Recent news of a man walking after his severed spinal column was repaired is an important step toward what most still steadfastly insist will never be possible: head transplantation and whole-body prostheses. Much work and many years lie ahead, of course, but medical technology is progressing toward a time when the entire body is replaceable. As the late Robert J. White, MD, PhD, medical advisor to Pope John Paul II, wrote at the turn of the century, as cited last year by Sergio Canavero, MD of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in HEAVEN: The Head Anastomosis Venture Project Outline for the First Human Head Transplantation with Spinal Linkage (GEMINI): What has been accomplished in the animal model - prolonged hypothermic preservation and cephalic transplantation, is fully accomplishable in the human sphere. Whether such dramatic procedures will ever be justified in the human area must wait not only upon the continued advance of medical science but more appropriately the moral and social justification of such procedural undertakings…what has always been the stuff of science fiction - the Frankenstein legend, in which an entire human being is constructed by sewing various body parts together - will become a clinical reality early in the 21st century… brain transplantation, at least initially, will really be head transplantation - or body transplantation, depending on your perspective… with the significant improvements in surgical techniques and postoperative management since then, it is now possible to consider adapting the head-transplant technique to humans. Canavero paper: bit.ly/L40qTg
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 03:36:09 +0000
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