Chinese, Italian team say they'll perform head transplant

zwiebel

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A joint Chinese and Italian medical team have announced they intend to perform a head transplant by 2016/17.

Ren Xiaoping, who along with Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero, hope to attempt the procedure within two years, but only if the preparatory research and tests go according to plan, Ren said...

The man who has volunteered for the operation is Russian-born Valery Spiridonov, 30, who suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, which is a progressive and incurable wasting ailment.

The op will be conducted in China but questions remain about where any body will be sourced from - Chinese authorities have pledged to stop harvesting organs from executed prison inmates but sceptics say they are still taken but just classed as 'donations'.

http://www.france24.com/en/20150911...aef&aef_campaign_date=2015-09-11&dlvrit=65413
 
It sounds like a great scam....

The patient's head would then be placed onto the donor's body and attached using what Dr Canavero calls his 'magic ingredient' - a glue-like substance called polyethylene glycol - to fuse the two ends of the spinal cord together.

The muscles and blood supply would be stitched up, before the patient is put into a coma for four weeks to stop them from moving while the head and body heal together.

When they wake the patient should be able to move, feel their face and even speak with the same voice

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...tor-perform-procedure-2017.html#ixzz3lZDFfUZq
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Yeah right, shoulda woulda coulda...

All those pictures of mice look pretty dead to me. If they can't get the mice to live beyond a day i'm sure they can get a human to walk and talk :p
 
Well, besides defying absolutely everything we currently know about the spinal cord and what happens when you completely sever it..... I don't see what the problem is.

It's a very devastating condition this young man lives with. Wernick-Hoffman is the most severe form of muscular dystrophy. Individuals with Type I SMA (its more common name) die in infancy unless they start mechanical ventilation. I have cared for five children with it in the last few years. It is horrible, devastating, and uniformly fatal without ventilator support. Quality of life is dependent on caregivers 24/7.
 
But others, such as Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, have opined that the science isn’t there to support this form of transplant, dismissing Dr. Canavero’s plans as a big PR stunt and describing the doctor himself as “nuts.”

According to Dr. Caplan, Canavero’s putative procedure needs to go through many more animal trials before it is ready to be tried on humans, and Canavero should first be helping paralyzed patients by fixing their spinal cords before transplanting whole bodies.

Harry Goldsmith, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of California-Davis, also told the New Scientist that Dr. Canavero’s project is likely too “overwhelming” for him to get a real chance at attempting it.

“I don’t believe it will ever work; there are too many problems with the procedure. Trying to keep someone healthy in a coma for four weeks — it’s not going to happen.”

Read more at http://now.snopes.com/2015/04/13/head-transplant/#DkDTv7sQMYCTkPfc.99

Well, you know, I probably wouldn't call the person *healthy* after they've got their head severed...

Even if they could reattach the spinal cord and get it to function, is there going to be a functional brain to direct the muscles? It seems like cutting the head off from the rest of the body might seriously compromise the supply of oxygenated blood to the brain during the operation, even if you connect it to some sort of machine, and you would take such a lot of time to stitch stuff back together there'd be just an infarcted mass in the end.
 
When I read this, all I could think about was those Nazi 'medical' experiment photos.
 

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