Head transplant: a man will be attached to his new body in under an hour and the aim is immortality, doctor says [Video]

I’ve written on this doctor’s Frankenstein exploits before. Color me extremely skeptical of a doctor who has a God-complex. Not to mention the real medical community thinks he’s nuts. The young man in question will most likely die from this procedure… but if he doesn’t, will he still be him? Can you transfer a soul by simply swapping bodies and reattaching your head? I’ll repeat – there are a number of things that are far worse than death.

From The Independent:

The Italian doctor who has claimed that he could transplant a man’s head onto a donor’s body has said that he could do much of the procedure in less than an hour.

The procedure — which Canavero has admitted is just a first step towards his ultimate aim of creating immortality — will see a man’s head removed and placed on a donor’s body.

That will see the man’s head get cooled down — as it is when doctors operate on some parts of the brain — and switched onto the different body. Doctors will then have a few minutes to attach the blood vessels and the whole thing will take less then an hour, Canavero said.

After that, the full joining process could take up to 24 hours. Canavero said that it would be carried out by a team of doctors to ensure that none of them got tired, and that doctors and surgeons from around the world had enquired about joining that team.

Canavero said that he will explain the procedure in depth at a neurosurgeons’ conference on June 12. “I’ll prove it is totally possible to all the sceptics there,” he told Mail Online.


A drawing depicting the first total cephalosomatic exchange in a monkey. (from White et al. 1971)

The patient for Canavero’s first attempt at the head transplant has already been chosen, and identified as Valeri Spidonov. He is a 30-year-old Russian man who has Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, which wastes away his muscles and means that his health is rapidly declining.

[…]

The doubt of those in Europe and Russia mean that Canavero could head to China to carry out the procedure, he said. Canavero also admits that it’s possible he could be jailed for carrying out the procedure in an unfriendly country.

[…]

The doctor needs $15 million to carry out the surgery, he says. While that’s a lot, he compared the money to that paid to footballers.

[…]

He said that he had received interest from tycoons and other super-rich people who were looking to use the surgery to prolong their lives. Admitting that the aim of the surgery is to allow people to eventually become immortal, he said that he has no problem with objections from churches and others.

Canavero’s comments come as conspiracy theories circulate on the internet that the entire head transplant story could be a marketing stunt. Internet users have pointed out the similarities between Canavero and a character from the game Metal Gear Solid 5, and have claimed that the entire tale could have been created by the game’s creator Hideo Kojima.

The conspiracy centres around a number of coincidences between Canavero’s story and that of Metal Gear Solid. Canavero published an article about the surgery, which he was then calling “Gemini”, as an article two days after the launch of Metal Gear Solid 5, which featured characters called Gemini that had cybernetic heads. There are a range of other unlikely coincidences, including special names and timings.

It’s unlikely that Canavero’s story is fake — he has published over 100 papers and carried out genuine medical procedures, as blog Kotaku noted in a post detailing the claims — but has brought extra attention to Canavero’s claims.

The Internet is buzzing with conspiracy stories on this whole affair. But the guy does seem to be a real doctor and is hell bent on creating immortality as an option. He has also claimed it is a political endeavor, whatever that means. The Chinese just successfully modified genomes of human embryos and they are looking to host Dr. Canavero’s endeavor. This whole thing reminds me of the Nazi experiments on Jews during the Holocaust. The doc says he has boned up on Chinese for years just in case. Looks like along with global conquest, the Chinese are into monster making these days. Now they have their very own Dr. Frankenstein – bring on the lightning.

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Terresa Monroe-Hamilton is an editor and writer for Right Wing News. She owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net. She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com. She also does research at KeyWiki.org. You can email Terresa here. NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter.

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