In a world first American Surgeons in Chicago, Illinois have successfully transplanted a woman's head to a donor body. Mrs. Heath of New Jersey was suffering from multiple organ failures and volunteered to for the surgery after being told by specialists she had less than a week to live. Prof. Willis, the lead doctor of the team of 16 who performed and assisted during the surgery, says the revolutionary procedure will change the destiny of mankind. 'This opens up countless avenues down which man can travel, and may even lead to the eradication of death as we know it.' A head transplant is a surgical operation involving the replacement of an organism's head with a replacement head. It should not be confused with another hypothetical surgical operation, the brain transplant. Head transplantation inevitably involves decapitating the patient. Since the technology required to reattach a severed spinal cord has not yet been developed, the subject of a head transplant would presumably be a quadriplegic, unless proper therapies, presumably along the lines of stem cell therapy, had been developed. This technique has been proposed as possibly useful for people who are already quadriplegics, and who are suffering from widespread organ failures which would otherwise require many different and difficult transplant surgeries. It may also be useful for people who would rather be quadriplegic than dead (for example because of progress in brain-computer interfaces). As of this time, there is no uniform consensus on the ethics of such a procedure.

Author: stu22aus
Keywords: Head transplant surgery world first american doctor chicago medical procedure medicine patriotic frankenstein immortal
Added: April 25, 2008