Frankenstein’s monster is the closest thing we know to a mismatched humanoid creation. As far as we’re concerned, no one has successfully created such a beast. Vladimir Demikhov tried back in the 50’s with dogs, but it was obviously highly unethical and also pretty unsuccessful. Then in the 70’s Dr. Robert White completed the first ever successful head transplant with a monkey. It was a crude job because he didn’t fuse the spinal cord segments together, so the monkey was paralyzed and needed mechanical assistance to breathe, but he proved that it could be done.

Since the days of these crude experiments science and medicine have obviously come a long way. All of the things we can do now were completely unfeasible all those years ago and we’ve advanced so much that Dr. Sergio Canavero thinks human head transplants will be possible by 2017. His surgical plan involves cooling the donor head and preserving the blood vessels as the neck is cut. The trickiest part that he foresees is joining the ends of the spinal cord. Any injury involving the spinal cord is pretty serious, and when it gets severed paralysis is usually the result. So intentionally severing and then attempting to reconnect it is a daunting task. Dr. Canavero thinks that using polyethylene glycol to help the fatty cell membrane bind would help this process though. Then the last step would be to reconnect all of the muscles and blood vessels before closing. The patient would have to be in an induced coma for about a month afterwards.

As with any transplanted organ, there’s always concern for rejection, but the patient would be kept on strong immunosuppressive drugs to try to prevent this from happening. However, organ rejection is not the biggest issue involved with something like this. Transplanting a human head is something straight out of science fiction, and not the kind that most people would want to see coming to real life. Many different groups will be unhappy if a procedure like this tried to become mainstream and people would be really worried about what this means in general. Right now, other surgeons are calling this proposal “too outlandish” while many others refuse to even acknowledge it. There’s a line somewhere out there and this crosses it for a lot of people, medical professionals included. Many others simply believe it just wouldn’t work. Further still, even if it did work and become acceptable, what’s stopping people from cosmetically requesting it to literally get a better body/face? On the flip side, something like this could actually be beneficial. It has the potential to help people with extreme problems from things like deformities, accidents, and cancer. As we get closer and closer to attaining the ability to do things like this, it’s really a matter of figuring out all of the pros and cons and then, if it’s allowed, probably strictly regulating the procedure.