The tragic end of the story with a Russian head transplant. An Italian surgeon promises to transplant the head of a Russian programmer. Is a head transplant possible: comments by Russian scientists

The world's first human head transplant will take place in China. This was announced by the Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who is going to perform this unique operation. Formerly Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov. But now, apparently, he decided to change his plans.

30-year-old Valery Spiridonov has a complex genetic disease - spinal muscular atrophy. He is practically unable to move. Everyone expected that Valery would become the first person in history to receive a body transplant. Or the head, there is no consensus among doctors on how to call this transplant. He has been preparing for the most complicated and yet unique operation since 2015.

"I'm not trying to commit some kind of sophisticated suicide. No, it's not. I'm happy with what I have. And I have confidence that everyone understands what they are doing. It's just that someone technically should be first. Why not me?" he said.

The transplant was supposed to be performed by a neurosurgeon from Italy, Sergio Canavero. Spiridonov flew to the USA to meet with him after Internet consultations.

And now, six months before the planned operation, the news comes: the first patient to receive a head transplant will not be a Russian, but a citizen of China. The official reason is as follows: they decided to carry out the operation in China, and the donor and recipient must belong to the same race.

“We will have to look for donors among the locals. And we cannot give the snow-skinned Valery the body of a person of a different race. We cannot name the new candidate yet. We are in the selection process,” said Sergio Canavero, a neurosurgeon.

However, many are sure that it is more about funding and national prestige. In China, a head transplant operation is funded by the state. A separate clinic in Harbin will be allocated for this. Dozens of local doctors will help the Italian neurosurgeon. And the choice of the patient, most likely, will also fall on a citizen of China.

“The Chinese decided on this operation because they want to get the Nobel Prize and to recommend their country as an engine of scientific progress. This is a kind of new space race,” Canavero is sure.

The operation is expected to take about 36 hours and cost $15 million. After freezing, the heads will be separated from the bodies. And the recipient's head will be attached to the donor's body with the help of special biological glue. Polyethylene glycol will be injected into the affected areas of the spinal cord, with its help it has already been possible to restore connections between thousands of neurons in animals.

Trial operations on patients in a state of clinical death are planned for autumn 2017. This is necessary to hone the technique of surgical manipulations. Previously, Sergio Canavero had already succeeded in sewing on a second mouse head and transplanting a head into a monkey. However, the monkey was euthanized 20 hours after the operation. And the transplanted mouse head did not send impulses to other parts of the body.

And many neurosurgeons still doubt that when performing an operation on a person, it will really be possible to successfully fuse the spinal cord and preserve the vital functions of the brain.

“Technically, there are many problems with stitching many vessels, nerves, bones. But these are solvable options. The main problem is how to make impulses from the head through the stitched spinal cord go down and back? Unfortunately, this technique does not work yet, there is no such technique ", says the Russian doctor.

The Italian surgeon himself estimates the chances of success as 90 percent. And I am sure that this will be a breakthrough in the field of transplantation, which will give a chance for life to people with many serious diseases - from spinal muscular atrophy to currently incurable forms of cancer.

@gubernia33

In 2015, Italian doctor Sergio Canavero announced his intention to perform a human head transplant. Despite the fact that attempts to carry out such transplantation have been carried out since the beginning of the 20th century, no one has previously dared to conduct an experiment involving a living person.

Head transplant to Valery Spiridonov

Valery Spiridonov, a programmer from Russia, wanted to become the first patient. He was diagnosed with a rare hereditary disease - Werdnig-Hoffmann syndrome, due to which cells of the spinal cord are destroyed. Valery is almost completely paralyzed, and his condition only worsens with time.

The essence of the procedure

The head was going to be transplanted onto the body of a donor, who they planned to look for among people who died in a car accident or were sentenced to death. The main difficulty is how to connect the fibers of the spinal cord of the donor and the recipient. Canavero said he would use polyethylene glycol for this purpose, a substance that, according to research data, can help restore neural connections.

After the operation, the patient was planned to be put into a coma, which would last 4 weeks, in order to immobilize the person while the head and body healed. During this time, electrical stimulation of the spinal cord will be performed to strengthen neural connections with the brain.

After the patient comes out of a coma, he will need to take drugs that depress the immune system - immunosuppressants. This is necessary so that the head does not tear away from the body. There is reason to believe that during rehabilitation a person will need the help of a psychologist.

The operation with the participation of the Russian programmer was scheduled for 2017.

How did the experiment end?

Sergio Canavero was looking for sources of funding for his medical project, but these attempts did not lead to results for a long time. European and American universities refused to conduct the experiment. Financing was offered by the Chinese government, and it was planned to carry out the operation on the basis of Harbin University together with Professor Ren Xiaoping.

The Chinese government insisted that the donor be a citizen of their country. The operation requires that the donor and recipient be of the same race. On this basis, Canavero denied Valery Spiridonov the opportunity to participate in the first human head transplant operation.

In November 2017, Canavero announced the transplantation of the head of a dead person. The operation ended well - the doctors were able to connect the spine, nerves and blood vessels of the donor and recipient. Many experts in this field are skeptical about this experiment as a scientific breakthrough, because. believe that the operation on corpses is not very indicative of a possible repetition with the participation of a living patient.

History of head transplant experiments

The first head transplant was performed in 1908 by Charles Guthrie. He sewed a second head to the dog's body and connected their circulatory systems. At the second head, scientists observed primitive reflexes, after a few hours the dog was euthanized.

A great contribution was made by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov, who conducted experiments in the 1950s. He ensured that the dog lived 29 days after the operation. She also showed more ability after the experiment. The difference was that Demikhov also transplanted the forelimbs, esophagus and lungs.

In 1970, Robert White performed a head transplant on monkeys. The scientists managed to keep the blood flow in the head during the separation, which made it possible to keep the brain alive after connecting with the donor's circulatory system. The animals lived for several days.

In the early 2000s Japanese scientists carried out transplantation on rats. They connected the spinal cord with the help of low temperatures.

The ability of polyethylene glycol and chitosan to restore nerve cells in the spinal cord was proven by studies conducted in Germany in 2014. Under the influence of these substances, rats that were paralyzed demonstrated the ability to move for a month.

By 2025, scientists from Russia plan to carry out an operation to transplant a human brain into a robot body.

Like snow on the head fell on Wednesday the message that the Italian neurosurgeon has chosen a man who will be the first in the world to transplant someone else's body. The doctor's choice fell on a Russian, 30-year-old Valery, a programmer from Vladimir, who suffers from severe muscular atrophy, which has forever chained him to a wheelchair.

According to the computer scientist, he decided to take a desperate step, because he wants to use the chance to get a new body before his death. “Am I afraid? Of course I'm afraid. But it’s not so much scary as very interesting,” Spiridonov said in an interview, “However, you need to understand that I don’t have many options. If I miss this chance, my fate will be unenviable. Every new year worsens my condition. It is known that while the doctor and his future patient had not yet met, Canavero did not study Spiridonov's medical history and they only communicated via Skype.

According to the surgeon, he receives many letters asking for a body transplant, but his first patients should be people suffering from muscle atrophy.

It is reported that the 36-hour operation will cost more than $11 million, the donor body is planned to be taken from a healthy person who has died of a brain. The success of the operation should ensure the simultaneous separation of the heads from the body of Spiridonov and the donor, while it is assumed that after the operation Spiridonov will be put into a state of coma for four weeks so that the neck muscles do not move, then he will be given abundant immunosuppressants to prevent tissue rejection.

Spiridonov was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease - Werdnig-Hoffman disease, which progresses every day. This is a severe form of muscle atrophy in which degenerative changes occur in the neurons of the spinal cord. Children with this diagnosis usually die, often in people the respiratory and facial muscles are affected. “Now I can barely control my body. I need help every day, every minute. Now I'm 30, but people with this disease rarely live past 20,” he says. According to the doctor, the donor body can be taken from a person who has been in a car accident or sentenced to death.

It is reported that the operation can take place as early as 2016.

Details are planned to be revealed at an upcoming conference of neurosurgeons in Annapolis this summer, in which the doctor and his future patient are going to participate.

This is not the first time that Canavero plans to transplant someone else's body to a person. Two years ago, Gazeta.Ru, as a surgeon, intends to carry out this operation. Canavero claimed that experiments with rats carried out by his group made it possible to rewire the spinal cord to another head. In order for the “new” head to work, surgeons need to be able to “solder” the cut axons. These are long processes of neurons, they are also wires with which neurons communicate with each other, transmit information between nerve cells, as well as signals to muscles and glands.

The doctor claims that clipped axons can be repaired using molecules such as polyethylene glycol, which is widely used in pharmaceuticals, or chitosan, a biopolymer isolated from crustacean shells.

The main role in the operation is given to the "ultra-sharp scalpel", which will cut off the spinal cord. Canavero calls this moment the key moment in the whole operation, the axons will inevitably be damaged in its course, but they must be given the opportunity to recover.

Canavero reasserted himself in February of this year, hinting that the world's first full-body transplant could take place in 2017, with all the technical hurdles along the way already surmountable. In his latest article published in the journal Surgical Neurology International(for some reason the link has ceased to be active), the doctor listed the latest achievements that should help in the revolutionary operation.

This is the cooling of the bodies of the donor and recipient, the dissection of the tissues of the neck and the connection of large blood vessels with small tubes before the spinal cord is dissected.

Canavero suggests that in the event of a successful outcome of the operation, the patient will be able to move, speak in the same voice and feel his own face. And physiotherapy will get him back on his feet in a year.

Despite all these successes, the plans of the Italian professor have many critics among the scientific community. “There is no evidence that connecting the spinal cord and brain will lead to the restoration of motor function after a head transplant,” said Richard Borgens, director of the Paralysis Center at Purdue University (USA). New York University medical ethicist Arthur Kaplan called Canavero crazy.

“I don’t think it’s possible,” says Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, a professor who in 2012 performed the first full face transplant.

According to him, even today, after decades of studying spinal cord injuries, there are very few ways to restore motor function in injured people.

The first experiments on head transplantation were carried out back in 1954 by a Soviet surgeon who successfully transplanted second heads to several dogs. The head transplant operation was performed in the USA on a monkey back in 1970 by neurosurgeon Robert Joseph White. At that time, there were no methods that could qualitatively connect the spinal cord with the brain, so the monkey was paralyzed and died eight days later. Experiments on head transplantation in mice have recently been carried out in China.

In other words, another experiment was carried out. It lasted 18 hours. It was conducted by the team of Harbin Medical University, headed by Dr. Ren Xiaoping. During the procedure, it was possible to restore the spine, nerves and blood vessels. And without this, there can be no talk of such a transplant.

It is appropriate to recall that sensational reports about her did not appear today. At first, Sergio Canavero was going to hold it in Germany or the UK. And the first patient was to be a programmer from Vladimir Valery Spiridonov, suffering from a severe genetic disease that makes it impossible for a person to move. Some time passed, and it was announced that not Valery Spiridonov, but the presumably 64-year-old Chinese Wang Hua Min would be the first person to undergo such an operation, since Wang was in a more difficult condition than Valery, and China joined this project.

In September 2016, a neurosurgeon published a video showing animals (a mouse and a dog) surviving a trial operation. During the experiment, polyethylene glycol was used, which was injected into the affected areas of the spinal cord and contributed to the restoration of connections between thousands of neurons. Polyethylene glycol, the same bio-glue that Canavero pinned his hopes on from the very beginning, is able to glue the nerve endings, which is necessary for this transplant. And here's Canavero's new message: a live human head transplant will take place soon.

The operation is technically feasible. But the main issue has not been resolved: the effectiveness of restoring nerve contacts between the head and body of the donor.

At the request of "RG", the director of the National Medical Research Center for Transplantology and Artificial Organs named after Shumakov, Academician Sergei Gauthier comments on the message:

Progress cannot be stopped. But when it directly concerns health, human life, in no case should one be in a hurry. The first is always, one way or another, associated with risk. And the risk must be justified. Technically, body-to-head transplantation is quite feasible. By the way, it is the body to the head, and not vice versa. Because the brain is an identity, it is a personality. And if the brain dies, there is nothing to do. It makes no sense to transplant someone else's head to a still living body, it will be a different person. The question is whether it is possible to help this head, which contains a human personality, by transplanting some donor body, so that this head is supplied with blood, oxygen, and can receive nutrients from the digestive system of this body. Technically, I repeat, such an operation is quite feasible. But the main issue has not been resolved: the effectiveness of restoring nerve contacts between the head and body of the donor. And conducting experiments on corpses, on animals about which reports are received, is a normal, generally accepted course of events, a generally accepted development of methodology.