Audacious! Russian tech geek may get head transplant in 2017
This is the craziest thing you’ll read today.
The world’s first human head transplant is in the offing.
Italian neurosurgeon, Sergio Canavero, who announced the project says the transplant could happen as early as 2017.
Canavero will be joined by Chinese surgeon, Xiaoping Ren who was on the team that performed the world’s first successful hand transplant.
The patient, Valery Spiridonov, a 31-yr-old Russian tech geek has Werdnig-Hooffmann disease, a genetic disorder that wastes muscles and motor neurons.
The usually fatal disease has left him physically capable of doing little else than feeding himself, steering his wheelchair with a joystick, and typing. Actually, doctors expected him to be dead by now.
His chances of successfully getting a new head, Canavero says, are “90 percent plus” although it is not totally sure the surgery will hold.
80 surgeons in addition to tens of millions of dollars would be needed for the surgery which many scientists and ethicists have termed “junk science”.
But the project itself raises interesting questions, Nancy Szokan wrote for The Washington Post: Even if Ren and Canavero can do the surgery, should they? If the donor body belonged to a pianist, would its muscle memory enable Spiridonov to play the piano? Who would the surviving patient be — Spiridonov or some kind of amalgam?
