Sergio Canavero, a neurosurgeon from Italy, has posted a video showing a mouse and dog surviving a trial head transplant.
Sergio Canavero, director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, is preparing for a unique operation, which will transplant a human head for the first time in the world. The volunteer was the Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, a severe hereditary disease for which there is no radical cure. It is assumed that the operation will take place in 2017 and will cost about 10 million euros.
The entire scientific world is following with interest the actions of Sergio Canavero. And now the neurosurgeon has presented a video of his experiment, which involved animals: mice and a dog. Canavero did not cut off the heads of living beings, limiting himself to cutting their spine. The fact is that it is the complexity of the restoration of the latter that is considered one of the main obstacles to a full-fledged human head transplant. The neurosurgeon said that as part of the experiment, polyethylene glycol was used: it was injected into the affected areas of the spinal cord, and due to this, the restoration of connections between neurons was achieved.
The Canavero experiment
A total of eight rats and one dog were involved in the experiment. According to Canavero himself, the rats were able to crawl a few weeks after the operation. The dog learned to walk three weeks after the experiment.
The dog that underwent surgery
SC-Yoon Kim et al
Promotional video:
However, some scientists were very skeptical about Canavero's trial operation. So, according to the American neuroscientist Jerry Silver, the experiment with the dog is a separate case without a control group and cannot provide enough information. And according to Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist representing New York University, the results of experiments on animals do not allow us to say that a human head transplant can be performed in 2017. The expert believes that the first such attempt can be made no earlier than in seven to eight years.
Recently, we recall, it was reported that there was a second applicant for a head transplant. It was a paralyzed 62-year-old Chinese man, Wang Huanming.
Ilya Vedmedenko