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Remember back in 2015 when we reported that the world’s first human head transplant on a live human being was scheduled to go down in 2017? Yeah, well, they’re still planning on doing it. It just probably won’t be in 2017.
That’s because Friday morning, Italian Professor Sergio Canavero, director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, announced that a medical team in China successfully performed a head transplant on a corpse.
According to Canavero, the 18-hour operation proved that it was possible to successfully reconnect the spine, nerves and blood vessels between a head and a body.
Reports The Independent…
“The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done,” he said. “A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage.
“And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent,” he told a conference in Vienna, according to The Telegraph, which first reported the news. The paper claimed that the “world’s first human head transplant” had been “successfully carried out”, though clearly that won’t really have happened until someone undergoes the procedure and survives it.
The surgeon didn’t appear to give any concrete proof for his claim, but said that would be made available in the coming days. “The first human head transplant, in the human mode, has been realised. The paper will be released in a few days. Everyone said it was impossible. But the surgery was successful,” he said, according to The Telegraph.
You may recall that back in 2015, a Russian man named Valery Spiridinov, who suffers from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, had volunteered to be the first live human to undergo this procedure. The surgery was originally planned to take place in December of 2017, but he has since changed his mind (no pun intended).
Can’t say as we blame him since back in 2015 doctors said that he could suffer a fate worse than death.
There’s no telling what the transplant – and all the new connections and foreign chemicals that his head and brain will have to suddenly deal with – will do to Spiridonov’s psyche, but as Hootan puts it rather chillingly, it “could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity”.
Canavero and his team have reportedly already been successful at carrying out this surgery on both rats and monkeys and don’t have any plans to stop until they succesfully complete the operation on a living human being.