I said it couldn’t be done. That the proposal was unethical. That Canavero couldn’t possibly get a spinal cord to regenerate. Then his head transplant volunteer rejected the plan.
Apparently, Canavero found new volunteers, and went ahead and did it. The result is even more horrifying than I ever predicted.
I think I’m going to be sick.
You fools! You argued over whether you could, when you were supposed to care about whether you should!
Just Frankenstein. Reader blf tracked down some information about Surgical Neurology International, where Canavero and his pals are having a grand time publishing shoddy science about head transplants. The journal has a complicated, messy history, with a mix of credible scientific papers and far-right-wing fringe conspiracy theories. That ought to make you question the source right there.
By the way, Canavero has a new paper there: HEAVEN: The Frankenstein effect.
The HEAVEN head transplant initiative needs human data concerning the acute restoration of motor transmission after application of fusogens to the severed cord in man. Data from two centuries ago prove that a fresh cadaver, after hanging or decapitation, can be mobilized by electrical stimulation for up to 3 hours. By administering spinal cord stimulation by applied paddles to the cord or transcranial magnetic stimulation to M1 and recording motor evoked potentials, it should be possible to test fusogens in fresh cadavers. Delayed neuronal death might be the neuropathological reason.
He sounds like he’d be fun at parties, doesn’t he?
I don’t get the point of this experiment. The question isn’t whether you can get an electrical current to jump the gap, crossing a lesion in the spinal cord; that’s trivial. The question is whether his fusogens promote active, specific regrowth of nerve fibers across the lesion, and you won’t get that by shocking corpses. It might have been an interesting observation 250 years ago when Luigi Galvani was shocking dead frogs, but it’s not something that needs to be tested now.
It’s also a rather pointless paper. He hasn’t done any of these experiments, but is just arguing that we should do them. Save that for the IRB. It shouldn’t count as a publication.
I surprised myself with how much I had written about Sergio Canavero, the quack who wants to do a human head transplant. His technique is to chop the head off one body, and the body off one head, and fuse them together by slathering the stumps with ethylene glycol, a substance that dissolves cell membranes and encourages fusion. It won’t work. It can’t work. He’s been working with rats, getting improbable results that he spins into great triumphs, but no one believes him. The whole experiment is dangerous and unethical, and at best what he was going to end up with is a severed head perfused with blood from a disconnected heart. It was going to be a nightmare scenario for his patient/victim.
But he had a volunteer. A young man, Valery Spiridonov, with a serious genetic degenerative disorder that was going to gradually shut down his entire muscular system was willing to take a desperate gamble and undergo Canavero’s horrible procedure. It wasn’t going to help, only make his condition abruptly worse, but hey, he was going to take a risk for a miracle. But now something has changed, and he has withdrawn from the experiment. No, his disease wasn’t cured, and there’s still no hope for him.
Instead, Spiridonov found love.
In late 2017, Spiridonov married computer expert Anastasia Panfilova, and the couple now shares a 5-month-old son who doesn’t appear to have inherited the disease, he explained to Good Morning Britain.
“I cannot leave them without my attention, even for a few months,” he said of the time he would be away from his family if he were to go through with the operation.
Yes! Canavero was actively neglecting the human side of the equation, but Spiridonov went on living his life, despite a seriously disabling condition, and found someone he cared about and a new reason to persevere. He might be doomed, but in the face of inevitable decline he found something else to hope for.
That’s beautiful.
Now Canavero is going to have to find a new guinea pig. I hope he doesn’t.
Sergio Canavero has been blustering for years about how he’s going to do a complete human head transplant. His most recent shenanigans was the horrible two-headed rat, in which he decapitated a little rat, killed a big rat, and stitched the two circulatory systems together to allow the big rat’s heart to keep the little rat’s unconscious brain alive for a few hours. It was a stupid waste; the big problem is and always has been to reconnect a nervous system in a functional way, and he’s not even trying to do that.
But now he has announced that he has successfully transplanted the head from one human being onto the body of another. Successfully. What does he mean by that?
He has successfully transplanted the head from one human cadaver to the torso of another human cadaver. No word yet on whether the patient has recovered consciousness or how he is feeling.
Are you impressed yet?
What will impress me is when these gullible newsrags wake up and realize that Canavero is a fraud, and they stop giving him free press for every ghoulish act of necrophilia he commits.
Sergio Canavero is now claiming to have achieved successful repair/regeneration of severed spinal cords by something he pompously calls The Gemini Protocol
. This is simply severing the cord with a sharp knife (good to know he’s not using a dull one) and immediately squirting the cut with polyethylene glycol (which we’ve known for decades will cause cells to fuse). He has photos of rats that he said managed to start walking again two weeks after slicing through their spinal cords.
This is pretty much guaranteed bullshit.
More qualified experts than I say the same thing.
Critics of the proposed human head transplant have been vocal since it was first announced. Commenting on it in 2015, Chad Gordon, professor neurological surgery at Johns Hopkins University, told BuzzFeed : “There’s no way he’s going to hook up somebody’s brain to someone’s spinal cord and have them be functional. On the conservative side, we’re about 100 years away from being able to figure this out. If he’s saying two, and he’s promising a living, breathing, talking, moving human being? He’s lying.”
Jerry Silver, Professor of Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, works on repairing spinal cords after injury. Commenting on the latest study, he tells Newsweek it is unclear whether to team had truly severed the cord completely. “I notice that in the last paragraph they state ‘In conclusion, we have shown that the paralysis following full severance of the dorsal spinal cord can be reversed—to a significant extent—by immediate application of a fusogen.’ Did they sever only the ‘dorsal’ cord?” he says.
He said the team also claims the axons—which form part of the spinal cord—had regenerated, but “they show no evidence for regeneration.”
“There is no histology [the study of the microscopic structure of tissues] which is the only way to assess what is really going on here,” Silver said, adding the BBB scores—the scoring system used to assess motor function in rats—were unrealistic.
“Two treated animals supposedly recover locomotor skills that are nearly normal (BBB scores of 19 and 20 out of a possible 21 total) and as a group they average a score of 12 which means that they can on average take multiple weight bearing steps. [This is] unbelievable. Too good to be true in my opinion, which mandates that these results will have be independently verified and properly analyzed before this work can be accepted as scientifically valid.”
No histology. Partial cuts? Poor documentation of supposed recovery. This guy is a quack.
By the way, he’s also abruptly dropped plans to do the first human experiment on a man with a degenerative disease, Valery Spiridonov, and is instead planning to do it on an unnamed Chinese victim patient, just as he has announced Chinese government support.
Don’t take Canavero seriously, unless it’s to drag him off to the Hague for prosecution. His proposal is a glory-seeking sham.
I’m not impressed with this recent exercise in microsurgical technique to allow researchers to transplant the head of one rat to another rat’s body. In all honesty, I don’t see the point.
I’m going to put the discussion of this paper below the fold because it seems more an exercise in animal cruelty than anything else; I’ve included one figure illustrating the surgery, but it will be at thumbnail size and you’ll have to click on it to see it in all its gory vulgarity.
I guess New Scientist is feeling some heat over their disgraceful advocacy of Canavero’s ludicrous head transplant scheme. They just posted a rather defensive follow-up, and they’re still getting it all wrong.
It is one thing to find the science risibly weak, but on the bigger issue of head transplants – or more accurately, full-body transplants – nobody is laughing. The surgery seems macabre but is scientifically feasible and could offer real benefits to some people.
No. That’s the whole point. It is not feasible, no one is even close to being able to do it, and risibly weak
is a ridiculous understatement. You can’t claim it’s feasible while also admitting that the science is weak. This makes no sense at all, especially considering how they close the thing.
Even if head transplants prove impossible or unacceptable, full spinal cord repair would be a breakthrough of huge importance. It’s time to get serious, lest this opportunity is lost.
It’s simultaneously feasible, but may also prove impossible? Who is writing this drivel?
No one is arguing about whether spinal cord repair would be a fantastically important advance. It would be. The point is, if you want to get serious
about accomplishing that, you’re not going to get there by promoting an irresponsible hack like Canavero, or by touting nonexistent advances and bad papers as breakthroughs of huge importance.
I’m sure you’re all wondering what’s happening with Sergio Canavero and his dangerous and unethical plan to transplant whole heads. Three new papers have been published claiming to have achieved partial regeneration of function of severed spinal cords in mice and rats and dogs.
Credible scientists do not believe it.
However, papers published today detailing the spinal cord repair technique applied to the dog have prompted other scientists to express concerns over the work. “These papers do not support moving forward in humans,” says Jerry Silver, a neuroscientist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
Jerry Silver is so nice. I’m more likely to say that these are cases of scientific fraud and that they are so shoddily done that they shouldn’t have been published. Of course, the way that they got published is that Canavero was the editor of all three who allowed them into the journal.
The “breakthrough” that they’re promoting is that after severing the cords, they tried some additional experimental treatments that were supposed to promote regrowth: they injected the site with polyethylene glycol (PEG) and with graphene ribbons. I’ve used PEG to make hybridomas — it’s basically a membrane solvent that allows adjacent cells to fuse with one another. The graphene ribbons act as electrical conductors to allow current to flow across the lesion.
I gawp in astonishment that anyone would think this would work, and that any ethical review board would allow them to continue. I should belatedly warn you that the New Scientist link includes a video of dogs and mice intentionally crippled and struggling to move.
Here’s the problem restated in cruder terms. This is a fancy cable with multiple insulated strands running through it — of course, it’s nowhere near as complicated as the human spinal cord.
It’s cut.
Now a friendly electrician tells you he can fix it easily. He’s not going to splice each wire together to restore the proper connections, instead, he has an easier solution: he’s going to inject acid into the cable to dissolve insulation and encourage the copper wires to fuse, and he’s going to fill the cable with an electrically conductive goop that will allow signals to cross the broken end.
Does this sound like it will work to you? These are generic treatments that completely ignore the specificity of the necessary connections. He’s just claiming that anything to promote fusion will work, and that the cables will somehow sort themselves out.
Would you let him reassemble your home theater system with this technique? He’s happy to show you videos of his work, with a television flickering and fading and speakers sputtering and wowing, all for verisimilitude’s sake, but he’s not actually able to show you that these botched repair jobs used these techniques.
You might ask for some quantitative measures of the success of his technique, and he tells you that it works maybe half the time, and that all of the controls, in which he just cut cables and plugged them together, burst into flames and exploded. (of his experimental mice, 5/8 showed some degree of improvement, 3/8 died, and all of his controls died, which is really suspicious right there).
In another experiment with rats, all but one of the experimental animals was accidentally killed in a flood, but that one showed great improvement. One. This is nothing but a dubious anecdote. How could it get published at all?
Somehow, though, this shabby work is getting funded, is passing review boards, and is getting published. And Canavero is planning to try it on a human subject.
Apparently, if you put on a white coat and have a medical degree, you can get away with torturing small animals before planning the torture-murder of a human being.
Sergio Canavero wants to transplant a head, and he has a volunteer. Canavero thinks he can carry out this operation, although he has no successes in preliminary animal testing, and just wants to jump right in with a human with a debilitating disease.
New Scientist has an article titled 5 things you're dying to ask about head transplants. Yeah, someone said we can expect to be able to do head transplants in a few years, so the media are all wound up and asking stupid questions. Here are the questions New Scientist thought were really important.
What’s the difference between brain and head transplants?
Could the transplant technique work for a cryogenically frozen head?
Would the surgery be psychologically damaging?
I’m a registered organ donor. Could my body be used for this?
There’s one more. It’s so stupid and misleading that I had to single it out.
