An Italian doctor announced Friday that he will soon perform the world’s first human head transplant in China because medical communities in the United States and Europe would not permit the controversial procedure.

The surgery is anticipated to last more than 24 hours and require the services of several dozen surgeons and other specialists and cost up to $100 million. The purpose is to discover whether nerves that are cut and then reattached will regenerate “downstream”.

This article would be a good one for students to explore. It presents a current bioethical dilemma that is promoted as right for humanity by the doctor who desires to carry out the experiment.

The justification for the procedure is as follows, provided by Dr. Michael Sarr, editor of the journal, Surgery.

Doctors "have always been taught that when you cut a nerve, the 'downstream side,' the part that takes a signal and conducts it to somewhere else, dies," he said. "The 'upstream side,' the part that generates the signal, dies back a little — a millimeter or two — and eventually regrows. As long as that 'downstream' channel is still there, it can regrow through that channel, but only for a length of about a foot.”

This is why, he said, if you amputate your wrist and then re-implant it and line the nerves up well, you can recover function in your hand. But if your arm gets amputated at the shoulder, it won't be re-implanted because it will never lead to a functional hand.

"What Canavero will do differently is bathe the ends of the nerves in a solution that stabilizes the membranes and put them back together," Sarr said. "The nerves will be fused, but won't regrow. And he will do this not in the peripheral nerves such as you find in the arm, but in the spinal cord, where there's multiple types of nerve channels.”

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IMAGE CREDIT: ’Frankenstein observing the first stirrings of his creature. Engraving by W. Chevalier after Th. von Holst, 1831.' by Theodor von Holst. Credit: Wellcome Collection