What Happened To The First Human Head Transplant? (Feat. Medlife Crisis)

in 2015 Dr Sergio canavero a man who in no way looks like a mad scientist who wants to attempt a human head transplant announced that he was totally going to attempt a human head transplant and everyone around him was like I told you head and believe it or not he had a volunteer the guy's name was valy spiridonov he was a Russian programmer with muscle wasting disease called spinal muscular atrophy which left him paralyzed and immobile so yeah when heard that somebody was going to attempt a human head transplant he was like you know what pop this head on something better many of you probably already know this story um the hell I may have already talked about in a video before I can't keep up with my videos but anyway here we are now it's been nearly 10 years now and uh we really haven't heard much about it lately so I decided I wanted to revisit the story and and you know take a look at what happened and then you know take a deep dive into the feasibility of this thing like what would you actually need to do to switch out your head to get the answer I spoke with hint over at midlife crisis who help put the whole thing into perspective you're doing incredible micro surgery on all the tiny structures so you've got all of that I mean there's so much running through the neck and you've got cranial nerves coming down the the windpipe the esophagus every surgical discipline would need to be contributing to this it it just it would be a Monumental operation what happened to Dr Cano's crazy dream is it actually feasible what kind of advancements would need to be made to make it happen and maybe the biggest question is it a head transplant or a body transplant the year 1780 the place is the city of bolognia and you're an assistant for an eccentric Professor named Luigi galvani when one day he asked you to bring him a frog for dissection so you fetch a preserved frog but when you bring it to him instead of dissection tools you see that he's got a a series of wires attached to a hand cred electric generator you probably roll your eyes at this because your boss has kind of been obsessed with this new electricity thing for a while he's been playing around with it and uh usually ends up shocking himself sometimes on purpose so you're really not too surprised when he opens up the Frog and attaches electrodes to the Frog's nerves you are surprised though when he cranks the machine and the dead frog tries to hop at least it looks like it the legs pump up and down uncontrollably causing you to uncontrollably pee your pants galvani used this in other experiments to hypothesize that there's a kind of biological electricity that powers animals including humans uh this comes being known as galvanism and it leads to a whole field of study for the next few decades galvani was kind of right human cells do have electrical Action potentials especially nervous system cells but he was mostly wrong in how it worked um regardless this whole idea of being able to control body parts and resurrecting dead tissue with electrical circuits eventually inspired Mary Shell's Frankenstein 30 years later Frankenstein of course featuring a monster that was constructed with multiple body parts from different dead people then shocked into existence by a Madman my my name is [Applause] Frankenstein this might have been the first time the idea was put on paper that a person could you know put a human head on another human body and bring that body to life even though transplants wouldn't be a thing for another hundred years yeah it's kind of hard to pull off a transplant in a time before anesthesia when surgeries had to be done as fast as possible um also they didn't have antibiotics back then immunosuppressive drugs and they didn't even understand different blood types it would have been a disaster in a million different ways the first successful organ transplant was a kidney transplant in 1954 uh but people were actually experimenting with head transplants long before that in fact it was way back in 1908 when an American doctor named Charles Guthrie did um some uh okay so look I did a video a while back about animals in space that nobody seemed to like because it involved a lot of animals dying including dogs um anyway if you're one of those people you're a little bit squeamish about that of thing you might want to skip forward a little bit because um I'm about to talk about some dog experiments basically uh Charles Guthrie sewed the head of one dog onto another dog and made a two-headed dog horrible as that may be and it is horrible it was also a breakthrough of sorts because he was able to prove that you could keep a head Alive by connecting it to a source of blood in fact he actually later won a Nobel Prize for his research not specifically the dog thing but for his research into trans stuff which included the dog thing but he would not be the last as Rohan points out so the the people you're referring to Vladimir demov in the Soviet Union who who was another brilliant pioneering surgeon but did these like he made these two-headed dogs um some of which lived for you know a fair a fair amount of time sort of maybe I don't want to get it wrong but maybe a couple of weeks or something like that and was the inspiration for the MTV to go by the way just a little bit of trivia there um and then Robert White in the 60s and 70s was the guy who who again was a bit of a Sergio Cano character said he was getting close and he did a lot of work on monkeys and baboons we'll hear more from Rohan here in a minute but I just wanted to pause for a second and thank him for his time if you don't follow Rohan he's got a channel called medlife crisis on YouTube uh it's also over on nebula it's great it's got medical advice with a healthy dose of humor uh it's kind of like what I do but he's an actual doctor so uh yeah go go check him out but yeah a little extra context of what he was saying about Vladimir demov and his two-headed dog thing he actually did that experiment over 20 times he created 20 two-headed dogs he arranged them in different ways included more or less of the second dog some of them included the entire front half with the with the legs and everything um there's plenty of footage of this obviously YouTube won't let me show it here um I may show it over on nebula but yeah you can you can go look it up if you're curious the other guy Rohan mentions was Robert White uh he pioneered the use of hypothermia to keep the brain stable during brain surgery which is actually saved a ton of lives and he did head transplants on over 30 rees's monkeys these surgeries were sort of successful in that the monkeys lived for a couple of weeks or eight days or so um they were conscious they were able to respond to all kinds of stimuli they had full control of their uh facial muscles one of them even tried to bite one of the doctors I think understandably they weren't however able to control their bodies yeah White's Legacy is fairly complicated because he he actually did pioneer some amazing things and and and this is something you see from a lot of these people they're highly respected in their fields as pioneers and whatnot but there's just something about the head transplant thing that just automatically puts you in the yikes category which brings us back to Sergio canavero yeah I mean he's he's kind of gone a little bit off the radar in the last few years but essentially um he's a he's a surgeon and by all accounts an accomplish one a skillful surgeon um really sort of raised a lot of eyebrows by saying that he was just a few years away I think you know it's one of those things like Elon Musk he keeps making predictions that he's going to be doing it by a certain year and it doesn't deliver but um you know clearly he was he was suggesting that they were very close to having a successful procedure but if you dig a little more into what he's actually saying um his definition of success I think is is very different to to other peoples canava was born in Turan Italy in 1964 and according to him he had a rough upbringing and a poor family but he worked hard and by the age of 18 He enrolled in the medical program at the University of Turin he graduated from there and trained in the hospital as a functional neurosurgeon beginning in the 1980s he would then go on to work as a neurosurgeon at the hospital for nearly 22 years and really by all accounts he was an accomplished neurosurgeon he did pioneering work on central pain syndrome and Parkinson's disease he even became the director of the T Advanced neuromodulation group and yet in 2015 he was unceremoniously fired from his position at the University and they cut all ties with him for some reason a head transplant head transplant head transplant head transplant head transplant yeah it was a separate head thing I also feel like I should point out that his Wikipedia page describes him as having an idiosyncratic personality really the head transplant guy is a little off who knew I knew turns out he's been interested in this topic since the 80s but he started making real plans in the 2010s and in 2015 he published a rough description of how he'd do it and who he'd do it to that man was valer spiridonov who I mentioned at the beginning of this video so valer story seems to have played out like this he was 33 years old when he signed up for this uh that was in 2015 and his body was still deteriorating from a condition called wck Hoffman disease he went from being a healthy normal dude to having trouble walking having trouble riding and he just kept getting worse and worse until he was confined to a wheelchair and had to have almost everything done for him now I can only imagine what that would be like and the mental state that would put you in and I don't want to say that he was ready to you know end it all or anything like that but you know with his body getting progressively worse he may have feared what was coming with his condition more than what he feared might happen in the surgery now when Cano first announced the surgery he described it as imminent but um you know after his announcement he lost his position at the University of Turan he had to find a new home base to do this from and he found one in China Harbin University specifically where an orthopedic surgeon named shiao ping Ren had been doing similar research this relocating and further research kind of pushed back the imminence of the surgery by a few years and while valer was waiting something kind of amazing happened first of all his his body kind of stabilized his disease stopped progressing now that might be an overly optimistic way of saying that it got as bad as it was going to get like it couldn't possibly get any worse but um it wasn't getting any worse and he kind of learned to live with it second of all dude got married yeah he met a woman named Anastasia panova and they fell in love and got married this is a picture of Anastasia she married him oh and she's also got a masters in uh chemical engineering so she's also super smart and accomplished and yes they are married yeah he dropped out of the surgery so my choices are I could spend the rest of my life with the hot Russian chemical engineer or I could have my head cut off by Dr Nas veratu over here [Music] um yeah I don't know Cake or Death no all kidding aside um they are happily married they have a kid together they now live in Florida and he runs his own software company he is living his best life and yeah in 2019 he dropped out of the surgery though he does still support the mission so the head transplant dream is dead right no does this look like a guy who gives up on things Ren and Cano's research continued throughout the 2010s and they produced some amazing results kind of for one thing they claimed to have successfully done a head transplant on a rat um it was kind of more like the dog experiments though where they just kind of sewed one rat's head onto another rat's body and uh yeah it only live for 36 hours but Cano claimed it as a success because he said that the goal was to minimize the amount of blood loss yeah I'm finding that success is a very malleable term when talking about head transplants even more impressive in 2017 they actually did perform a human head transplant on cabers and it was successful obviously neither of the participants survived the surgery because they were dead before it started but by successful they mean they were able to fully perform the head transplant protocol that Cano had outlined in his 2015 paper that protocol by the way is called the heaven protocol um probably not the best thing to name something that's likely going to kill you but it stands for head anastomosis Venture um yeah the the sciency term for a head transplant is sephos Matic anastomosis so you know that now and this protocol that they successfully performed on cavm will imminently perform on living people works like this the donor and the recipient are brought into the operating room together and both are intubated tracheotomized ventilated and stabilized and wired for monitoring of Vital Signs ECG EEG oxygen saturation body temperature and whatnot by the way in the paper the donor refers to the body and the recipient is the head so technically this is a body transplant and not a head transplant once both are anesthetized the recipient's head is subjected to profound hypothermia through cooling helmets as well as a heat exchange or applied to the femoral cored artery the goal is to cool the brain to around 10° C the donor's body is is also cool but only the spinal column by pumping cold Solutions into the subdural and epidural spaces hypothermia of course slows down the metabolic process and reduces damage to cells and tissues next is the whole removing the head part two surgical teams work on the body simultaneously meticulously severing the nerves arteries and muscles and labeling them for reconnection later they start with the anterior or front of the neck including the trachea and the esophagus and then move the bodies into a prone position to do the back of the neck or the posterior this is where the spinal column is transected exposing the SP spinal cord so the cutting and reattaching the spinal cord has its own protocol that they call Gemini uh I couldn't find what that stands for but it involves an as of yet uninvented ultr sharp microsurgical instrument called a jotome this is sci-fi technology number one once a spinal cord is cut the head is placed on the donor body as quickly as possible and the spinal cord is glued together using sci-fi technology number two a polyethylene glycol glue influ with chosan nanofibers this would supposedly have the ability to immediately reconstitute cell membranes that were damaged during the in process the head is then connected to the donor body's circulation the spinal column is stabilized with a screw and Rod system and the trachea and esophagus are stitched back together and finally the muscles and nerves are painstakingly reconnected before the neck is sewn up obviously there's a ton that I left out of that description um this is supposed to take like 36 hours and require a staff of 130 doctors it's a massive undertaking but when it comes down to it like 90% of this surgery is stuff that we can totally do you know we can reconnect nerves and muscles we can stitch together trach we can even transect vertebrae the thing we've never quite pulled off is the whole spinal cord thing hence the couple of Science Fiction technologies that don't exist yet or do they in the interview with valer that I shared earlier from Good Morning Britain they showed this footage of a monkey that according to Cano and his team had it spinal cord severed and they were able to fully repair it giving it the ability to walk again now I tried to verify this clip because if they were actually able to do this that would be huge like huge if true sorry Cleo but I couldn't find anything now if you guys know of something that I missed please do share it down in the comments but as far as I can tell this was a video that was released by canavero and his team and we're kind of just supposed to take them at their word which I find super suspicious because these guys publish a lot of papers like pretty much anytime they manage any kind of advancement they they publish it and they plaster it all over the place but I couldn't find anything on this now again if I missed it correct me down below yeah most of the Cano monkey heads lines that I could find revolved around a transplant that they did on a monkey in 2016 that survived for 20 hours but it never had control of its body successful so okay if I'm going to be fair to Cano and all the other head cases um there's really two problems overcome here the first is just making sure that the head can be sustained by reconnecting it to a different body's blood supply the second is giving that head control over the body by reconnecting the spinal cord and they focused on the first problem first which makes sense of course that's I don't know kind of a solved problem I mean demov was doing this on dogs back in the 50s the second problem reconnecting spinal cord that's where the Sci-Fi technologies come in and while I couldn't find proof of that walking monkey experiment I did find papers that they did on experiments where they claimed to have done this with rats Cano's solution to this the stitching together of the spinal cord traditionally has been to reconnect it using polyethylene glycol which Rohan explains the problem with this polyethylene glycol um actually is mostly used as a laxative uh that that's its most common use I uh I I had a colonoscopy I'm very familiar with that yeah right yeah so it's not like some super high-tech liquid right it's um it's basically just gloopy gloopy glue and and and that is kind of's technique is just to that now what he's based that on is there is some experimental research suggesting that it may encourage neuronal development so it may have a role in in nerve repair absolutely it's but to just say you know you're going to whack it on and stick the spinal cord which is you know orders of magnitude more complex than a than a nerve in in the hand um it's it's it's this magical thinking yeah now there has been a Twist in recent years and I found out about this after talking to Rowan or I would have brought it up there but there's a new type of peeg that they use on those red experiments that I talked about that might actually hold some promise it was invented by a guy named William sikma he's a rice PhD candidate in biomedical nanot Tech ology he created a polyethylene glycol substrate containing carbon nanofiber ribbons that he called Texas Peg uh CU rice Universities in Houston in a talk for ideacity Williams showed how these rats had their spinal cord severed and how the ones that were treated with the graphine Nano ribbons made almost a full recovery and according to William the way this works is that the nanor ribbons provide a kind of a lattice work that the damaged neurons can use to cross the divide and reconnect and heal together uh apparently when nerves get severed they reach out in thin spikes that make it hard for them to connect plus the graph caffeine is electrically conductive so that allows signals to bridge the gap while it's healing so look head transplant stuff aside if this Texas Peg stuff could really repair spinal cord injuries this would be a massive game Cher and and something to get really excited about luckily Williams been continuing his research at Rice University and uh he's under the mentorship of uh James tour who um has been accused of publishing fraudulent papers and hyping breakthroughs that don't exist and vocally doesn't believe in evolution have you ever researched a topic and been convinced you're taking crazy pills every time I think I've stumbled on something legit it just knes itself back into Crazy Town it almost goes without saying but this entire thing has been overwhelmingly criticized by the medical and scientific Community bioethicist Paul root walp from Emory University said that it quote walks a fine line between Medical Care and murder should the attempt fail Yan schnu professor of neuroscience at City University of Hong Kong said quote I would really like the general public to be reassured that neither I nor any of my colleagues think that beheading people for extremely Longshot experiments is acceptable it is not the president of the American Association for neurological surgeons said in 2015 quote I would not wish this on anyone I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death and bioeth thesis Arthur Kaplan of New York University said quote they haven't done enough animal studies to persuade anyone that they actually know what they're doing it's sort of a long endless publicity tour and I go on but that last one is really U something I've seen a lot repeated a lot in this whole thing that it's not science it's a big publicity campaign because ultimately he's trying to raise millions of dollars to perform this surgery um he apparently even reached out to Mark Zuckerberg trying to get him to send him money but the scientific Community has roundly condemned this thing um you know he lost his position at Tan University and while he was given an honorary position at Harbin University in China um apparently they gave him the boot too a couple years back he's gone fairly quiet since then um he CLA to have a long list of volunteers since Valeri dropped out and that he's continuing his research in an undisclosed location it's probably an underground layer if anybody's got an underground layer in a island somewhere it's this guy in 2022 he published a paper claiming that he's figured out a way to do just a brain transplant so uh yeah if you can't get something done just just claim you can do something even Wilder seriously crazy pills but rohen had a pretty good idea of how he would do this surgery so I'll in the last word I I think for this to work properly you would need to be able to support essentially like a brain and a jar I I I think we would need to get to that level of sophistication and then maybe transplant the entire brain and spinal cord and then you get round the the problem of trying to repair the spinal cord um and then you you just have to attach all the the peripheral nerves which would be again enormous but I wonder if you know kind of Mortal Kombat finishing move you take the whole spinal cord out and um finishing and then plun that in so will head transplants ever actually be a thing I mean on a long enough timeline pretty much anything's possible but the big hurdle has to be solving the spinal cord injury thing which if that could be solved it would be huge for so many people around the world maybe the carbon Nano ribbon thing could get us there and and that would be amazing but you know given how sketch everything else has been in the story I have my reservations sketchy but also just hype a lot of hype there's a lot of hype to sore through my take is until they can solve that problem and can reliably do this in animals um it's just way overstepping right now it's just doing it to say you did it successfully for now though it seems like the the hype train has left the station um you know that that was the reason why I wanted to do this video cuz I hadn't heard anything about it in a long time U you know maybe it kind of ran its course maybe kind of AR ran out of options and decided to to wait on it maybe focus on the Nano ribbon thing cuz I mean hey if he was actually able to figure out a way to reconnect a spinal cord I mean that would be history making enough so to that I say gotp speed I'm going to get some lunch thankfully unlike so many two-headed Russian dogs I have only one mouth to feed which 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when you go to factor75.com andent Joe Scot 50 when you check out you'll get 50% off your first box and 20% off your next month of boxes it's already less expensive than ordering from a food delivery app and now you get even more with your money so one more time that's factor75.com in or Joe Scott 50 at checkout you'll get 50% off your first box 20% off your next month of boxes check it out I think you'll like it I'm going to finish eating now all right one more time big thanks to Rohan for taking the time to talk with me uh he and I had never actually spoken before so that was really cool I enjoyed it um if this is your first time here maybe check out this video if you've never seen one of my videos before or if you look down on the little sidebar if you're on your website uh there's plenty of videos down there with my name on them give it a look and if you enjoy it I invite you to subscribe I'll come back a videos every Monday but that's it for today you guys share your thoughts down below would you would you not have a head transplant do you think it's everx going to happen do you think can a GU is going to do it chime in down below but in the meantime go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and I'll see you here next time love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 1,883,574

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: P4hFRfOeZX8

Length: 25min 11sec (1511 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2024