In April, 2015, Computer scientist Valery Spiridonov, who is wheelchair bound due to a muscle-wasting disease, Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, which will one day kill him, announced he would be the first volunteer to undergo a head transplant.
The procedure, which has been constantly been delayed as experts try to thrash out what exactly needs to be done to ensure the patient’s survival, will be handled by neurosurgeon Dr Sergio Canavero – who has been dubbed the real life Dr Frankenstein.
However, top medical officials are warning that the operation is bound to fail, and even if Mr Spiridonov does survive, he will not lead a happy life.
Dr Hunt Batjer, president of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons, said: “I would not wish this on anyone.
“I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death.”
Not only would there be many issues with the body, such as paralysis due to the sheer difficulty of trying to connect a spinal cord, but there will be many psychological issues for the recipient.
Arthur Caplan, director of medical ethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Centre, told the Independent patients “would end up being overwhelmed with different pathways and chemistry than they are used to and they’d go crazy.”
Dr Canavero has previously claimed he is ready to perform the operation, insisting he has successfully severed and reconnected the spinal cord of nine mice.
Dr Canavero and a team of Chinese doctors severed the spinal cords of 15 rats, and attempted to reattach nine of them, with the other six as test subjects.
The team used polyethylene glycol, which is found in medicines but also industrial processes, to fix the spinal cords, while attempting to minimise blood loss.
All of the rats, bar one, managed to survive for an astonishing 30 days after the experiment, according to a report in the journal CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics.
The rats apparently even managed to walk again and regain basic motor functionality, while the researchers said two of the rodents returned to a state of being “basically normal”.
However, the team noted the spinal cord severance needs to be extremely clean for the procedure to work.
The report reads: “We show for the first time in an adequately powered study that the paralysis attendant to a complete transection of the spinal cord can be reversed.”