We have all seen classic horror films like Re-Animator (1985) and Frankenstein (1931), and tinkering with the natural order of life and death rarely yields positive outcomes outside of box office results.
Enter 53-year-old Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon with a fetish for head transplantion.
Canavero previously hit headlines when he announced that he’d be able to successfully perform a full human head transplantion this year.
Canavero and his sidekick, Chinese man Xiaoping Ren, have been busy shifting heads across animal species for some time. The team reportedly swapped heads between two monkeys, and were said to have behead mice before re-attaching the spinal cords, allowing the mice to move again.
Having incurred the wrath of philosophers and animal rights activists alike, Sergio and Xiaoping have now set their sharp tools on a full human head transplantation procedure. According to them, a donor has already been sourced.
The questionable issue of head swapping is going through somewhat of a revival as of late. Scientists have recently succeeded in attaching a rat’s head to another rat’s body, thus creating a bicephalous rodent. A third rat was used as blood source to keep the floating head alive while in between bodies.
The resulting aberration reportedly remained alive for 36 hours, and the transplanted head could apparently see and feel pain, according to results published in the CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics.
Now, Canavero and Xiaoping are willing to up the ante in the unnecessary head transplant sweepstakes, and are said to be ready to show their latest creation to the world in a few months’ time.