It was reported on Friday 17 November 2017, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero claimed he had completed the world’s first human head transplant between two corpses. At a press conference in Vienna, Austria, the neurosurgeon announced that he had removed the head from one corpse and attached it to the body of another corpse. He claims to have done so by fusing the spine, nerves, and blood vessels. Canavero, in a video of the conference that he posted to Facebook, announced that “The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done” (but gave no evidence to back it up).
Canavero claimed that the procedure lasted 18 hours and said the next “imminent” step would be to do the procedure on a living human paralysed from the neck down. Canavero told reporters that a scientific paper with the details would be released in the “next few days.”
This Frankenstein idea has been one that Canavero had discussed in the past where he has referred to the process as a head transplant or a “full body transplant.” In his video report on Friday, Canavero said, “My primary goal was not a head transplant. My primary goal was a brain transplant”
On Friday, he said the procedure between corpses proved that the procedure had been a success and that he and his team would try next, the procedure on two brain-dead organ donors before eventually attempting a similar surgery on someone paralysed from the neck down.
“We have a cure for spinal cord injury,” Canavero said.
However, he added that his real goal was not curing spinal cord injury, but rather extending life. “I’m into life extension,” he told Business Insider in July, “Life extension and breaching the wall between life and death.”
The surgeon envisions a future in which healthy people could opt for full-body transplants as a way to live longer, eventually even putting their heads on clone bodies. Canavero predicted that “One day, it will be clones, but not yet.” His research does not stop there, but he also said he hopes the procedure will “create a near-death experience – actually a full death experience – and see what comes next.”
This entire procedure presents various issues of medical ethics, which needs to be addressed and explained, as such, the question remains – What about the soul of a person and the body in which that soul existed?
Jack Kevorkian, an American pathologist stated, “In quixotically trying to conquer death doctors all too frequently do no good for their patients ‘ease’, but at the same time they do harm instead by prolonging and even magnifying patients’ dis-ease.”
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there are numerous references to God and the Bible, specifically the book of Genesis. Whilst it is important and relevant to us today, we need to be careful of the role science plays in society. It is God who makes man, not man who makes man. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).
This week let’s pray for wisdom and a spiritual mindset of ethics for our scientists and doctors as they pursue cures for the illness that plight’s mankind. It is in the image of God that man is made not man.