World’s first head transplant volunteer could experience something "worse than death”
This week, 30-year-old Russian
man, Valery Spiridonov, announced that he will become the subject of the first
human head transplant ever performed, saying he volunteers to have his head
removed and installed on another person’s body.
If this sounds like some kind of sick joke, we’re right there
with you, but unfortunately, this is all too real. Earlier this
year, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero outlined the transplant
technique he intends to follow in the journal Surgical
Neurology International, and said he planned to launch the project
at the annual conference of the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic
Surgeons (AANOS) in the US in June, where he will invite other researchers to
join him in his head transplant dream.
At the time, it sounded
completely outlandish - and it still is - but the difference now is that
Canavero actually has a living, breathing volunteer willing to be the guinea
pig for what Christopher
Hootan at The
Independent says is predicted to be a 36-hour operation
requiring the assistance of 150 doctors and nurses. You can read
about the procedure here.
Hootan brings home what’s really at stake for Spiridonov - it’s not just
death he has to worry about:
"A Werdnig-Hoffman 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,” says Hootan.
"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."
From speaking to several medical experts, Hootan has pin-pointed
a problem that even the most perfectly performed head transplant procedure
cannot mitigate - we have literally no idea what this will do to Spiridonov’s
mind. There’s no telling what the transplant - and all the new connections and
foreign chemicals that his head and brain will have to suddenly deal with -
will do to Spiridonov’s psyche, but as Hootan
puts it rather chillingly, it "could result in a hitherto never
experienced level and quality of insanity".
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