Wheelchair-bound Valery Spiridonov, 31, will be the first patient in the world to undergo a head transplant. Despite the risk, the Russian is ready to go under the surgeon's knife in order to get a new, healthy body.
Wheelchair-bound Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov announced that he would undergo a head transplant next year. The operation will be performed by Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero. Despite the fact that Canavero has an ambiguous reputation in the scientific world, Spiridonov is ready to give his body and his own life into his hands. Details of the operation neither the doctor nor his patient have not yet disclosed. According to Spiridonov, Canavero will talk in more detail about the fantastic procedure in September. However, it is already known that the operation, which the entire scientific world is waiting for with excitement, will take place in December 2017.
Valery Spiridonov voluntarily agreed to become an experimental patient for Dr. Canavero - the first on whom the doctor would test his theories. He still has no other hope of finding a healthy body. Valery suffers from spinal muscular amyotrophy, also known as the Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome. With this disease, the patient fails all the muscles, he has difficulty breathing and swallowing. The disease is incurable and only progresses over the years.
Most patients with Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome die in the first years of life. Valery entered the 10% of the lucky ones who were lucky to live to adulthood. But his condition is deteriorating day by day. Valery says that he dreams of getting a new body before the disease kills him. According to him, relatives fully support him. 
“I perfectly understand all the risks of such an operation. There are many of them,” Valery says. “For the time being, we cannot even imagine exactly what could go wrong. to something else."
It is assumed that a healthy body of a donor who will be diagnosed with brain death will be used for the operation. According to Dr. Canavero, the operation will last 36 hours and will be performed in one of the most modern operating rooms in the world. The cost of the procedure will be about $18.5 million. According to the doctor, all the methods and technologies necessary for such an intervention already exist.
During the operation, the donor's and the patient's spinal cords will be cut at the same time. Spiridonov's head will then be aligned with the donor's body and bonded with what Canavero calls a "magic ingredient" - an adhesive called polyethylene glycol that will connect the patient's and donor's spinal cords. Then the surgeon will sew the muscles and blood vessels, and put Valery in an artificial coma for four weeks: after all, if the patient is conscious, with one awkward movement he can nullify all efforts.
According to the plan, in four weeks Spiridonov will wake up from a coma, already having the opportunity to move independently and speak in his former voice. Powerful immunosuppressants will help avoid rejection of the transplanted body.
Opponents of Dr. Canavero argue that he underestimates the complexity of the upcoming operation, especially in terms of connecting the patient's spinal cord and the donor. They call the Italian doctor's plan "pure fantasy". However, if successful, thousands of terminally ill and paralyzed patients around the world will receive hope for a cure.
At his press conference, Spiridonov also presented to the public a wheelchair with an autopilot of his own design. According to him, he wants to help people with disabilities around the world and hopes that his project will be a good addition to Dr. Canavero's plan. Valery also tries to help Canavero raise money for the operation by selling souvenir mugs and T-shirts. 
The world's first head transplant was performed in 1970 by American transplantologist Robert White at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine Clinic in Cleveland, connecting the head of one monkey to the body of another. After the operation, the monkey lived for eight days and died due to rejection of the new organ. All eight days she could not breathe and move on her own, because the surgeon could not accurately connect the two parts of the spinal cord. 
Like snow on the head fell on Wednesday the message that the Italian neurosurgeon has chosen a man who will be the first in the world to transplant someone else's body. The doctor's choice fell on a Russian, 30-year-old Valery, a programmer from Vladimir, who suffers from severe muscular atrophy, which has forever chained him to a wheelchair.
According to the computer scientist, he decided to take a desperate step, because he wants to use the chance to get a new body before his death. “Am I afraid? Of course I'm afraid. But it’s not so much scary as very interesting,” Spiridonov said in an interview, “However, you need to understand that I don’t have many options. If I miss this chance, my fate will be unenviable. Every new year worsens my condition. It is known that while the doctor and his future patient had not yet met, Canavero did not study Spiridonov's medical history and they only communicated via Skype.
According to the surgeon, he receives many letters asking for a body transplant, but his first patients should be people suffering from muscle atrophy.
It is reported that the 36-hour operation will cost more than $11 million, the donor body is planned to be taken from a healthy person who has died of a brain. The success of the operation should ensure the simultaneous separation of the heads from the body of Spiridonov and the donor, while it is assumed that after the operation Spiridonov will be put into a state of coma for four weeks so that the neck muscles do not move, then he will be given abundant immunosuppressants to prevent tissue rejection.
Spiridonov was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease - Werdnig-Hoffman disease, which progresses every day. This is a severe form of muscle atrophy in which degenerative changes occur in the neurons of the spinal cord. Children with this diagnosis usually die, often in people the respiratory and facial muscles are affected. “Now I can barely control my body. I need help every day, every minute. Now I'm 30, but people with this disease rarely live past 20,” he says. According to the doctor, the donor body can be taken from a person who has been in a car accident or sentenced to death.
It is reported that the operation can take place as early as 2016.
Details are planned to be revealed at an upcoming conference of neurosurgeons in Annapolis this summer, in which the doctor and his future patient are going to participate.
This is not the first time that Canavero plans to transplant someone else's body to a person. Two years ago, Gazeta.Ru, as a surgeon, intends to carry out this operation. Canavero claimed that experiments with rats carried out by his group made it possible to rewire the spinal cord to another head. In order for the “new” head to work, surgeons need to be able to “solder” the cut axons. These are long processes of neurons, they are also wires with which neurons communicate with each other, transmit information between nerve cells, as well as signals to muscles and glands.
The doctor claims that clipped axons can be repaired using molecules such as polyethylene glycol, widely used in pharmaceuticals, or chitosan, a biopolymer isolated from crustacean shells.
The main role in the operation is given to the "ultra-sharp scalpel", which will cut off the spinal cord. Canavero calls this moment the key moment in the whole operation, the axons will inevitably be damaged in its course, but they must be given the opportunity to recover.
Canavero reasserted himself in February of this year, hinting that the world's first full-body transplant could take place in 2017, with all the technical hurdles along the way already surmountable. In his latest article published in the journal Surgical Neurology International(for some reason the link has ceased to be active), the doctor listed the latest achievements that should help in the revolutionary operation.
This is the cooling of the bodies of the donor and recipient, the dissection of the tissues of the neck and the connection of large blood vessels with small tubes before the spinal cord is dissected.
Canavero suggests that in the event of a successful outcome of the operation, the patient will be able to move, speak in the same voice and feel his own face. And physiotherapy will get him back on his feet in a year.
Despite all these successes, the plans of the Italian professor have many critics among the scientific community. “There is no evidence that connecting the spinal cord and brain will lead to the restoration of motor function after a head transplant,” said Richard Borgens, director of the Paralysis Center at Purdue University (USA). New York University medical ethicist Arthur Kaplan called Canavero crazy.
“I don’t think it’s possible,” says Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, a professor who in 2012 performed the first full face transplant.
According to him, even today, after decades of studying spinal cord injuries, there are very few ways to restore motor function in injured people.
The first experiments on head transplantation were carried out back in 1954 by a Soviet surgeon who successfully transplanted second heads to several dogs. The head transplant operation was performed in the USA on a monkey back in 1970 by neurosurgeon Robert Joseph White. At that time, there were no methods that could qualitatively connect the spinal cord with the brain, so the monkey was paralyzed and died eight days later. Experiments on head transplantation in mice have recently been carried out in China.
In other words, another experiment was carried out. It lasted 18 hours. It was conducted by the team of Harbin Medical University, headed by Dr. Ren Xiaoping. During the procedure, it was possible to restore the spine, nerves and blood vessels. And without this, there can be no talk of such a transplant.
It is appropriate to recall that sensational reports about her did not appear today. At first, Sergio Canavero was going to hold it in Germany or the UK. And the first patient was to be a programmer from Vladimir Valery Spiridonov, suffering from a severe genetic disease that makes it impossible for a person to move. Some time passed, and it was announced that not Valery Spiridonov, but the presumably 64-year-old Chinese Wang Hua Min would be the first person to undergo such an operation, since Wang was in a worse condition than Valery, and China joined this project.
In September 2016, a neurosurgeon published a video showing animals (a mouse and a dog) surviving a trial operation. During the experiment, polyethylene glycol was used, which was injected into the affected areas of the spinal cord and contributed to the restoration of connections between thousands of neurons. Polyethylene glycol, the same bio-glue that Canavero pinned his hopes on from the very beginning, is able to glue the nerve endings, which is necessary for this transplant. And here's Canavero's new message: a live human head transplant will take place soon.
The operation is technically feasible. But the main issue has not been resolved: the effectiveness of restoring nerve contacts between the head and body of the donor.
At the request of "RG", the director of the National Medical Research Center for Transplantology and Artificial Organs named after Shumakov, Academician Sergei Gauthier comments on the message:
Progress cannot be stopped. But when it directly concerns health, human life, in no case should one be in a hurry. The first is always, one way or another, associated with risk. And the risk must be justified. Technically, body-to-head transplantation is quite feasible. By the way, it is the body to the head, and not vice versa. Because the brain is an identity, it is a personality. And if the brain dies, there is nothing to do. It makes no sense to transplant someone else's head to a still living body, it will be a different person. The question is whether it is possible to help this head, which contains a human personality, by transplanting some donor body, so that this head is supplied with blood, oxygen, and can receive nutrients from the digestive system of this body. Technically, I repeat, such an operation is quite feasible. But the main issue has not been resolved: the effectiveness of restoring nerve contacts between the head and body of the donor. And conducting experiments on corpses, on animals about which reports are received, is a normal, generally accepted course of events, a generally accepted development of methodology.
On July 18, a little over 100 years ago, in 1916, Vladimir Demikhov, a man who stood at the origins of Russian transplantology, was born into a peasant family.
He was the first to make an artificial heart and implanted it in a dog who lived with him for 2 hours. Demikhov was also the first to transplant a separate lung, a heart together with a lung, a liver, and developed the mammary-coronary bypass procedure. One of the areas of his work was attempts at head transplants. Back in 1954, he first implanted a second head in a dog and repeatedly successfully repeated this procedure.
Today, a heart transplant is still one of the most complex operations in the world, but no longer unique. Only in Russia more than 200 such operations are performed annually. Liver transplant is gradually becoming a routine procedure, as well as many other operations developed by Demikhov. Only head transplantation still remains one of the unsolved problems of transplantology - science has advanced to a large extent over the past 60 years, but it still has not reached head transplantation to a living person.
MedAboutMe figured out why it is more difficult to transplant a head than a heart, and what problems, besides medical and physiological ones, confront scientists in this field.
Body or head?
The essence of the head transplant operation is to engraft the head of one living being to the body of another. It can be carried out in two ways:
The head of the "receiving party" is not removed - and Demikhov did just such experiments. In total, he created 20 two-headed dogs. The head is removed from the body, that is, the donor's head should remain the only one on the body.
It is worth noting right away: the question of which of the two organisms is the donor (the one who shares organs), and which is the recipient (the one to whom the organs are transplanted) has not yet been finally resolved:
On the one hand, the body is 80% of the body, and in this perspective, the head is transplanted onto a new body. Both in the media and among a significant part of scientists, they are talking about head transplantation. On the other hand, by default, we consider the head to be a more significant part of the body, because it contains the brain that defines a person as a person. In this perspective, it would be more correct to talk about a body transplant. Medical problems of a head transplant
Scientists talk about three main problems that have not yet been solved with head transplantation.
risk of transplant rejection.
Well, let's say that the achievements of modern medicine will make it possible to cope with this problem, at least for a short time. In the end, even in the late 1950s, after the operation, Demikhov also had dogs with two heads, and even a two-headed monkey for some time - though not for long, well, medicine was developed much worse.
Risk of brain death when the blood supply is cut off.
To keep the neurons of the brain alive, they need an uninterrupted supply of blood that carries oxygen and nutrients and removes harmful waste products from the nerve cells. Disabling the blood supply to the brain, even for a short time, leads to its rapid death. But this problem can be solved with the help of modern technologies. For example, when transplanting a monkey, the head was cooled to 15°C, which made it possible to largely prevent the death of brain neurons.
The problem of connecting parts of the central nervous system of the body and head.
This question is the most difficult and has not yet been resolved. For example, breathing and heartbeat are controlled by the autonomic nervous system and the brainstem. If you remove the head, the heart will stop, breathing will stop. In addition, it is necessary to correctly connect all the processes of neurons coming out of the skull into the spinal cord, because otherwise the brain will not receive information from the body's sensors and will not be able to control movement. But the spinal cord is not only motor activity. This is also tactile sensitivity, proprioception (sensation of one's body in space), etc.
Skeptics also remind that if scientists and doctors learned how to splice a torn spinal cord - and this is what we are talking about in this case, then first of all this technology should be applied to hundreds and thousands of people with already existing spinal cord injuries.
In 2016, an international team of scientists from the US and South Korea proposed using polyethylene glycol (PEG) to splice damaged nerve pathways in the spinal cord. During the experiment, the scientists managed to at least partially restore the cut spinal cord of 5 out of 8 animals: they were alive a month after the start of the experiment and demonstrated the ability to move. The rest of the animals died paralyzed.
Later, scientists at the University of Texas improved the solution for splicing the spinal cord, enhancing its properties with graphene nanoribbons, which should act as a kind of building frame for nerve cells.
There is also evidence that South Korean scientists managed to restore the ability to move rats with a cut spinal cord and achieve good results in a dog whose spinal cord damage was 90%. True, the degree of evidence of these experiments is rather low. Scientists have not provided evidence that the experimental animals really had a damaged spinal cord, and the sample is too small.
In any case, according to experts, after doctors learn how to confidently restore a torn spinal cord, head transplantation will be possible, at best, only in 3-4 years.
Psyche, ethics and the two brains of the body
The above problems are not the only ones. Even the theoretical possibility of a body transplant raises many questions on the verge of ethics, physiology and psychiatry.
Scientists believe that we perceive the world not only "through the head", but also to a large extent through bodily sensations. The role of proprioception in human life is enormous - we cannot realize it, since it is a part of human existence. However, psychiatrists describe rare cases of loss of the sense of proprioception - it is difficult for such people to exist in this world.
Another important point. The brain is the largest collection of nerve cells in the human body. But there is another extensive nervous network - the enteric nervous system (ENS), located in the walls of the gastrointestinal tract. It is sometimes called the "second brain" because it can "make decisions" without the participation of the brain, while using the same neurotransmitters as the latter. Moreover, 95% of serotonin (“mood hormone”) is produced not “in the head”, but precisely “in the intestines”, and it is this hormone that largely determines our understanding of the world.
Finally, in recent years there is growing evidence that the gut microbiome also has an impact on the formation of human personality.
All these facts cause scientists to doubt that it is the head that determines the personality of a person. It is quite possible that the bodily part of the personality will have such an influence on the transplanted head that the question will still arise: who is the master in the body? And how the human psyche will transfer this new view of the world is not yet known.
Russian head transplant
For the past couple of years, the media has periodically flashed information about the decision of a resident of Russia, a programmer Vitaly Spiridonov, to become a "guinea pig" and take part in the world's first head transplant operation on a living person. Spiridonov suffers from an incurable disease - Werdnig-Hoffman disease, congenital spinal amyotrophy. His muscles and skeleton atrophy, which threatens him with death. He gave his consent to Sergio Canavero to participate in the operation, but the procedure is delayed.
Chronicle of a head transplant 1908. French surgeon Alexis Carrel developed techniques for connecting blood vessels during transplantation. He transplanted a second head to the dog and even recorded the restoration of some reflexes, but the animal died after a few hours. 1954 Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov, also as part of the development of a coronary bypass procedure, performed a transplantation of the upper body - the head with front legs - on a dog. The grafted body parts could move. The maximum life expectancy in one case was 29 days, after which the animal died due to tissue rejection. 1970 The American neurosurgeon Robert J. White cut off the head of one monkey and connected the body's blood vessels to the head of another animal. He also did not touch the nervous system. At the same time, White used deep hypothermia (cooling) to protect the brain at the stage of its temporary disconnection from the blood supply. The grafted head could chew, swallow, and move its eyes. All the monkeys involved in these experiments died within a maximum of three days after surgery from the side effects of high doses of immunosuppressants. year 2012. After several experiments on head transplantation by other scientists, the experiments of the Chinese transplantologist Xiaoping Ren gained fame. He successfully transplanted the head of one mouse onto the body of another - at best, the experimental animals lived for six months. year 2013. Italian transplantologist Sergio Canavero made a statement about the possibility of human head transplantation. 2016 Canavero and Ren reported successful head transplants in mice, rats, dogs, and monkeys, and equally successful reconnection of cut animal spinal cords using fusogen proteins. True, the scientific community doubts the reliability of the published results, since only photos of dubious quality were presented instead of videos. Yes, and Ren and Canavero themselves admitted that we are talking about restoring only 10-15% of the nerve connections in the spinal cord, at best. According to scientists, this should be enough for at least some small movements. 2017 Xiaoping Ren reported a successful head transplant on a human corpse. True, it turned out to be quite difficult to prove success, because it is not clear whether it is possible to restore the nerve connections of the spinal cord in this way. Bright future. Sergio Canavero (Italy) and Xiaoping Rei promise to transplant the head of a living person in the coming years. They hope to become Vitaly Spiridonov. But it seems that the first "experimental" will be a citizen of China - it is more beneficial for business. Conclusions Transplantology is developing by leaps and bounds. The annual number of kidney transplants in the world is measured in tens of thousands, liver and pancreas - in the thousands. Surgeons have learned how to transplant limbs and faces, a woman with a transplanted uterus recently gave birth, and in 2014 a penis was successfully transplanted. Sooner or later, humanity will cope with a head (or body) transplant. But for now, we can say for sure: a living person, assembled from the body and head of different people, we will not see soon. Today, medicine is clearly not yet ready for this. Take the testTest: you and your health Take the test and find out how valuable your health is to you.
Shutterstock photo materials used
It seems that you can only transplant a person's head in a science fiction novel. However, the Italian doctor Sergio Canavero decided to convince the scientific community and the whole world that he was capable of it. Lenta.ru found out whether the adventurer scientist is ready for a medical miracle.
In 2015, Canavero announced that he wanted to perform a head transplant. This could help those disabled people whose body is paralyzed below the head. However, to connect the two ends of the spinal cord, it is necessary to restore the connection between thousands of nerve cells. If you collect neurons in dense bundles, then their processes will grow past each other and will not be able to connect to form conductive electrical impulses of the path.
Canavero co-authored South Korean and US scientists who published a series of papers on polyethylene glycol (PEG) in a journal in Surgical Neurology International. According to them, this substance can help repair the cut spinal cord.
For example, a team of researchers from Konkuk University in Seoul cut the spinal cords of 16 mice. After traumatic surgery, the scientists injected PEG into the gap between the cut ends of the spine in half of the mice. The rest of the animals (control group) were injected with saline. According to the authors of the article, after about a month, five of the eight rodents in the experimental group regained the ability to move to some extent. Three mice died paralyzed. All mice died in the control group.
Although some mice managed to survive, the results are far from perfect. Before proceeding to operations on humans, you need to make sure that such a procedure will not kill three out of eight people. American scientists from Rice University in Texas have developed an improved version of the PEG solution. They added electrically conductive graphene nanoribbons to it, serving as a kind of scaffolding for neurons to grow in the right direction and stick to each other.
Image: Cy-Yoon Kim / Konkuk University
The Korean researchers tested the new solution, which they called Texas PEG, on five rats that had also had their spines cut open. The next day after the operation, the experimental rodents were stimulated with the spinal cord to find out if any electrical signals were passing along the ridge. A slight electrical activity was recorded, which was absent in control animals. However, the experiment failed due to unforeseen flooding in the lab, causing four rats to drown.
The only surviving rat gradually regained control over the body. The movements of all four limbs were weak at first, after a week the rat could stand, but it was difficult to maintain balance. Two weeks later, according to scientists, the rodent walked normally, stood on its paws and ate on its own. The rats in the control group remained paralyzed.
Image: C-Yoon Kim et al.
The last experiment was carried out on a dog using conventional PEG. According to surgeons, more than 90 percent of the animal's spinal cord was damaged. Similar injuries are seen in people who have been stabbed in the back. The dog was completely paralyzed, but three days later it was already trying to move its limbs. Two weeks later the dog was crawling on its front paws, three weeks later it was walking normally.
However, this experiment also had one fundamental drawback - the lack of control. In fact, scientists studied one single case, and this caused criticism from experts. Suspicion was also aroused by the lack of evidence that the dog's spinal cord was indeed damaged by 90 percent.
Such evidence could be histological samples - microscopic pieces of tissue. The experimenters were required to provide a thin section of the spine of the operated dog. In addition, it is not customary in a scientific article to report that there is little data due to flooding. A conscientious researcher must repeat the experiment.
Korean scientists respond to criticism by saying that the experiments were preliminary. They wanted to show that recovery was possible in principle and to spark interest in new experiments. The following article should contain information on histological specimens confirming the degree of spinal injury.
In any case, a head transplant operation is not yet feasible. Spinal healing is a necessary but not sufficient step towards realizing Canavero's dream. According to medical ethicist Arthur Caplan, after surgeons learn how to repair the spinal cord, it will be another three or four years before the first successful head transplant is performed.
Canavero reported on a monkey head transplant. Chinese scientists also participated in the experiment. They managed to connect the circulatory systems of the head and the new body, but the spine remained damaged. To prevent the death of brain cells, the head was cooled to 15 degrees Celsius. After the operation, the monkey lived for 20 hours and was euthanized for ethical reasons. However, the details of this experiment have not been published so far.
This was not the first animal head transplant. Similar experiments were conducted back in 1954 by the Soviet transplant surgeon Vladimir Demikhov, creating two-headed dogs. However, he stitched only the circulatory systems and did not touch the spine.
Photo: Jay Mallin / Globallookpress.com
Canavero wants to go further. He hopes to raise money to carry out the world's first human head transplant. He already has a patient - Russian Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from spinal muscular atrophy, a genetically determined incurable disease. The sponsor, according to the doctor, could be Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. The operation will take place, possibly, in a Vietnamese hospital, the director of which has already given his consent. However, given the development of technology, it is unlikely to be successful. Failure can deal a serious blow not only to the prestige of all the specialists involved in the project, but also to the whole field of science. Therefore, doctors are not eager to join Canavero's adventure.
Loading...