First head transplant patient schedules procedure for 2017 “Video”

Valery Spiridonov, believes a head transplant is his best hope. The 30-year-old Russian suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, a severe type of spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative muscle disease.

Sergio Canavero says a full head transplant is Spiridonov’s only chance to overcome his condition. Since his muscular atrophy is advancing at a rapid pace, having his head detached from his body and fitted onto a new one is the computer scientist’s only shot at survival.

Understandably, the medical community did not take lightly to the Italian surgeon’s plans to chop off Valery Spiridonov’s head and put it on a new body. They even started calling him Dr. Frankenstein.

All the same, it looks like Sergio Canavero is determined not to let such remarks bring him down. He will perform the world’s first ever full head transplant and he will do it no later than December 2017.

At least there are some people who believe in him

It might be that most medical experts think him, well, insane, but Sergio Canavero does not stand completely alone in this endeavor. He’s found a friend and supporter in Ren Xiaoping, a surgeon at China’s Harbin Medical University who’s volunteered to help him perform the transplant.

This means the intervention will probably play out in China, an organizational detail Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero seems quite happy about.

“Dr. Ren is the only person in the world able to lead this project,” he said in a recent interview. “With its outstanding organizational ability and group operational ability, China might be the best choice to carry out head transplants,” the surgeon went on to add, as cited by Science Alert.

In case you anyone was wondering, Ren Xiaoping isn’t a novice to the art of chopping up living creatures and then mixing and matching body parts. He’s so far performed head transplants on about 1,000 mice and, apparently, cannot wait to graduate to operating on monkeys and people.

Agencies/Canadajournal