Yesterday, 30-year-old Russian man
Valery Spiridonov volunteered to
become the first person in the world to
undergo a complete head transplant .
Literally his entire head. On a different
body.
The operation will be carried out by
Italian surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero, in
what he expects to be a 36-hour
procedure involving 150 doctors and
nurses.
A Werdnig-Hoffmann disease sufferer
with rapidly declining health,
Spiridonov is willing to take a punt on
this very experimental surgery and you
can't really blame him, but while he is
prepared for the possibility that the
body will reject his head and he will
die, his fate could be considerably
worse than death.
"I would not wish this on anyone," said
Dr Hunt Batjer, president elect of the
American Association for Neurological
Surgeons.
"I would not allow anyone to do it to
me as there are a lot of things worse
than death."
The problem is, fusing a head with a
separate body (including spinal cord,
jugular vein etc) could result in a
hitherto never experienced level and
quality of insanity.
Arthur Caplan, director of medical
ethics at New York University’s
Langone Medical Centre, who
described Dr Canavero as "nuts",
believes that the bodies of head
transplant patients "would end up
being overwhelmed with different
pathways and chemistry than they are
used to and they’d go crazy."

Source: www.independent.co.uk/news/science/man-undergoing-head-transplant-could-experience-something-a-lot-worse-than-death-says-neurological-10164423.html

where is the limit in science.