Sergio Canavero

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“Death Has Never Made Any Sense To Me”

April 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

No one with stock options would want to die, so Silicon Valley technologists are earnestly pursuing radical life-extension methods–even immortality. I mock, but I also wish them well and hope there are eventual results. However, anyone professing that successful head transplantations and hundreds-year lifespans are on the horizon is sort of overpromising. Theoretically not impossible but nowhere near ready. From Charlotte Lytton’s Daily Beast piece about the fountain of youth’s new splash:

If a successful, life-extending surgery does arise—and prove successful—its implications would be revolutionary. After announcing his intentions to carry out the procedure several months ago, [head-transplant enthusiast Sergio] Canavero was inundated with volunteers offering themselves up for the project—a testament to how prevalent the notion of extending one’s life really is.

Canavero’s ideology is one keenly shared by Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, Joon Yun, founder of the Palo Alto Longevity Prize. A $1 million reward for those who can successfully “hack the code of life and cure aging,” Yun is hoping to find scientists able to extend the lives of mice by 50 percent, which he believes will be demonstrative in efforts to push the human life span beyond its current U.S. average of 78.7 years.

While Yun’s efforts might resemble a Death Becomes Her-esque bid to uncover an elixir of eternal youth, he is not the first wealthy businessman to make a serious financial donation to the prevention of aging. Peter Thiel, one of PayPal’s co-founders, has donated millions to researchers leading the charge, while Larry Ellison, who co-founded computer hardware company Oracle, has given some $430 million to the cause. “Death has never made any sense to me,” says Ellison.

The government used to fund two-thirds of medical research, with private backers accounting for the other 33 percent of studies, but that ratio has now been flipped, with the major cash injections supplied by entrepreneurs with life-prolonging pet projects far surpassing money pumped in by the state. Some of the ideas being explored by Thiel-backed researchers include technology that can cool human organs at a high speed, allowing them to be preserved long term, and using stem cells to grow bone replacements for broken ones. One more involves analyzing molecular and cell damage throughout our lifetimes in a bid to better understand how we might rejuvenate deteriorating bodies.•

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“Technically It’s Not Any Harder Than A Liver And Heart Transplant”

March 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Tuan C. Nguyen of the Washington Post earnestly investigates the pretty ridiculous claims of neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero who believes he’ll perform a successful head-transplant surgery in the next two years. The writer comes away believing the procedure won’t permanently be impossible, but there’s one little catch: Even a “successful” operation will leave the patient permanently a quadriplegic. An excerpt:

In recent years, there’s been renewed talk of perfecting such a procedure. This time it’s spearheaded by Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon at the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group who has claimed that advances in medical science now make it possible to carry out head transplants that would allow patients to not only survive, but function normally. And with sufficient financial and legal support, he envisions successfully performing a transplant on a human as early as 2017.

“I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible,” Canavero told New Scientist.

While expert opinions on Canavero’s claims vary, the possibility isn’t as far fetched as it sounds. James Harrop, director of Adult Reconstructive Spine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and co-editor of Congress of Neurological Surgeons, says that the kind of complications the surgeons faced back in 1970 could easily be fixed using today’s methods.

“Technically it’s not any harder than a liver and heart transplant,” he says. “We now have immunosuppressant drugs that might prevent the body from rejecting it. Arteries and the ends of the esophagus can be sewn together. Bones can be fused. As long as the cuts are in place and if you do it high enough, there isn’t that much to hook back up.”

Several challenges remain, however. For Harrop, the biggest hurdle would be to reconstruct the millions of disconnected central nerve fibers that, under normal circumstances, do not regenerate.•

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“The Real Stumbling Block Is The Ethics”

February 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The head transplant has long been a goal of some on the outer edges of scientific research. (Oriana Fallaci profiled the main such controversial pioneer, Dr. Robert White, for Look in 1967.) Now a divisive surgeon, Dr. Sergio Canavero, believes that within two years he’ll be able to successfully transfer a human head from a shattered or dying body and graft it onto a donor body. Sure, if there was some safe way for Stephen Hawking or anyone similarly afflicted with a degenerative disease to have a new lease on life, that would be great, but it almost definitely won’t happen within Canavero’s timeframe and really shouldn’t happen anytime soon. We’re nowhere near close to being able to deal with such an operation, medically or ethically. From Ian Sample at the Guardian:

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.

The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed. The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in primates to test whether the procedure works.

But Canavero wants to provoke a debate around these issues. “The real stumbling block is the ethics,” he told New Scientist. “Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it.”•

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