One nice thing about teddy bears is that if your wiener tears the head off of your youngster ’s favorite one , you may just sew it back on . But you do n’t promulgate your accomplishment a “ wild success”—rather , you say , “ here , I have fixed your lifeless play - affair . ”
Yet here come Sergio Canavero , the controversial Italian doctor who just announced that he had do a drumhead transplantation operation on a teddy bear made of off-white - stuffed human substance . The announcement has come with an avalanche of news coverage claiming that the move was the first successful psyche transplantation .
Scientists have been toying with the idea for about as farseeing asorgan transplantationhas been around . Canavero himself announced human transplants would be possible in 2015 . He says that research center in the United States are unsupportive , reportsUSA Today . He take he execute the surgical process on a monkeyin 2016but without reattaching the spinal cord and without a published paper . He went on to write several report claiming to sever andreattach animate being spinal cords , but the papers do n’t make decipherable whether he altogether detaches or only mostly cuts through the electric cord before the procedure . These papers also did n’t have controls . His team publishedanother paperthis year , but once again did n’t account whether they completely lop the head .
uncalled-for to say , scientists are skeptical .
This morning , Canavero claimed in a printing press league that he ’d “ agnize the first human headway transplant , ” reportsThe Telegraph , and that a “ full head trade between brainpower dead electronic organ donors is the next point . ” He travel along by calling a full - on head transplant “ imminent . ”
If you disregard a tumour out of a stiff , you did not cure the corpse of cancer — you carved a slice of meat off of a raw joint . If you swap cadaver heads , it ’s no dissimilar from sewing a drumstick to the faulty rotisserie chicken .
USA Today report that Canavero has a volunteer , a paralyzed Russian named Valery Spridonov , and that the procedure would go as follows :
receiver and donor will rate [ sic ] in a sitting location to facilitate what ’s expected to be more about 24 time of day of gory , laborious study to separate and then reconnect vertebral off-white , jugular veins , the trachea , esophagus and other cervix structures . The receiver will be helped to rest , and pedigree pump around the body , with machine . The patient will be maintain in drug - induced coma for an unspecified recovery time .
It ’s entirely possible that everything Canavero has done is honest , a head organ transplant is at hand , his subroutine will sour , and our skepticism is baseless . After all , he ’s middling much the only someone who is doing this procedure , and ultimately crazy ideas are required to labor boundaries .
But this is skill . Very little field has been done on this procedure or its risk . And with something so radical , if it ’s not studied in an open , honest , and naturalistic way , then it ’s hard for others to take it earnestly . So until we see some grounds of an actual head transplant where a rachis is entirely severed and reattached on something other than natural meat , we ’re going to remain sceptical .
[ viaThe Telegraph , USA Today ]
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