Recently, news appeared in the media that Sergio Canavero from Italy and his colleague Xiaoping Ren from China are planning to transplant a human head from a living person onto a donor corpse. Two surgeons have challenged modern medicine and are trying to make new discoveries. It is believed that a head donor will be someone with a degenerative disease whose body is depleted as long as the mind remains active. The body donor is likely to be someone who has died from a severe head injury but whose body remains unharmed.
Human head transplant in 2017 was announced by Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero
First human head transplant
The researchers claim to have perfected the technique on mice, a dog, a monkey and, more recently, a human corpse. The first human head transplant was planned to take place in 2017 in Europe. However, Canavero underwent surgery in China because no American or European institution has authorized such a transplant. This issue is very strictly regulated by Western bioethics specialists. It is believed that Chinese President Xi Jinping wanted to return China to greatness by providing a home for such cutting-edge work.
In a telephone interview with USA TODAY, Canavero denounced the unwillingness of the United States or Europe to carry out the operation. “No American medical school or center is pursuing this, and the US government does not want to support me,” he said.
The human head transplant experiment was met with considerable skepticism, to put it mildly. Critics cite a lack of adequate preliminary research and animal studies, a lack of published literature on techniques and their results, unexplored ethical issues, and the circus atmosphere encouraged by Canavero. Many also worry about the origin of the donor body. The question has been raised more than once that China is using the organs of executed prisoners for transplantation.
Some bioethics argue that it is necessary to simply ignore this topic in order not to contribute to the "world circus". However, one cannot simply deny reality. Canavero and Ren may not succeed in attempting a live head transplant, but they certainly won't be the last to try a head transplant. For this reason, it is very important to consider the ethical implications of such an attempt in advance.
Canavero presents human head transplant as the natural next step in the transplant success story. Indeed, this story would be just wonderful: people live for many years with donated lungs, liver, heart, kidneys and other internal organs.
2017 marked the anniversary of the oldest living, passed on by the father to his daughter; both are alive and well 50 years later. Most recently, we saw successfully transplanted arms, legs and another. The first completely successful one took place in 2014, as did the first live birth from a woman with a transplanted uterus.
Of course, face and penis transplants are difficult (many still fail), head and body transplants represent a whole new level of complexity.
Head transplant history
The question of head transplant was first raised in the early 1900s. However, transplant surgery faced many challenges at the time. The problem faced by vascular surgeons was that it was impossible to cut and then connect the damaged vessel and subsequently restore blood flow without interrupting blood circulation.
In 1908, Carrel and an American physiologist, Dr. Charles Guthrie, performed the first dog head transplant. They attached one dog's head to another dog's neck, connecting the arteries so that blood would flow first to the decapitated head and then to the recipient's head. The severed head was without blood flow for approximately 20 minutes, and while the dog demonstrated auditory, visual, cutaneous reflexes and reflex movements in the early postoperative period, her condition only worsened and she was euthanized a few hours later.
Although their work on head transplantation was not particularly successful, Carrell and Guthrie made significant contributions to the understanding of the field of vascular anastomosis transplantation. In 1912, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work.
Another milestone in the history of head transplantation was achieved in the 1950s thanks to the work of the Soviet scientist and surgeon Dr. Vladimir Demikhov. Like his predecessors, Carrel and Guthrie, Demikhov made a notable contribution to the field of transplant surgery, especially thoracic surgery. He improved on the methods available at the time to maintain vascular nutrition during organ transplantation and was able to perform the first successful coronary artery bypass surgery in dogs in 1953. Four dogs survived for over 2 years after surgery.
In 1954, Demikhov also attempted a dog head transplant. Demikhov's dogs demonstrated more functionality than Guthrie's and Carrel's and were able to move, see and lap water. The step-by-step documentation of Demikhov's protocol, published in 1959, shows how his team carefully preserved the blood supply to the lungs and heart of the donor dog.
Two-headed dog from Demikhov's experiment
Demikhov showed that dogs can live after such an operation. However, most dogs only survived for a few days. The maximum survival rate of 29 days was achieved, which is more than in the experiment of Guthrie and Carrel. This survival was due to the recipient's immune response to the donor. During this time, no effective immunosuppressive drugs were used that could alter research results.
In 1965, American neurosurgeon Robert White also attempted a head transplant. His goal was to perform a brain transplant on an isolated body, contrary to Guthrie and Demikhov, who transplanted the entire upper part of the dog, not just the isolated brain. This required him to create various perfusion methods.
Maintaining blood flow to an isolated brain was the biggest challenge for Robert White. He created vascular loops to maintain anastomoses between the internal maxillary and internal carotid artery of the donor dog. This system was called "autoperfusion" because it allowed the brain to be perfused by its own carotid system even after it had been severed in the second cervical vertebra. The brain was then positioned between the jugular vein and the recipient's carotid artery. Using these perfusion techniques, White was able to successfully transplant six brains into the cervical vasculature of six large recipient dogs. The dogs survived between 6 and 2 days.
With continuous monitoring of the electroencephalogram (EEG), White monitored the viability of the transplanted brain tissue and compared the activity of the graft brain to that of the recipient. Moreover, using an implantable recording module, he also monitored the metabolic state of the brain by measuring oxygen and glucose consumption and demonstrated that the transplanted brains were in a highly efficient metabolic state after surgery, another sign of the functional success of the transplant.
Head transplant to Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov
Back in 2015, the Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero proposed the first live human head transplant in 2017. To prove that the procedure would be possible, he repaired the severed dog's spinal cord and attached the mouse's head to the rat's body. He even managed to find a volunteer in the person of Valery Spiridonov, but it seems that the operation may not move forward as originally planned.
Doctors from all over the world claim that the operation is doomed to failure, and even if Spiridonov survives, he will not live a happy life.
Dr. Hunt Butger, President of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, said: “I would not wish this on anyone.
Valery Spiridonov volunteered to undergo the world's first complete head transplant, which is to be performed by the Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, but after a while he changed his mind. Spiridonov suffered from severe muscular atrophy and was a wheelchair user all his life.
Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian man, volunteered to undergo this surgical procedure because he believes that a head transplant will improve his quality of life. Valery was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called Werdnig-Hoffmann disease. This genetic disorder causes his muscles to break down and kills nerve cells in his spinal cord and brain. There is currently no known cure.
How the story of a head transplant to a Russian programmer ended
Valery recently announced that he would not undergo the procedure, because the doctor could not promise him what he wanted so much: that he would walk again, he would be able to have a normal life. Moreover, Sergio Canavero said that the volunteer may not survive the operation.
Given that I cannot rely on my Italian colleague, I must take my health into my own hands. Fortunately, there is a fairly well-proven operation for cases like mine where a steel implant is used to support the spine in a straight position. - said Valery Spiridonov
The Russian volunteer will now seek alternative spine surgery to improve his life, instead of undergoing an experimental procedure that has been criticized by several researchers in the scientific community.
In early 2018, foreign media outlets regularly and very actively posted news about the Russian volunteer Valeria Spiridonov. However, after the abandonment of the operation, their interest in the disabled person subsided.
Human head transplant is a very difficult procedure as it requires reconnection of the spine. After the operation, the immune system must be controlled to prevent the head from separating from the donor body.
Some interesting facts:
- Spiridonov has already won. The doctors told him that he should have died of an illness several years ago.
- Valery works from home in Vladimir, about 180 kilometers east of Moscow, running an educational software business.
- Spiridonov is terminally ill. He is tied to a wheelchair due to Werdnig-Hoffmann disease. A genetic disorder that causes motor neurons to die. The disease has limited his movements in order to feed himself, he operates a joystick in a wheelchair.
- Spiridonov is not the only person who has volunteered to be the first potentially successful head transplant patient. Nearly a dozen others, including a man whose body is full of tumors, asked doctors to go first.
- Spiridonov came up with a new way to help finance the operation, according to preliminary estimates, the cost of the operation was from 10 to 100 million US dollars. He began selling hats, T-shirts, mugs, and iPhone cases, all featuring a head on a new body.
Head transplant in China
In December 2017, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero performed the first head transplant on two cadaver donors in China. With this procedure, he tried to make fusion (taking an entire human head and attaching it to a donor body) a reality and stated that the operation was successful.
Many scientists around the world believe that the successful human head transplant claimed by Canavero is actually a failure! The argument is that no actual results of post-transplant human head transplant have been shown to the public. Sergio Canavero has gained a reputation in wider circles as a crook and populist.
Dr. Canavero performed a head transplant with another doctor named Xiaoping Ren from Harbin Medical University, a neurosurgeon from China who successfully grafted a head onto a monkey's body last year. Canavero and Dr. Ren were not the only ones involved in this operation. More than 100 doctors and nurses were on standby for this procedure for 18 hours. Answering a question from journalists “how much does a head transplant cost?” Canavero said that the procedure cost more than $ 100 million.
The first head transplant in China was successful. The operation on the human corpses has been completed. We underwent a head transplant, whoever said what! - said Canavero at a conference in Vienna. He said the 18-hour surgery on two cadavers showed that the spinal cord and blood vessels could be restored.
Sergio Canavero and Xiaoping Ren
Since then, Canavero has been dubbed "Dr. Frankenstein in Medicine" and has been criticized for his actions. We can say that Sergio Canavero is a person who plays god or wants to cheat death.
Ren and Canavero hope their invention may one day help patients with paralysis and spinal cord injuries walk again.
These patients currently do not have good strategies and their mortality is very high. Therefore, I am trying to promote this technique to help these patients, ”Professor Wren told CNBC. "This is my main strategy for the future."
If doctors really did a head transplant to a person (living recipient), it would be a breakthrough in the field of transplantation. Such a successful surgery could mean saving terminally ill patients, as well as giving people with spinal cord injuries the opportunity to walk again.
Jan Schnapp, professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford, said: “Despite the enthusiasm of Professor Canavero, I cannot imagine that ethics committees in any reputable research or clinical setting will give the green light to live human head transplants in the foreseeable future ... given the current state of the art, it would be nothing more than a crime.
Any innovative procedure will undoubtedly face objection and skepticism, and requires a leap of faith. While all this seems impossible, a human head transplant would revolutionize medicine if successful.
Ethical issues
Some doctors say the chances of success are so low that attempting a head transplant would be tantamount to murder. But even if it were feasible, even if we could connect the head and body and have a living person at the end, this is only the beginning of ethical questions about the procedure for the created hybrid life.
If we transplanted your head onto my body, who would it be? In the West, we tend to think that what you are essentially - your thoughts, memories, emotions - is entirely in your brain. Since the resulting hybrid has its own brain, we take it as an axiom that this person will be you.
But there are many reasons for concern that such a conclusion is premature.
First, our brain constantly monitors, reacts and adapts to our body. A completely new body would force the brain to engage in massive reorientation to all of its new inputs, which could over time change the fundamental nature and connective pathways of the brain (what scientists call “connect”).
Dr. Sergio Canavero said at a conference in Vienna that the head transplant on a corpse was successful.
The brain will not be the same as it was before, still attached to the body. We do not know exactly how it will change you, your sense of self, your memories, your connection with the world - we only know what it will be.
Second, neither scientists nor philosophers have a clear understanding of how the body contributes to our essential sense of self.
The second largest nerve cluster in our body, after the brain, is the bundle in our gut (technically called the enteric nervous system). The ENS is often described as a “second brain,” and it is so vast that it can function independently of our brain; that is, he can make his own “decisions” without the involvement of the brain. In fact, the enteric nervous system uses the same neurotransmitters as the brain.
You may have heard of serotonin, which may play a role in regulating our moods. Well, about 95 percent of the serotonin in the body is made in the gut, not the brain! We know that ENS has a profound effect on our emotional states, but we do not understand its full role in determining who we are, how we feel and how we behave.
Moreover, there has recently been an explosion in the study of the human microbiome, the large mix of bacterial life that lives within us; it turns out that we have more microorganisms in our bodies than in human cells. There are over 500 species of bacteria in the gut, and the exact composition differs from person to person.
There are other reasons to worry about a head transplant. The United States suffers from an acute shortage of donor organs. The average waiting time for a kidney transplant is five years, a liver transplant is 11 months, and a pancreas is two years. One corpse can donate two kidneys, as well as a heart, liver, pancreas, and possibly other organs. Using the whole body for one head transplant with ghostly chances of success is unethical.
Canavero estimates the cost of the world's first human head transplant at $ 100 million. How much good can you do with such funds? It's actually not that hard to calculate!
When and if it becomes possible to repair a severed spinal cord, this revolutionary achievement should be targeted primarily at the many thousands of people who suffer from paralysis as a result of a torn or injured spinal cord.
There are also unresolved legal issues. Who is a hybrid person legally? Is the "head" or "body" legal personality? The body is more than 80 percent of the mass, so it is more of a donor than a recipient. Who, according to the law, will be the children and spouses of the donor to the recipient? After all, the body of their relative will live, but with a “different head”.
The history of head transplant does not end there; on the contrary, new facts, questions, and problems emerge every day.
Surely many people remember the Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who intended no less than to carry out a human head transplant. Since then, it seemed, apart from statements, nothing new happened, but, as it turned out, all this time, Mr. Canavero was preparing not only for a head transplant operation, but also for a larger-scale manipulation of a brain transplant.
In addition to the ambitious plan, Sergio's first patient has also changed. Previously, the first patient was supposed to be a Russian, Valery Spiridonov, diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, but now the right to be the first has passed to a resident of China, whose name has not yet been announced. The Chinese colleague Sergio Shaoping Ren also takes part in the conduct and preparation for the operation, and the choice of the patient will depend on the availability of a compatible donor.
The location of the operation has also changed: if earlier the transplant was planned to be carried out in Germany or Great Britain, now the operation is being prepared on the territory of the Harbin Medical Center. Despite the still fantastic claim about the future success of this manipulation, a team of scientists have already successfully transplanted the head of one rat to the body and head of a second, using the bloodstream of another rodent. With this, the surgeons protected the rats from blood loss and hypothermia. However, the donor rat was clearly in pain.
A unique operation is scheduled for December this year. And if the operation is successful, the Italian will start working towards a brain transplant. According to the surgeon, on the one hand, this will be a less difficult task, since in this case it will not be necessary to transplant all the vessels, tendons, muscles and nerves. On the other hand, problems of a different nature may arise with the brain, for example, it is not known how the human brain will react to the “replacement” of the body, in addition, the cranium will have a different configuration.
For his own purposes, Sergio Canavero is going to use the brains of people who have subjected their bodies to cryofreezing. According to the specialist, perhaps already in 2018 the first frozen patients will be able to return to life.
In China, for the first time, a head was transplanted from one dead person to another. Initially, it was planned that the head of the Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov would be transplanted onto the donor's body, but the story had a sad end. The surgeon refused to operate on a patient from Russia.
The world's first human head transplant took place in China on Friday November 17th. True, the head was transplanted from one dead body to another.
The idea behind this transplant was to successfully connect the spinal cord, nerves and blood vessels. And as the surgeon Sergio Canavero assured, he succeeded quite successfully. Earlier it was planned to transplant the head to the Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov. But this story ended sadly - the operation was canceled.
The beginning of the story
We will remind, at the beginning of 2015, the Italian doctor Sergio Canavero said that he was ready to transplant a head from a living volunteer to a donor body. This information was seen by the Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov, and could not help but respond. The fact is that Spiridonov suffers from a congenital disease - Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome. Because of this, his back muscles are almost completely atrophied. That is, a 32-year-old guy is practically immobilized, and over time this situation is getting worse. The surgeon met with Valery personally and was convinced of the sincerity of his intentions, of his willingness to take risks.
Fact! Despite the fact that Valery practically cannot move without the help of a wheelchair, he leads an active life. The guy has been working since he was 16, he is a successful programmer. Travels a lot, constantly communicates with interesting people. Therefore, as he himself said in an interview, you should not think about the fact that he wants to die in this way.
The operation was scheduled for December 2017. The doctor and the patient had no doubts that it would be difficult to find a donor. But it is possible, because every day people get into fatal car accidents, and some are sentenced to death. It was among them that it was planned to find a donor body.
However, these plans never materialized. The fact is that the sponsor of the operation, the Government of China, insists that the patient be a citizen of this country. It is also important that the donor is of the same race as the patient. It is not possible to transplant Spiridonov's head onto the body of a Chinese. That is why all preparations for the operation had to be frozen. And it is difficult to say whether Spiridonov will be operated on in the future.
The essence of the operation
Previously, Sergio conducted similar successful experiments only on mice. He transplanted the head from one mouse to another. But the operation to transplant the head to the monkey was unsuccessful. First, the spinal cord was not connected, but only the blood vessels. Secondly, the animal then experienced severe torment, and the doctors had to euthanize him 20 hours later. This is why many scientists are terrified of what Hanavero is about to do.
The surgeon himself is very optimistic. He states that he will definitely do such operations again. In addition, in the future, he plans to transplant the brain of an elderly person into the body of a young donor. So, according to him, it will be possible to defeat death.
On July 18, a little over 100 years ago, in 1916, Vladimir Demikhov was born into a peasant family - a man who stood at the origins of Russian transplantation.
He was the first to make an artificial heart and implant it in a dog who lived with him for 2 hours. Demikhov was also the first to transplant a separate lung, heart with lung, liver and developed the procedure for mammary coronary bypass grafting. One of the areas of his work was attempts at head transplantation. Back in 1954, he first implanted a second head on a dog and repeatedly successfully repeated this procedure.
Today, heart transplant is still one of the most difficult operations in the world, but it is no longer unique. In Russia alone, more than 200 such operations are carried out annually. Liver transplantation is gradually becoming a routine procedure, as well as many other operations developed by Demikhov. Only head transplantation is still one of the unsolved problems of transplantation - science has made significant headway over the past 60 years, but it has not yet reached a head transplant for a living person.
MedAboutMe figured out why a head transplant is more difficult than a heart, and what problems, besides medical and physiological, are faced by scientists in this field.
Body or head?
The essence of a head transplant operation is to engraft the head of one living creature on the body of another. It can be carried out in two ways:
The head of the "receiving side" is not removed - and these are the experiments that Demikhov did. In total, he created 20 two-headed dogs. The head is removed from the body, that is, the donor's head must 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 the organs) and who is the recipient (the one to whom the organs are transplanted) is still not completely resolved:
On the one hand, the body is 80% of the organism, and from this perspective the head is transplanted onto a new body. Both in the media and among a significant part of scientists they talk 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. From this perspective, it would be more correct to talk about a body transplant. Head transplant medical problems
Scientists talk about three main problems that have not yet been solved with head transplantation.
Risk of graft rejection.
Well, let's say that the achievements of modern medicine will allow us to cope with this problem, at least for a short time. In the end, even in the late 1950s, after the operation, Demikhov had dogs with two heads for some time, and even a two-headed monkey - albeit not for long, well, medicine was much less developed.
Risk of brain death when disconnected from the blood supply.
To keep the neurons of the brain alive, they need to provide a continuous flow of blood that carries oxygen and nutrients, and also removes harmful waste from nerve cells. Cutting off 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, during transplantation, the monkey's head was cooled to 15 ° C, which largely prevented the death of brain neurons.
The problem of connecting parts of the central nervous system of the body and head.
This issue is the most difficult and has not yet been resolved. For example, breathing and heartbeat are controlled by the autonomic nervous system and the brain stem. 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 that exit from the skull to 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 physical activity. It is also tactile sensitivity, proprioception (feeling 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 pre-existing spinal cord injuries.
In 2016, an international team of scientists from the United States and South Korea proposed the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) for fusion of destroyed nerve pathways of the spinal cord. During the experiment, scientists managed to at least partially restore the severed spinal cord of 5 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 from the University of Texas improved the spinal cord fusion solution, enhancing its properties with graphene nanoribbons, which are supposed to act as a kind of building framework for nerve cells.
There is also evidence that South Korean scientists were able to restore the ability to move in rats with a severed spinal cord and to achieve good results in a dog whose spinal cord injuries accounted for 90%. True, the degree of evidence for these experiments is rather low. Scientists have not provided evidence that the experimental animals actually had a damaged spinal cord, and the sample is too small.
In any case, according to experts, after doctors learn to confidently repair a torn spinal cord, head transplantation will be possible, at best, only in 3-4 years.
Psyche, ethics and two brains of the body
These 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 this, since it is 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 vast 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 “in the intestines”, and it is this hormone that largely determines our view of the world.
Finally, in recent years, there has been growing evidence that the gut microbiome is also having an impact on personality shaping.
All these facts raise doubts among scientists 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 effect on the transplanted head that the question still arises: 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
Over the past couple of years, the media has periodically flashed information about the decision of a resident of Russia, programmer Vitaly Spiridonov to become a "guinea pig" and take part in the world's first head transplantation to a living person. Spiridonov suffers from an incurable disease - Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, congenital spinal amyotrophy. His muscles and skeleton atrophy, which threatens him with death. He gave Sergio Canavero's consent to participate in the operation, but the procedure has been postponed.
Chronicle of a head transplant, 1908. French surgeon Alexis Carrel was involved in the development of methods 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 a few hours later. 1954 year. Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov, also as part of the development of a coronary bypass procedure, performed an upper body transplant on a dog - a head with front legs. The grafted body parts could move. The maximum life span in one case was 29 days, after which the animal died due to tissue rejection. 1970 year. American neurosurgeon Robert J. White cut off the head of one monkey and connected the blood vessels of the body to the head of another animal. He did not touch the nervous system either. At the same time, White used deep hypothermia (cooling) to protect the brain during the stage of its temporary disconnection from the blood supply. The grafted head could chew, swallow, and move its eyes. All monkeys who participated in such experiments died within a maximum of three days after surgery from the side effects of high doses of immunosuppressive drugs. year 2012. After several experiments on head transplantation by other scientists, the experiments of the Chinese transplantologist Xiaoping Ren became famous. 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 on the possibility of human head transplantation. 2016 year. Canavero and Ren reported on successful attempts at head transplantation in mice, rats, dogs, and monkeys, and equally successful attempts to fuse a severed spinal cord in animals using fusogen proteins. True, the scientific community doubts the reliability of the published results, since instead of the video, only photos of dubious quality were presented. And Ren and Canavero themselves admitted that we are talking about the restoration of 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 year. 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 unclear whether the nerve connections of the spinal cord can be restored in this way. Bright future. Sergio Canavero (Italy) and Xiaoping Rei promise to transplant a head to a living person in the coming years. Vitaly Spiridonov hopes to become one. But it seems that the first "experimental" will be a citizen of China - this is more profitable 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 thousands. Surgeons have learned to transplant limbs and faces, a woman recently gave birth with a transplanted uterus, and in 2014 a penis was successfully transplanted. Sooner or later, humanity will cope with a head (or body) transplant. But while 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 ready for this. Take the testTest: you and your health Take the test and find out how valuable your health is to you.
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