One nice thing about teddy bears is that if your dog rips off such a head, you can sew it back in place. But do you call your achievement "wild success"? No, you say “I fixed your dead toy”. But Sergio Canavero is different.
Just yesterday, an Italian doctor, famous for his controversial statements, announced that he had performed a head transplant to a teddy bear made from meat filled with bones. And he called it "the first successful head transplant."
Scientists have been experimenting with organ transplant ideas for a long time, sometimes even successfully. Canavero said that a real head transplant would be possible in 2015. He says that research centers in the United States do not support such experiments. He also stated that he performed such a surgery on a monkey in 2016, but without reattaching the spinal cord and without evidence. He then published several articles calling for the separation and reunification of animal spinal cords, but did not specify whether the separation was complete or partial. Again, these documents were left without evidence.
Needless to say, how skeptical are scientists?
And so Canavero said at a press conference that he "performed the first human head transplant," writes The Telegraph, and that "a complete head exchange between donors with dead organs is the next stage." He also called the head transplant "imminent."
If you cut off a tumor on a corpse, you will not cure its cancer - you simply cut a piece of meat from raw flesh. If you swap heads for corpses, it is no different from a cut and re-stitched chicken.
Canavero has a volunteer - a paralyzed Russian guy Valery Spiridonov. The operation itself will look like this:
“The donor and recipient will be placed in a sitting position to facilitate the next 24 hours of painstaking, bloody work of separating and then reattaching the vertebral bones, jugular veins, trachea, esophagus and other cervical structures. The recipient will be assisted in breathing and pumped blood into the body using machines. The patient will be immersed in an artificial coma for an indefinite period of time necessary for recovery."
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It is possible that Canavero will do everything honestly and a head transplant is inevitable, his procedure will work, and our skepticism will be unfounded. In the end, while he is the only person who wants to perform such an operation, and the road opens up to the one walking.
But there is science. Very little research has been done on the topic of head transplants. And when we are faced with something radical and unexplored, it is very difficult for us to take it seriously. Therefore, until we see any evidence of the possibility of an actual brain transplant, when the spine is split and reattached, we will remain skeptical.
Ilya Khel