Sergio Canavero refused Valery Spiridonov
For a long time, 31-year-old Valery Spiridonov figured as the person whose head will be the first to be transplanted onto a new body during a unique operation that the Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has planned for the end of 2017. But recently, Canavero increasingly cautiously hinted that Spiridonov's priority was in question. The fact is, the surgeon has finally decided on the site of the operation: it will take place in Chinese Harbin, where Canavero will be assisted by a large team of Chinese doctors led by transplantologist Ren Xiaoping.
For a long time, 31-year-old Valery Spiridonov figured as the person whose head will be the first to be transplanted onto a new body / kp.ru
“Since the transplantation will take place in China, Valery Spiridonov will not become the first patient,” Canavero confirmed the other day in an interview with OOOOM. - He will be a citizen of China. This is due to quite understandable circumstances. We will have to look for donors among local residents. And we cannot give a white-skinned Valery, like snow, the body of a person of a different race. We cannot name the new candidate yet. We are in the process of choosing.
Canavero named the cost of the operation - $ 15 million - and has scheduled it for Catholic Christmas on December 25, 2017. But two months before that date, he is going to conduct a trial operation on patients from among those who are in a state of clinical death. This will be done to hone the technique of the most complex surgical manipulation.
Meanwhile, Canavero says there has been significant progress in medical animal experiments.
First, Canavero demonstrated a two-headed "mutant" - it turned out when the head of a small one was sewn to the neck of a large laboratory rat. Secondly, on June 14, the scientific journal CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics published a report on the next experiment of Canavero and his friend Ren Xiaoping. The surgeons cut the spinal cords of 15 laboratory mice, 9 of them were treated with polyethylene glycol, a substance that, according to Sergio Canavero's plan, should regenerate nerve fibers and restore the patency of signals. And 6 more animals from another group - control, were treated with saline. At the same time, after 28 days, all 9 rodents treated according to the Canavero method began to recover and began to move their limbs (in contrast to the poor fellows from the control group).
The latest achievement of Sergio Canavero and colleagues is the transplantation of the head of one rat onto the body of another with the help of a third circulatory system / kp.ru
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“This is a sign that we are on the right track,” said the Italian neurosurgeon.
However, the luminaries of world science are still skeptical about Canavero's idea.
The stumbling block, they say, is to reconnect the ends of the severed spinal cord into a single whole. The experiment with the two-headed rat has nothing to do with this at all, because Canavero did not try to fuse the spinal cord, but simply connected the blood vessels that allowed the second head to live on the body of another rat. Much more successful experiments of this kind were made by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov back in the 1950s. The Canavero rat died after 6 hours, and Demikhov's two-headed dogs lived for about a month.
With regard to an article published in CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, there is no evidence that the spinal cord of laboratory animals was cut completely and not partially. All of Canavero's achievements are still visible only on paper. Until now, he has not presented to the scientific world a single animal that would restore motor functions after a complete rupture of the spinal cord.
“Before announcing a human head transplant, show me a dog walking around a stage with a donor body,” says Paul Zachary Myers, Ph. D. and professor at the University of Minnesota. “If Dr. Canavero’s technology worked, we would have been presented with such proof.
So maybe it's for the best that Valery Spiridonov escaped the fate of becoming the first experimental Canavero?
YAROSLAV KOROBATOV