Maverick surgeon wants to transplant living human head onto dead body
After critics in the US objected to his plan to graft a living human head onto the body of a recently-deceased donor, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero moved to China – but then his volunteer fell in love
A maverick surgeon says the ground-breaking operation of transplanting the head of a terminally-ill man onto a recently deceased donor is around the corner.
Many medical experts have weighed in to criticise the work of Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero. Among them is bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, from Emory University in the US, who said that Canavero’s so-called HEAVEN procedure “Walks a fine line between medical care and murder.”
Canavero had planned to perform the risky procedure on Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from a rare muscle-wasting disease. But while legal challenges in the US delayed the surgery, two major changes occurred in Spiridonov’s life.