A head transplant surgery was performed on a Monkey and it caused no neurological damage which keeps human head transplant attempt on track for end of 2017

Sergio Canavero plans to transplant a human’s head onto a donor body. He says that the procedure will be ready before the end of 2017 and could eventually become a way of treating complete paralysis.

The team behind the work has published videos and images showing a monkey with a transplanted head, as well as mice that are able to move their legs after having their spinal cords severed and then stuck back together.

Non-damaging transplant of Monkey head and mice have had spinal cord repairs

Sergio Canavero said researchers led by Xiaoping Ren at Harbin Medical University, China, have carried out a head transplant on a monkey. They connected up the blood supply between the head and the new body, but did not attempt to connect the spinal cord. Canavero says the experiment, which repeats the work of Robert White in the US in 1970, demonstrates that if the head is cooled to -15 °C, a monkey can survive the procedure without suffering brain injury.

“The monkey fully survived the procedure without any neurological injury of whatever kind,” says Canavero, adding that it was kept alive for only 20 hours after the procedure for ethical reasons. New Scientist was, however, unable to obtain further details on this experiment.

“We’ve done a pilot study testing some ideas about how to prevent injury,” says Ren, whose work is sponsored by the Chinese government. He and his team have also performed experiments on human cadavers in preparation for carrying out the surgery, he says.

This can open up a new science of spinal cord trauma reconstruction

Canavero is seeking funds to offer a head transplant to a 31-year-old Russian patient, Valery Spriridonov, who has a genetic muscle-wasting disease. Canavero says he intends to make a plea to Mark Zuckerberg to finance the surgery. Last week, Trinh Hong Son, director of the Vietnam-Germany Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam, offered to host the procedure.

“If the so-called head transplant works, this is going to open up a whole new science of spinal cord trauma reconstruction,” says Michael Sarr, editor of the journal Surgery and a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “We are most interested in spinal cord reconstruction using head transplantation as a proof of principle. Our journal does not necessarily support head transplantation because of multiple ethical issues and multiple considerations of informed consent and the possibility of negative consequences of a head transplant.”