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It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie but the world’s first human head transplant could take place in just a couple of years.
The world’s first attempt to transplant a human head will be launched this year at a surgical conference in the United States. The idea was first proposed in 2013 by Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. The plan is to use the surgery to extend the lives of people who have had muscles and nerves that have degenerated or whose organs are riddled with cancer. They would essentially be given a brand new body.
Canavero says he has overcome some major hurdles, such as fusing the spinal cord and preventing the body’s immune system from rejecting the head. The surgery could take place as early as 2017. The first attempt at a head transplant was carried out on a dog by Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov in 1954 but it was unsuccessful.
An article was recently published in Surgical Neurology International discussing the spinal cord fusion protocol. There are two key principles that are important when conducting the surgery; sharp severance of the cords is not as damaging as clinical spinal cord injury, the gray matter "motor highway" is more important than the pyramidal tract in human motor processing. The process would involve cooling the recipient’s head and the donor body to extend the time their cells can survive without oxygen.
Following the procedure the patient would be kept in an induced coma for three to four weeks to give time to allow the stump ends to refuse. This would be followed by months of rehabilitation.
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