Get Ready for the First Human Head Transplant

Chinese surgeon Dr. Ren Xiaoping and Italian specialist Dr. Sergio Canavero will make medical history when they attempt the first human head transplant. The patient is a 30-year-old Russian computer scientist suffering from a rare genetic muscle wasting disease.

Valery Spiridonov says he wants the chance of a new body before he dies. If it works, head transplants could lead to a new life for people suffering with incurable conditions like spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy or cancer.

The operation is scheduled to take place in 2017 at a hospital affiliated with Harbin Medical University in Heilongjiang, China. The doctors estimate that the head transplant will cost $11 million and take about 36 hours.

Medical ethics experts have raised concerns about the controversial procedure. But Dr. Xiaopong is no stranger to public controversy. He triggered an international ethical debate in 2013 after he successfully transplanted the head of one mouse to another mouse’s body.

The doctors are assembling an international medical team. They are hoping to combine the best experts in the world to address the many technical difficulties of the operation. The doctors cite the challenge of successfully linking the head with the donor body’s nervous system, blood vessels and spinal cord. They must also treat the patient with drugs, and put him in a medically-induced coma, in order to prevent the body from rejecting the head. This will require the team to design special instruments and invent new surgical methods. Find out more reasons why a head transplant is so difficult.

Dr. Canavero revealed some of the details of the head transplant operation. First, the medical team will cool Mr. Spiridonov’s head and the donor body. Cooling is used in extreme operations such as heart transplants in order to extend the period during which human tissue can survive without oxygen.

The surgical team will use a special scalpel that is extremely sharp and thin. The doctors plan to cut Mr. Spiridonov’s spinal cord lower on the spine than needed. The cut on the body’s spine will be higher than needed. Just before joining Mr. Spiridonov’s head with the donor body, both parts will be sliced again for what Dr. Canavero called a “fresh cut” of living cells.

Reconnecting the blood vessels will be followed by treatment with polyethylene glycol. This chemical is shown to stimulate nerve regrowth in animals. Electrical stimulation would be applied to further encourage regrowth.

Mr. Spiridonov volunteered for the operation after he heard Dr. Canavero give a lecture in Maryland on the possibility of a human head transplant. And he’s not afraid.

“The only thing I feel is the sense of pleasant impatience, like I have been preparing for something important all my life and it is starting to happen,” he told Sputnik Italia.

Some of Dr. Canavero’s colleagues doubt the head transplant will be successful.

One of them is Dr. Michael DeGeorgia, a neurologist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center. He said that for doctors to ethically perform the procedure on a human, more successes with animal subjects are necessary.

Mr. Spiridonov says he trusts the doctors to do what no one has ever done with a human patient before.

In 1970, American neurosurgeon Dr. Robert White performed a head transplant using two rhesus monkeys. The monkey patient survived for 10 days on a ventilator. Eventually the donor monkey body rejected the head transplant. Read more about the operation here.

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