First full body transplant is two years away, surgeon claims

www.theguardian.com ^ | 02-25-2015 | Staff

[Red Badger]

A surgeon says full-body transplants could become a reality in just two years.

Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off.

Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June.

He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.

The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed. The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in primates to test whether the procedure works.

[Boogieman]

They’ll get the bodies the same way they get hearts, lungs, kidneys, etc. Declare a non-responsive person “brain dead” and then harvest the parts they want while killing that person in the process.

[Durus]

I’m sure she would. Or did you mean as a body transplant?

[Vaduz]

Won’t work because Soros head has rotted away it just hasn’t fell of yet.

[Boogieman]

Now, imagine if they transplant Bill’s head on to Hillary’s body...

[Yardstick]

I’m not sure they’re even to the point of being able to reattach the nerves in, say, a severed finger. I think they can do the mechanical stuff but not the “wiring”.

[a fool in paradise]

[nascarnation]

Now we need one with Monica and Huma, LOL

[a fool in paradise]

I don’t know how the nerve endings work but there was a blues man who had his finger tip reattached with just a wrapping of balm and spider webbing.

http://www.chron.com/entertainment/music/article/Earl-Gilliam-sings-lives-the-blues-1725886.php

He holds up his “trigger finger,” a long, brown, spidery digit that has pounded out blues songs on a keyboard for the better part of seven decades. The tip of the finger is positioned at a permanent right angle, the result of a lawn mower accident when he was a kid. “My mother didn’t believe in doctors,” he says. So she reattached the fingertip, splinted it using spider webs as a wrap and soaked it in vinegar. “That’s just the way it healed,” he says, smiling. “Told you, she didn’t believe in doctors.”

[Yardstick]

Wow, spider webs! It would be interesting to know if the nerves reconnected. I’m pretty amazed that his body was able reestablish the blood supply to the tip quickly enough to keep it alive.

[a fool in paradise]

Elsewhere in this thread I posted references (but not links) to the Soviet experiments (first of keeping a severed dog’s head alive on artificial heart and lungs, then of grafting one dog’s head and paw to another living dog, both breathing and eating from the same dog’s throat, lungs, heart).

[Buckeye McFrog]

I’m sure she would. Or did you mean as a body transplant?

Okay....you owe me another bottle of Two if by Tea, and a new keyboard...

[Yardstick]

I saw that and I can see how such a thing could be done with surgery where the blood supply is carefully spliced together. In the case of the musician’s finger, though, his body had to reconnect the blood supply spontaneously. That is pretty amazing.

Regarding reconnecting nerves, it looks like nerves in the peripheral nervous system can reconnect and heal back together so that their function is restored. The best outcomes are in the young and when the nerve is cut cleanly. It’s the central nervous system where regeneration is not possible.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration

[Bulwyf]

That part is easy... if you want the perfect body back, give your heart to Jesus now, we’ll all be new then.

As for your ass, that will still have to belong to the corps.

[Red Badger]

We’ll all get new spirit bodies that can traverse the universe in th blink of an eye..................

[jimfree]

Imagine that. I’ll trust your superior knowledge on this one. Thanks for sharing.

[Trillian]

Amy: "Ok, Fry. We're done putting on the bra."
Fry: "Why exactly did you shave your legs anyway? Are you expect something to happen with your Valentine's date?"
Amy: "What business is that of yours?"
Fry: "And another thing. You're use an awful lot of make-up there."
Amy: "This is deodorant."
Fry: "What does it do?"