Sergio Canavero has moved beyond "Young Frankenstein's" search for the perfect rostrum; he plans to head to China in order to perform the first full-head transplant.
Earlier this year, Canavero became famous around the world when he enlarged on plans, long cherished, to remove the heads of two people. One would be alive, with an ailing body (a paraplegic, say), the other newly dead or doomed (perhaps the brain-dead victim of an accident). As Canavero explained in academic papers and speeches, he planned to surgically attach the first head to the second body, fusing the spinal cords so that the owner of the first head might enjoy the functional use of the second body. It might be best understood as a "body transplant," but the wider world has tended to settle on the more sensational phrase.
It seems a bit ghoulish, but he's planned out the whole approach to removal of the heads and the ultimate reattachment of the "good" head to the "donor" body (as the procedure will occur in China, one can make an educated guess as to where and how that "donor" will be provided, and it won't involve an accident). Nonetheless, once the heads are severed, the first order of business will be connection of blood supplies to keep the brain oxygenated.
Canavero will then fuse the spinal cords and reconnect nerves - that's his specialty as a neurosurgeon. Other surgical specialists will step in to connect things like the windpipe and gullet. Even in the early 1900s, a woman whose spine was severed by a gunshot regained limited movement after her spine was fused. Things have come a long way since then.
Canavero likes to talk about medical pioneers who were outcasts and fringe-dwellers in their day. Louis Pasteur, he says, was called crazy for suggesting illnesses could be caused by microbes. "The history of mankind is trial and error. But we have to be dreamers. If you don't dream, you're not going anywhere."
And if successful, there would be other implications as well: consider reproduction; the head that's attached to the body will not pass on its genes, as those would come from the donor body (although if a clone is used, it would be possible to continue the genetic lineage of the head's former body). There would likely be immune system issues as well, although those are generally well-addressed today through tissue matching and the development of antirejection drugs.
Then there are the overall ethical issues involved - although Canavero doesn't worry about those; in his view from a scientific perspective, what can be done, will be done.
