At the edge of 2017, an Italian neurosurgeon called Sergio Canavero is desiring to carry out what's probably the most complex and risky operation in the history of medical science, a full human head transplant,

Now you may well have already heard about this ambitious project since it's been on the cards for a few years, but as December and the scheduled operation approaches, it's a good time to look at how exactly one would go about transplanting a Head.

 Firstly, through a brief dip into definitions, when surgeons usually transplant organs like hearts or kidneys or even face the unhealthy organ is removed and a healthy donor organ is put in its place.

So, with a head transplant you'd be forgiven for thinking that the head is the faulty organ that needs to be replaced the problem with that is that the head contains the brain and hence all the stuff that makes you, you so by transplanting a donor head you'd be replacing the essence of you which is basically dying then that can't be right, 'can it, well no it's not right and that's because of one of the most common misconceptions about head transplants.

In the procedure that Sergio Canavero is hoping to carry out it's not the head that's at fault but the rest of the body, in fact the head of the patient is the only fully functioning part, so in contrast to all other transplant operations a head transplant sees the head being the thing that's kept while everything else is replaced, really it should be called a body transplant, right? Anyway, that's just me.

Even though a human head transplant hasn't been carried out yet, you might be surprised by the amount of decapitation, recapitation that has, albeit just with animals, the very first was way back in 1908 when an American scientist succeeded in grafting one dog's head onto the side of another's the neck, later in 1940 a terrifying steampunk like device called an "AutoJektor " was wired up to a decapitated dog's head to show how it could be kept alive without a body, amazingly the experiment was actually televised and the disembodied head was shown to be able to respond to simple stimuli like sounds and touch.





Since then scientists have kept on experimenting with varying degrees of success over the years dogs rats even monkeys have had their heads removed and replaced in the effort to create the perfect Frankenstein's monster, however somewhat disconcertingly they've still not got it quite right although they are getting closer, to date, none of the new head-body combinations have successfully had a head control the body and in fact, most have unfortunately died shortly after their operations.

But Sergio Canavero seems to have a plan for overcoming some of the biggest challenges and making the first full human head transplant also the first fully successful head transplant and here is how he plans to do it. The procedure is ironically named heaven which stands for "Head Anastomosis Venture". Both the healthy-headed patient and the brain-dead body donor will be operated on at the same time by a very large team of surgeons, that's to reduce any complications from having to store the head or the body while they are separated.

First, the patient's head will be cooled down to a chilly 10 degrees Celsius to minimize the brain damage that can occur, when you know you yank a head off a body, then they'll make deep incisions around the neck to expose all the pipework and wiring, the muscles will be color-coded so, that when it comes to sticking them back together, the surgeons can be sure that tab and sits back into the slot and or something like. That the team will then make neat cuts in the Trachea, Esophagus, and the veins and arteries and the entire head will be drained of blood to avoid problems like blood clots when the flow stops, the final step will be one of the hardest separating the spinal cord, this bundle of many thousands of nerve fibers must be sliced incredibly cleanly so that it doesn't get frayed, so they're going to use a diamond-edged blade that will need almost no force to slice through the most important cable in our bodies, just like a hot knife through butter.

Once the patient's head is separated it will hang freely from a crane which let's be fair will be a pretty disturbing sight, luckily though it won't be dangling there for long.





 As within just a couple of minutes the donor's body will be brought in and the spinal cord will be the first thing to be reconnected, this is the critical part of the procedure to make sure that the head will be able to drive the new body and it's the part that's not been fully successful yet, so how do you stick one end of a spinal cord to another, well Canavaro is planning to use a special kind of glue yeah, it's called "polyethylene glycol" or "PEG" for short and it's actually found in some lotion, skin creams and weirdly printers and it has the remarkable ability to mend and fuse delicate cell membranes, by applying "PEG" to the spinal cord and infusing it into the blood the surgeons hope that the nerve bundle will fuse together and simply heal itself, after the cord is stuck back together it's relatively plain sailing the blood vessels will be sewn together allowing blood from the donors body to flow into the patient's brain, warming that head up within a matter of minutes, the Trachea and the esophagus will be reconnected the muscles matched up and joined and finally the skin will be delicately sewn to minimize the scarring and hide the unbelievably complex rewiring that's gone on beneath the surface, then once they're all patched up the patient will be kept in a coma for at least 3 days keeping them still to allow the joints to heal and the spine to finish fusing.

The procedure is expected to take a team of 80 surgeons up to 36 hours to complete and in total it will cost a mere 10 million euros, yet still, there's no guarantee of success.

That's just one of the reasons that Sergio Canavero plans have been met with almost unanimous criticism and derision of that and the whole you know severed head.

It is such an ambitious procedure and one that can't properly be practiced in stages so it's bound to be spectacularly risky and I've not even started on the ethical and moral dilemmas that it throws up.

Despite surgeons intricate knowledge of the machinery of our body we still have a very poor understanding of exactly how our consciousness works does it all come from the brain, by replacing basically the majority of your whole body well a patient's mind even be able to function, let alone retain its identity, the short answer we don't know. Even if successful, another inescapable crisis that the head transplant team faces is if they choose to have children, their mind will be their own, but their genetics and their genitals will be that of the long-dead donor.

Canavero and his surgeons are exploring very real medical and moral frontiers, when no, if the first human head transplant takes place, but I think it's fair to say that is really ahead of the curve.

Would you opt for a head transplant or a body transplant, which we should really call it for that matter.



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