Head Transplant in 2 Years, Proposes Surgeon
Better to be the donor than the recipient in this case
Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero is apparently working on plans for the first head transplant (alternatively described as a full body transplant). According to the Guardian, Canavero aims to graft a living person's head onto a donor body:
Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June.
He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.
The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.
Some Chinese researchers claim to have made some progress in transplanting the heads of mice. Assuming that Canavero could keep the head alive during the operation, it is overwhelmingly likely at this point that the person would wake up attached to a paralyzed body. Still, that might be preferable to being dead.