On Friday afternoon at the Westin Hotel in
Annapolis, Maryland, with the volunteer for
the first human head transplant by his side,
Dr Sergio Canavero made a bid to recruit
surgeons willing to help him perform the
procedure from an audience of fellow doctors
at the annual meeting of the American
Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic
Surgeons.
About a quarter of the seating was given over
to video cameras, tripods and lights stands.
In order to get the press-friendly doctor to the
front of the room, one of the attendees had
to take the podium microphone and bellow
into the scrum surrounding Canavero: “‘Scuse
me, press, I would like for you to back off,
please. Enough is enough.”
The topic of Canavero’s keynote was a
procedure he hopes to perform in the next 24
months , which he calls HEad Anatomosis
VENture, or “Heaven”.
“Today I’m here to give us all a vision,”
Canavero said.
The physician added that there was no such
thing as the self, and that the final goal of
his project was life extension.
For two and a half hours (the presentation
was scheduled for 90 minutes) in front of an
audience of mostly blue- and gray-suited
middle-aged surgeons, Canavero paced the
width of the long room in cream slacks and a
reddish-brown tunic, bespectacled, his head
shaved, looking like an especially hip monk.

He spent most of the first half-hour firing off
aphorism after aphorism, some by writers
including Kierkegaard and Arthur C Clarke,
others of his own devising.
“If Heaven is reckless, nature is crazier, and
nature must be given pause when it comes to
what it does to us all as creatures on this
planet,”he said.
The neurosurgeon, of Italy’s Turin Advanced
Neuromodulation Group, veered between
trying to inspire his listeners, digging deep
into neurobiology and goading the white-
haired medical professionals assembled in
front of him. At one point he compared the
procedure’s future success to the moon
landing, with an image of JFK on the screen
behind him.
“We must go to the moon to test who we are,
to test our skills, to test our confidence, to
see what kind of men we are!” he said.
“We must do it to test America! We must do
it to see if you are still Americans! When I
grew up America was the top.”
Promising high pay and backing from
“American billionaires”, Canavero told the
assembly: “I came to you; I gladly accepted
this invite to humbly come before you to
make a case that this is possible.”
He has said he plans to perform the
procedure either in the US or China.
Humility was not a quality the audience
seemed to sense in Canavero.
“You of all people have a definite sense of
self, not an illusion,” said the first doctor to
pose a question in the Q&A session. “What
self is the patient? The new body, or the self
that he suffers with?”
“Ask him yourself,” Canavero replied.
Valery Spiridonov, the man who has
volunteered to undergo the procedure, spoke
little at the gathering, but he was figure of
great interest. Spiridonov has Werdnig-
Hoffmann disease, or spinal muscular
atrophy. It’s a debilitating, eventually fatal
condition that had taken a visible toll on the
30-year-old Russian’s body. Spiridonov
emailed Canavero out of the blue when the
doctor’s project began to receive press
attention.


http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/13/neurosurgeon-first-head-transplant-america-sergio-canavero

Not new in Nigeria

Is it even possible?

if they can perform transgender whatever then it is possible .

so now the spacemen A, would it be a living body or dead? just asking ni o

kingssmith:
so now the spacemen A, would it be a living body or dead? just asking ni o

That's the ethical and moral conundrum consequent. A different mind and different finger prints and DNA. What will his (their ) official identity be?