The line between genius and madness is often closer than people realize. Don’t tell Dr. Sergio Canavero that he can’t help his patient with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).
How many times have people at the forefront of their fields been told that they cannot do something? Albert Einstein was called crazy for theorizing that gravity can bend light. Now, general relativity is widely accepted.
Felix Baumgartner was told he couldn’t parachute from space, but he did.
Charles Lindbergh was told he was crazy when he said he was going to fly from New York to Paris nonstop, alone, but he did it and became a hero in the process. J
K Rowling’s Harry Potter manuscript was rejected either nine or twelve times, depending on who you ask. Not only did she get it published, along with the six books that followed, but they made her the first writer to ever become a billionaire.
Even you, when you were a kid, probably wanted to do something even more after you were told you couldn’t. “Don’t touch that! It’s hot!” You had the burned fingertips to prove that you did it anyway.
Sergio Canavero, a doctor from Italy, has been told that he is crazy and that it just can’t be done. The “it” here is a human head transplant. Dr. Canavero is trying to help a patient who has a rare type of spinal muscular atrophy.
Valery Spiridonov, the patient whose head will be transplanted onto a donor body, suffers from a rare genetic disorder that caused his limbs and torso to become severely weakened and atrophied.
Dr. Canavero and his team of approximately 150 doctors and nurses plan to sever Spiridonov’s head and freeze it to just a few degrees above zero Fahrenheit before attaching it to a donated body. The body will come from a person how has been medically determined to be brain dead. The operation, tentatively scheduled for December 2017, will take more than 30 hours to complete and is estimated to cost more than $10 million.
A colleague of Dr. Canavero, Dr. Xiaoping Ren, has successfully transplanted the heads of both a monkey and a mouse in previous operations. Spiridonov’s will be the first attempt on a human being.
While this is a pretty extreme and albeit, an unbelievable treatment for this rare condition, it will be informing to watch the progress.
Read more about this world-first by clicking here.
