A Chinese doctor from Harbin Medical University has had success performing 1000 head transplant surgeries on mice and now he is moving up the food chain and monkeys are next.
Dr. Xiaoping Ren from Harbin Medical University completed his first successful head transplant on a mouse in July 2013. The surgery took 10 hours.
Dr Ren said he wants to use monkeys next admitting he is 'hoping to create the first head-transplanted primate that can live and breathe on its own, at least for a little while'.
“We want to do this clinically, but we have to make an animal model with long-term survival first,” Dr. Ren said, newspaper reported. “Currently, I am not confident to say that I can do a human transplant.”
Dr. Ren studied and worked in the U.S. for more than 15 years before returning to his hometown in northeast China three years ago to take advantage of the Chinese government’s financial support for medical research.
Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese government has been pouring money into scientific research, giving extra attention to projects that are potentially high-impact or groundbreaking. China’s investment in science and technology research rose to 18 percent of the world’s total research-and-development spending last year, from 10 percent in 2009, according to the Battelle Memorial Institute.
Of course, even if head transplants are eventually possible in humans, the procedure is so ethically controversial that many scientists doubt it will ever be allowed in the U.S., even on an experimental level (part of the reason Ren left his job at the University of Cincinnati for China to conduct his research). Researchers who have tried have been nicknamed “Dr. Frankenstein.”
“The whole idea is ridiculous,” New York University medical ethics professor Arthur Caplan told the Journal.
Still, head transplantation could open up life-changing possibilities for people with severe disabilities or who have experienced extreme trauma. For example, paralyzed or quadriplegic patients with all their mental faculties could regain all of their physical movement if their heads were transplanted onto healthy bodies. And comatose patients who have been pronounced brain dead but whose bodies are unimpaired could wake up and walk again if they received a functioning new head.
