World’s First Head Transplant Set To Take Place In 2017. If It Fails, the Consequences Are Worse Than Death
On December 3, 1967 at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, the first human heart transplant was performed by a South African surgeon, Christiaan Barnard. This surgery marked a breakthrough in medicine.
And 50 years later, a 30-year-old computer scientist from Russia, will be putting his life on the line for the world’s first Head Transplant. Yep you read that right.
Basically it’s your head being completely cut of then transplanted on an entirely different body.
But as you can imagine the surgery is extremely delicate and if it fails the patient will die or worse undergo something so agonizing that death will look like a walk in the park. You can check out the procedure here
According to the Christopher Hootan of The Independent the surgery is expected to take 36 hours with the help of 150 doctors and nurses .And there is “the possibility that the body will reject his head and he will die, the patients fate could be considerably worse than death”.
And experienced neurosurgeons are against it. Such as Dr Hunt Batjer, the president of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons who says that “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.”
If the surgery succeeds, there is still the big question how the surgery will affect the patients mind and there is a possibility of the patient having a “never experienced level and quality of insanity”.
The question many of you are asking why is this young Russian man willing to wade in these unchartered waters with Dr. Sergio Canavero as head surgeon? Well, because he suffers from a degenerative muscular disease called Werdnig-Hoffmann and his health is rapidly declining as people with this condition do not live past 20 years.
The whole surgery sounds extremely painful and sounds like something right off a horror movie, but you can blame the volunteer, after all who does not was to preserve his life?
