Doctors Say The Guy Who Is Volunteering For The First Human Head Transplant Could Suffer A Fate Worse Than Death

worlds first human head transplant

Shutterstock


In case you were thinking the world’s first human head transplant was going to be a really simple and positive procedure with very little room for error, know that the subject could face an outcome even more terrifying than death.

Sounds … well, it sounds not great.

Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old Russian man suffering from Werdnig-Hoffman disease, has agreed to let a surgeon remove his head and place it on another body. This is happening. In real life. Brace yourself.

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,” says Hootan. 

“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.”

From speaking to several medical experts, Hootan has pin-pointed a problem that even the most perfectly performed head transplant procedure cannot mitigate – we have literally no idea what this will do to Spiridonov’s mind. There’s no telling what the transplant – and all the new connections and foreign chemicals that his head and brain will have to suddenly deal with – will do to Spiridonov’s psyche, but as Hootan puts it rather chillingly, it “could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity”.

Christ Jesus. That’s too awful to even joke about.

Like, I don’t even know what outcome to root for here. I guess whichever one is the least hellish.

Absolutely zero percent chance this ends well.

[H/T: Science Alert]