Head Transplants Are Now Possible but Remain Highly Controversial

Here’s a heads up on a future medical innovation. A human head transplant is now possible.

Though highly controversial, the procedure is a long time in coming. Back in 1970 the first “cephalosomatic linkage” was done in monkeys.

“However, the technology did not exist for reconnecting the spinal cord, and this line of research was no longer pursued,” according to a recent medical research essay published by Dr. Sergio Canavero. “In this paper, an outline for the first total cephalic exchange in man is provided and spinal reconnection is described. The use of fusogens, special membrane-fusion substances, is discussed in view of the first human cord linkage.”
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He claims that many human diseases without a known cure could benefit from the procedure. In particular, paraplegics and patients

 with muscular dystrophy may benefit from the procedure.

Canavero, who is a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, writes, “The greatest technical hurdle to [a head transplant] is of course the reconnection of the donor’s (D)’s and recipients (R)’s spinal cords. It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage…. [S]everal up to now hopeless medical connections might benefit from such a procedure.”

Here are some requirements. Both patients need to be in the same operating room. The head to be transplanted has to be kept between 12°C and 15°C (54.6°F and 59°F). Surgeons have to remove both heads at the same time, and “re-connect the head to be preserved to the circulatory system of the donor body within one hour,” the study said. During the reconnection, the donor’s body has to “chilled, and total cardiac arrest must be induced.” When the head is connected on the patient, the heart of the donor “can be re-started, and surgeons can proceed to the re-connections of other vital systems, including the spinal cord.”

It was pointed out by Quartz.com that connecting a spinal cord from a head of one living being to the body of another one “has never been attempted even in animals, so Canavero’s paper must be taken as an exercise in speculation.”

Recently, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic restored “limited connectivity between the two severed halves of spinal cords in rats,” the report said.

Canavero wants to use a very sharp knife to cut spinal cords and then connect the spinal cord from one person’s head with another person’s body. “It is this “clean cut” [which is] the key to spinal cord fusion, in that it allows proximally severed axons to be ‘fused’ with their distal counterparts. This fusion exploits so-called fusogens/sealants….[which] are able to immediately reconstitute (fuse/repair) cell membranes damaged by mechanical injury, independent of any known endogenous sealing mechanism,” he said in the paper. He suggests using polyethylene glycol (PEG) for the fusing.

The cost is high. It would be at $13 million to complete the procedure.

There are also many ethical issues from such a procedure. “Before human head transplantation could enter the realm of consideration, scientists would have to perform multiple successful experiments on primates, Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, was quoted by Popular Science. “None of those, he believes, would be condoned by any reasonable ethics committee,” the magazine reports.

“If you’d have the technology to attach spinal columns, you’d have certainly developed the technology to repair somebody’s broken spinal column,” Latham told Popular Science.

Also, Dr. Christopher Scott, a bioethicist and regenerative medicine specialist at Stanford, adds, “You’d have to make sure the motivations are around a true medical need, and not some desire to be famous.” Also, the result would create what he calls a “hybrid person.”