Head transplant is a go!

[Magical Realist]

But will it work? Will the body reject a new head, attacking it like an invading tumor? One neurologist predicts dire consequences for the recipient..

"Yesterday, 30-year-old Russian man Valery Spiridonov volunteered to become the first person in the world to undergo a complete head transplant. Literally his entire head. On a different body.

The operation will be carried out by Italian surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero, in what he expects to be a 36-hour procedure involving 150 doctors and nurses.

A Werdnig-Hoffmann disease sufferer with rapidly declining health, Spiridonov is willing to take a punt on this very experimental surgery and you can't really blame him, but while he is prepared for the possibility that the body will reject his head and he will die, his fate could be considerably worse than death.

"I would not wish this on anyone," said Dr Hunt Batjer, president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons.

"I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death."


The problem is, fusing a head with a separate body (including spinal cord, jugular vein etc) could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity.

Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Centre, who described Dr Canavero as "nuts", believes that the bodies of head transplant patients "would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are not used to and they’d go crazy."====https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=c...5.5008j0j8

[C C]

"Yesterday, 30-year-old Russian man Valery Spiridonov volunteered to become the first person in the world to undergo a complete head transplant. Literally his entire head. On a different body.

Mary Shelley's torch was passed on to Vladimir Demikhov back in the 1950s. So it was bound to still involve a Russian or Russians somehow. Inspiration-wise, the last X-Files movie was replete with everything from the two-headed dog barking at Mulder to an "east-European" rogue surgeon and his medical team.

[cluelusshusbund]

Woudnt a blood supply be all thats needed to keep the head alive... ie... brain an all 5 senses workin fine.???

[Mr Doodlebug]

Could you have your head taken off and put on backwards?

[stryder]

Woudnt a blood supply be all thats needed to keep the head alive... ie... brain an all 5 senses workin fine.???

The closest you'd get to an answer for that currently would be to ask someone that is paralysed from the neck down and requires lifesupport machines to make the body function since it's not receiving signals from the brain.

The only way a reattached head could work is perhaps if they incorporate cybernetics into mapping brain patterns and translating them to body if the nerve system isn't connected correctly, so that the body can function in relationship to the brain.  (It's still a Life support system though.)

The worst big for their actual experiment is that the head will have to be conscious as will the body (As in not suppressed by drugs) The nerve endings in the spine aren't going to be as easy as wiring a plug, every human has their own biometric traits from the way the brain develops to how those signals are sent down the spine. To cut and splice two different systems together however is going to result in a lot of "bruteforce" work, touching nerve endings together and asking the head to wiggle a toe and seeing what the results are. That could take dozens of hours to do, meanwhile the "victim/guineapig/volunteer" would have to be conscious throughout it all.

[Yazata]

The biggest difficulty that I see in head transplants is that it necessarily implies a severed spinal cord.

All of the brave talk about growing the spinal cord back together is just wishful thinking, until effective treatments exist for existing quadriplegics. If we can't really help people who have broken necks now, why should we think that we have the ability to work magic with head transplant cases?

What we will end up with is heads attached to bodies that they can't feel or move, bodies that keep the heads alive like heart-lung machines as long as the head isn't rejected by the body's immune response. (They do have pretty effective ways of suppressing that.)

It won't be much of a life. The head-transplant case will be totally helpless and will require 24 hour nursing care for his/her remaining life. But I guess that some terminal patients might find that preferable to no life at all.

[cluelusshusbund]

If the transplanted head lives at all... i suspect that ther will be a waitin list for this procedure.!!!

Buy the time its finaly posible to conect spinal cords... most people will simply choose to down load ther "brain" to a beter-than-human robot.!!!  

Doodlebug
Could you have your head taken off and put on backwards?

Basically... just rearrange some muscles... a reverse joint added to the spine... neck skin cut all the way around for the reverse twist... plus a few other minor detals an wallah... reversed head... but i recomend that you also have you'r feet an arms reversed so people wont stare.!!!

[elte]

Once they can grow a body clone of the person with the good head, for that same person, then maybe this type of operation would make sense, and I'd seriously consider it for myself.

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The biggest difficulty that I see in head transplants is that it necessarily implies a severed spinal cord.

All of the brave talk about growing the spinal cord back together is just wishful thinking, until effective treatments exist for existing quadriplegics. If we can't really help people who have broken necks now, why should we think that we have the ability to work magic with head transplant cases?

What we will end up with is heads attached to bodies that they can't feel or move, bodies that keep the heads alive like heart-lung machines as long as the head isn't rejected by the body's immune response. (They do have pretty effective ways of suppressing that.)

It won't be much of a life. The head-transplant case will be totally helpless and will require 24 hour nursing care for his/her remaining life. But I guess that some terminal patients might find that preferable to no life at all.

Latest I've read on something like medicalxpress is that they can restore the nerve connections to some extent these days.  That was based on some kind of trial therapy they did.

[Yazata]

Latest I've read on something like medicalxpress is that they can restore the nerve connections to some extent these days. That was based on some kind of trial therapy they did.

I know that a lot of research is currently being done on spinal injuries. I guess that what happened to Christopher Reeve had something to do with it, along with injured military returnees. Lots of money is going into it and many people are working on it.

But I don't think that a head-transplant will have much chance of real success, until after we start seeing success with existing quadriplegics. I want to see treatments that return quadriplegics to an acceptable quality of life, with some significant ability to move and feel their hands and arms particularly.

Only then would I consider a head transplant for myself, even if I was suffering from a terminal bodily illness.