionable of course.”
He added: “The spinal cord is… the central issue here. An arm and a leg have nerves; (they) have arteries, veins, muscles and bones.
“But the issue here is that a person with a spinal cord that is functioning, which has a neurological function… is facing having that completely removed with surgery.”
There are reports of neurosurgeons attempting to transplant the heads of animals during experiments dating back to the 1950s.
A Soviet surgeon attempted to transplant a dog’s head onto the back of another dog in 1954, without success.
Dr Robert J White, an American neurosurgeon who died in 2010, carried out research into the draining of fluids and the cooling of mammal brains for surgery.
His work led to attempts to transplant the brains of dogs and monkeys.
In 2001, he transplanted a monkey’s head onto a monkey’s body. The hybrid animal survived only briefly after the operation.
Lachlan Forrow is the director of the ethics program at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston.
He told Sky News the ethics of transplanting a human head have not been adequately explored by scientists or the public.
“Until a few days ago I would have said this crazy, but the Wall Street Journal reported this week on experiments in China where there’s been success in doing this with mice,” he said.
“The longest surviving mouse… was one day so far, so we’re a long way from doing this even in mice.
“But, it’s started. The next phase will then be to do it in primates, the way we usually do things.
“Then from that we would have a responsible and open date about when it would be acceptable to try this in human beings.
“My impression is the biology of technically how to do this, since they’re making progress in mice, is likely one day to be possible.
“And then the question is: what condition, if any, would make it acceptable to do it with human beings?”
Credit: Sky News
