reeve.JPG
Neuroscientist Sergio Canavero says head transplantation, if it had then been possible, could have helped the late Christopher Reeve after the horse-riding accident that left him paralyzed.
(The Associated Press)
Ethicists might lose their heads over this one.
Italian neuroscientist Sergio Canavero believes it's now possible to transplant a human head. He wants to do the first one in 2017.
"The real stumbling block is the ethics," he said in New Scientist. "Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it."
Canavero says the procedure can save the lives of people whose bodies have been swamped by cancer, or improve the lives of quadriplegics or people with muscle-wasting diseases.
The donor body would be provided by the family of someone who is brain dead.
"I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible," Canavero says.
The toughest surgical hurdle would be cutting the spinal cords of the head and the donated body and successfully fusing them. Canavero tells New Scientist that cleanly severing the cords is key. No kidding.
The patient would be in a coma for weeks after the surgery, with electrical stimulation provided -- along with stem cells -- to help new nerve connections take hold. Canavero, who works with the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, believes the post-surgery patient would speak with the same voice as before and would be able to walk within a year. But even for an expert neurosurgeon, that's largely guesswork.
The line of skeptics stretches out the door and around the block. Some neurosurgeons believe a head transplant isn't possible and will never be attempted on a human being.
"There is no evidence that the connectivity of cord and brain would lead to useful sentient or motor function following head transplantation," Purdue University's Richard Borgens said in New Scientist. Borgens is the director of Purdue's Center for Paralysis Research.
Despite such doubts among his colleagues, Canavero says he already has volunteers who are ready to sign up for a new body.
Surgical issues aside, the question of it happening and being accepted by society in part comes down to how we define what makes us who we are. Is your brain alone what truly makes you you? Canavero says he's going public now, two years ahead of his projected date for the first procedure, so that doctors, philosophers and politicians can debate the ethics of it as he keeps working toward his goal.
Williams Matthews, chairman of the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons, also believes head transplantation is possible. A significant issue in the past for organ transplantation has been rejection by the body, but he says that's largely been overcome. "The system we have for preventing immune rejection and the principles behind it are well established," he says.
Still, Matthews disagrees with Canavero's timeline. "He thinks (head transplantation) is ready" to happen, Matthews says in the Daily Mail. "I think it's far into the future."
-- Douglas Perry