Chinese surgeon Xiaoping Ren from Harbin Medical University, who has successfully transplanted heads to hundreds of mice, plans to perform such an operation on monkeys in the near future. The Wall Street Journal reports on the experiences of the "Chinese Frankenstein" - an American journalist filmed Xiaoping's experiments on video.
The first successful experience of transplanting a head from one rodent to another occurred in 2013. The operation took ten hours. Since then, Zhen Xiaoping has conducted more than a thousand experiments, gradually increasing the survival time of the rodents to 24 hours. The mice even managed to open their eyes and drink water.
In the summer, the doctor plans to switch to operations on primates. To do this, he invented special microtubules, through which oxygenated blood will flow from the brain of animals into their new body. In the distant future, such operations may help terminally ill people, but first you need to ensure the survival of experimental mice and primates.
Transplanting a head from one animal to the body of another is so dubious from the point of view of medical ethics that the possibility of starting such operations is not even discussed in the USA.
For this reason, in particular, Ren Xiaoping resigned from the University of Cincinnati and went to China, whose authorities allocated more than $ 1.6 million for his experiments.
This is not the first time that the PRC has allocated money for scientific research that the world scientific community considers unethical or dangerous. In April 2015, Junjiu Huang and his colleagues modified the genome of human embryos for the first time.
In February 2015, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero announced his promising method for transplanting a human head onto a new body. The scientist promised to carry out such an operation in 2017. Canavero's first patient may be Valery Spiridonov, a thirty-year-old programmer from Vladimir suffering from spinal muscular atrophy.
