China has achieved a lot of medical firsts in the area of organ transplants such as the first face transplant and first penis transplant, although the latter was not successful.
Ahead of performing the world’s first head transplant with Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero on a Russian man in December 2017, Dr. Xiaoping Ren, an orthopedic surgeon, wants to make medical history by performing the world’s first whole-body transplant.
The transplant expert from Harbin Medical University in China is building a team for the whole-body transplant, reported Time. Ren initially tried the procedure on mice and dead human bodies, but the animals died one day after the transplant.
Nevertheless, Ren is confident it would work on humans since he believes he has sufficient experience in the field with his involvement in the first hand transplant in the United States in 1999.
The New York Times reported that Ren has several volunteers for the procedure, including 62-year-old Wang Huanming, a retired gas worker paralyzed from the neck down in 2010 because of a wrestling match injury.
For the pioneering surgery, Ren would remove two heads from two bodies, connect the blood vessels of the corpse and the recipient head. This would be followed by insertion of a metal plate to stabilize the new neck and bathe the spinal cord nerve endings in a substance similar to glue to help in regrowth. The last step is to sew up the skin.
Medical experts who have questioned Canavero’s planned head transplant also doubted if Ren’s transplant procedure would succeed. Giesel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College Neurology and Medicine Professor Dr. James Bernat described Ren’s plan “premature and reckless.”
Former Chinese Deputy Health Minister Dr. Huang Jiefu stated in November that it is scientifically impossible to reconnect the neurons once the spine is cut. Huang added that Ren’s planned surgical procedure is ethically impossible. He asked, “How can you put one person’s head on another’s body?”
Critics blamed Ren’s ambitious surgery on generous funding from the Chinese government and China’s dream to be great in the international medical community. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the national government invested 1.42 trillion yuan ($216 billion) on scientific research and development, up from 245 billion yuan in 2005.
However, some Chinese scientists and ethicists defended the recent medical firsts done by Chinese doctors and blamed the criticism foreign medical experts to professional envy. Zhai Xiaomei, dean of the Peking Union Medical College’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, wrote in the Developing World Bioethics journal in January that the feedback from western commentators indicated they misunderstood the current scientific breakthroughs. She blamed it to unwillingness of critics to recognise China “as an equal partner in the international debate about proper limits to the development of new biotechnologies.”