Even a successful head transplant will be extremely dangerous for the patient due to unpredictable changes in brain chemistry and the fact that there are no effective ways to suppress inflammation and the rejection response, said a bioethics professor at the University of New York.
“The head is not a light bulb, it cannot be unscrewed and inserted into a new socket. If we move the head and brain and connect them to a new body, then they will enter a completely new chemical environment and will be connected to a new set of senses and neurons. It seems to me that a person will go crazy before he dies from rejection or infections,”says Arthur Kaplan, quoted by Live Science.
At the end of February 2015, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero announced the launch of an ambitious HEAVEN / AHBR project, in which he planned to transplant a volunteer's head onto a donor body by connecting the spinal cord and brain using a special procedure called the GEMINI protocol.
Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov, confined to a wheelchair due to muscle dystrophy, responded to Canavero's call. The Russian suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome, a serious genetic disease that gradually deprives a person of the ability to move.
Neurosurgeons' opinions on Canavero's idea were divided: some do not exclude such a possibility in principle, but are not sure of the success of the operation, others consider a head transplant an adventure that will inevitably end in failure.
Despite the skepticism of the scientific community, Canavero and his associate, Chinese neurosurgeon Ren Xiaoting of the University of Harbin, have already demonstrated mice and monkeys with transplanted heads, and last week Canavero announced the successful head transplant of one dead person onto the body of another.
According to Kaplan and many other skeptics, even if Canavero and Xiaotin succeed in successfully completing the operation, this could be fatal for a volunteer due to the low level of development of medicine and the unpredictable consequences of such experiments.
“At New York University we are conducting an experimental facial transplant program, and we can already say that this is a very difficult task. The patient receiving such a transplant must constantly take huge doses of immunosuppressive drugs. A head transplant will require even more of these drugs, and infection or rejection will kill the patient in a few years,”continues the scientist.
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According to Kaplan, the techniques developed by Xiaotin and Kanavero should first of all be tested in experiments on volunteers with damaged spinal cord and spine, suffering from complete or partial paralysis. If these experiments are successful, then Canavero and his associates could begin to discuss how to apply the techniques of splicing nerve fibers created by them to more complex operations.