Head Transplantation

These days the world was shocked by an Italian Neuroscientist Sergio Carnavero for he has announced to attempt head transplantation that has been scheduled for December 2017. He will be the first man who does head transplantation on a human in the world. The volunteer to this experiment is a 31 years-old computer scientist from Russia Valery Spiridonov who suffers Werdnig-Hoffmann  (a rare genetic muscle wasting condition that caused by the loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord and the brain region connected to the spinal cord).

A Head Transplantation is an experimental surgical operation involving the grafting of one organism’s head onto the body of another. To be sure, the head transplantation is not the first time done by a man. There has been a number of scientists who had also done the experiment before. In 1908 there were Soviet’s Scientists Charles Claude Guthrie and Sergei Brukhonenko who had done the experiment on a dog. In 1950 Dr. Vladimir Demikov had also done the same experiment but failed at the end. In 1970, a group of scientists from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine at Cleveland that led by Professor Robert J. White had done the experiment on a monkey. Different to the previous experiments the group successful doing it. But, after only nine days of the operation, the monkey died due to the rejection is done by his body. All of these facts are seemingly foreseeing what will happen to the next experiment.

There has been a lot of arguments and critics among scientists since Carnavero announced his plan to attempt the first head transplantation on a human. Most of them believe that it will not become a reality since there are many things that would make it possible to become a reality. Apart from that, if this experiment succeeds it will draw a new history in human life and save many lives.