Free Republic

Just two more months till I move from California to Texas and once more register as a Republican. It was too hard to hold my nose here. I voted the best I could but am proud to say not once for the Terminator.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Dogs with paralyzed hind legs regained the ability to walk after getting a shot of a chemical cousin of antifreeze that helped repair nerve cells in their damaged spinal cords, scientists reported. Purdue University researchers who led the project hope the approach can soon be tried in people, but caution that there are significant differences between human and canine spinal cords. The treatment only worked on dogs given the injections within about three days of their injury. Some dogs not given the injections eventually walked again, but those getting the new treatment had a dramatically higher recovery...

The man volunteering to be the guinea pig for pioneering head transplant surgery is flying to America this week to meet for the first time the doctor intending to give him a new body. Russian Valery Spiridonov will appear at a major medical conference in Annapolis with Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero, who hopes to convince the medical establishment that his techniques are on the brink of viability. But he prepared to fly to New York today, one of Moscow's top surgeons branded the £9.8million ($15million) head transplant plan 'reckless', claiming the medic - who has been labelled Dr Frankenstein by...

Texas doctors say they have done the world's first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man with a large head wound from cancer treatment. MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist Hospital doctors announced Thursday that they did the operation on May 22 at Houston Methodist. The recipient - Jim Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer from Austin, Texas - expects to leave the hospital Thursday with a new kidney and pancreas along with the scalp and skull grafts. He said he was stunned at how well doctors matched him to a donor with similar skin and coloring. "It's...

A 30-year-old Russian man with a degenerative disease has volunteered for the world’s first human head transplant operation. Researchers have seriously questioned the feasibility of the operation proposed by Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero. But Valery Spiridonov, a computer scientist from the Russian town of Vladimir, about 160 kilometers east of Moscow, says he wants to undergo the operation within the next two years.

A man with a fatal medical condition has spoken exclusively to MailOnline about how he is set to become the first person to undergo a head transplant and hopes it could be as soon as next year. Valery Spiridonov says he is ready to put his trust in controversial surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero who claims he can cut off his head and attach it to a healthy body. Mr Spiridonov, 30, a computer scientist from Russia, said: 'My decision is final and I do not plan to change my mind.' As a lifelong sufferer of the rare genetic Werdnig-Hoffman muscle...

<p>BOSTON – Charla Nash never served in the military. She was horribly disfigured, not in combat, but in a 2009 attack by a rampaging chimpanzee. The Pentagon, though, is watching her recovery closely.</p> <p>The U.S. military paid for Nash's full face transplant in 2011 and is underwriting her follow-up treatment at a combined cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the hope that some of the things it learns can help young, seriously disfigured soldiers returning from war.</p>

A surgeon says full-body transplants could become a reality in just two years. Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off. Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June. He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the...

Surgeon Sergio Canavero will be embarking on a project to implement the world's first human head transplant. It's a fascinating concept. You have an otherwise perfectly healthy head on a body that no longer functions. You have, also, an otherwise perfectly healthy donor body. What if you could take the head from its non-functioning body and transplant it onto the healthy body?

“Potentially unethical.” That’s how one expert described an Italian scientist’s plan to perform a “head transplant” by severing two heads at the same time, then cooling and flushing out the ‘recipient’ head before attaching it to its new body with polymer glue.That is “POTENTIALLY unethical?” Making one person out of two, and throwing away the unused halves, is only “potentially” unethical?Shock and awe.* * * * *Neuroscientist Sergio Canavero is undeterred by criticism, however. Canavero now reports that it’s possible to merge bone marrow, surgically cut with an ultra-sharp knife, when fusing one person’s head onto another person’s spine. The...

An amazing video of a way to keep transplant hearts alive for much longer. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=644095252280513

A wife who saved her dying husband’s life by giving him one of her kidneys wants it back after he walked out on her. Andy Lamb was suffering from renal failure and was only being kept alive by dialysis sessions, until his wife Samantha persuaded him to take one of her kidneys. Mrs Lamb, 41, lost more than 3st in weight to make sure that she would be healthy enough for the transplant operation in October 2009. The couple were even filmed for a BBC show which documented the story of her gift of love. But they did not live...

In most lung transplants, organs from a cadaver donor are placed on ice and thawed at the site of the transplantation surgery. But with the new technology, doctors use a device that pumps blood and oxygen through the lungs during transportation to simulate conditions of the human body. "It seemed in this case that it did" make a difference, Loor said. "The oxygen levels that we got back from our recipient when we were done with the procedure were the best that I'd ever seen." The device -- called the TransMedics Organ Care System -- is being studied as part...

A group of US scientists have created the world’s smallest human liver which can survive for forty days and works like the real thing – using a 3D printer. The mini-livers, made by California-based medical research company Organvo, are just half a millimetre deep and four millimetres wide but can perform most of the functions that a real liver can. The printer builds up 20 layers of hepatocytes cells, which carry out liver functions, along with two major types of liver cell. It also adds cells from the lining of a blood vessel. This allows the liver cells to receive...

This is a clip of a donor heart being sustained in preparation to being transplanted. It's rather an amazing sight that makes you appreciate the very existence, the consciousness in which you are currently viewing this. Looking at this particular heart, it seems a bit large from what I've otherwise seen.

ATLANTA — A dying teen initially told he wouldn't get a new heart has learned he's not only on the transplant list, but he's at the top of it. Anthony Stokes' mother, Melencia Hamilton, told Channel 2's Tom Jones she is relieved and her heartache is gone now that her son is getting a new heart. "They just had a change of heart,' Hamilton said. That change of heart has given Hamilton's 15-year-old son, Anthony, a chance at a new heart. Stokes has been moved to 1-A status for a new heart. That means "his heart is critical where he'll...

Demanding access to organ transplant procedures for undocumented immigrants, a group of hunger strikers set up camp outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Sunday. They said they would stay until hospital CEO Dean Harrison agreed to a meeting, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. The group of about 40 picketers included 14 people who were in the sixth day of a hunger strike. “We’re asking for help,” said Blanca Gomez, 23, who needs a kidney transplant. “I go to dialysis three times a week. I’m not going off the hunger strike until I get on the transplant list.” Gomez said she had lost...

A leading neurosurgeon has revealed a project to carry out the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage within the next two years. The project is code-named HEAVEN/GEMINI. Published in the June issue of Surgical Neurology International, the project has been outlined by Italian neuroscientist and functional neurosurgeon, Dr. Sergio Canavero. He says the procedure would take 100 surgeons 36 hours to complete, and would cost around £8.5 million ($12.6 million). In 1970, US neurosurgeon Robert Joseph White performed an operation to transplant a monkey's head onto another monkey's body. However, the inability to repair the severed spinal cord due...

Cannot find any recent news on Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old Philadelphia girl who fought a legal battle to be included on the adult lung transplant list. Does anyone know how she is doing?

In what sounds like a science-fiction novel come to life, one scientist says he is close to being able to affix one person's head to another human body. Italian scientist Sergio Canavero believes he has come up with an outline to successfully complete the first human head transplant in history, which could lead to solutions for those suffering from muscular dystrophy or tetraplegics with widespread organ failure. Head transplants have been attempted since the 1950s, when Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov experimented with dogs. Twenty years later, American neurosurgeon Robert White conducted a successful head transplant by moving the head of...