Could head transplantation be a path to immortality? – The Irish Times

We have all heard of organ transplantations in medicine, notably in relation to the kidney or liver. But many may not have heard of transplanting the head of one person on to the body of another person who has been declared dead.

The whole-body/head transplantation procedure is under development by a team led by Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero and Chinese surgeon Xiaoping Ren, in a project called the Head Anastomosis Venture (HEAVEN). This project raises a host of philosophical, bioethical, social and political issues not encountered in conventional organ transplantations. This is discussed by M Cherry and R Fan in Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol 7, Issue 2, April 2022.

A whole-body/head transplantation involves severing the volunteers spinal chord and removing the head while preserving the blood vessels. The head is then attached to the donor body, whose head has been removed, fusing and stimulating the two spinal chords to create new functional nerve connections. Muscles and blood supply are also connected. The body and head must be cooled during the operation to prevent cellular damage from oxygen deprivation.

Some limited success in animal experiments has been reported using this procedure. A successful grafting of a monkey head on to a monkeys body was reported. Canavero and Ren also carried out a head transplant on a corpse in China in 2021. A full head swap between brain-dead organ donors is the next step. A Russian, Valery Spiridonov, who suffers from a muscle-wasting disease, volunteered to have his head transferred on to a healthy donor body, hoping this would provide a new lease of life. He recently opted out of the programme and the HEAVEN team is now seeking new volunteers.

A key philosophical question is who survives a whole-body/head transplantation, the donor of the head or the donor of the body? It would commonly be assumed, since the brain is the site of our thoughts and memories, that it is the donor of the head who survives. But surely the body plays some part in shaping personality? Also, we dont know how well the head would integrate with the new body or how long the post-transplant individual could maintain the identity of the head. That the question of who survives this procedure is philosophically undecided means that ethical criteria to guide research in this area cannot be drawn up.

Things get more complicated if, say, a mans head is transplanted on to a womans body. Is the new individual a man or a woman? And suppose he/she decides to have children, whose children are they? The male head will have decided to procreate but the children will be genetically related only to the female donor of the body. And, suppose the head donor and the body donor were each married (not to each other) at the time the transplantation was carried out, two individuals can now claim to be married to the post-transplant survivor.

Dr Sergio Canavero claims that modern medicine has solved problems that have traditionally dogged head transplant operations

Whole-body/head transplantations may be seen to offer a pathway to immortality. Say my head is transplanted on to a healthy young body that maintains my head until the body grows old and ineffective, at which time my head is transplanted on to a fresh young body, and this process continues indefinitely. One obvious problem is how to maintain my head in a healthy state over the long term. As we all know, the brain deteriorates with age, just like the rest of the body.

Canavero and Ren propose three reasons why the transplantation would be a good development life extension, cosmetic body swaps and gender reassignment. But swapping your body for cosmetic reasons is a flimsy justification for such a fraught procedure and there is no evidence that whole-body head/transplantation would reverse gender dysphoria.

Surgeons Canavero and Ren arrogantly dismiss bioethical objections to the HEAVEN project as mere opinion and seem to work on the crude utilitarian philosophical basis that if something can be made to work, its ethical. As the old surgeon joke goes: Whats the difference between God and a surgeon? Answer: God doesnt think hes a surgeon. Anyway, if you think whole-body/head transplantations will be widely available anytime soon, you are, I would think, getting ahead of yourself.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC

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Could head transplantation be a path to immortality? - The Irish Times