Imagine if this operation is the first step in healing spinal cord injuries. It would be revolutionary.The real issue is when we get down to the physiology of the situation. One of the problems that is brought up is the ability to heal the severed spinal cord, which is what would happen if you cut a head off and put it on a different body. You would try and fuse that spinal cord together. Our current technology doesn't allow that healing to occur," he said.
I was talking about this procedure with mk tonight and I mentioned that the fusing of the spine is the one big hurdle preventing it. I used the case of a quadriplegic benefiting from a head transplant and then he said, "why wouldn't they just fix his spine at that point?" -Becasuse at this point, they would have figured out how to re-fuse a spine, right?
In its current form, you could use this technique to keep a quadriplegic alive whose body/multiple organs systems were failing. Long term, with the way medicine is going I don't see much use for this kind of surgery. In the next few decades we'll just make you a new bit, rather than taking an old bit from someone else and forcing it to work with immunosuppressants. However I still think it's a worthwhile use of resources because of the possible benefits for the treatment of spinal cord injuries.