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The world's first human head transplant has been carried out on a corpse in China in an 18-hour operation that showed it was possible to successfully reconnect the spine, nerves and blood vessels. At a press conference in Vienna on Friday morning, Italian Professor Sergio Canavero, director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, announced that a team at Harbin Medical University had "realised the first human head transplant" and said an operation on a live human will take place "imminently". The operation was carried out by a team led by Dr Xiaoping Ren, who last year successfully grafted a head...

Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero will undertake the first human head transplant later this year in China, the doctor told German magazine Ooom in an article published Thursday. And, following that effort, he will revive a cryogenically frozen brain and transplant it into a donor body within the next three years. The plans, completely disconnected from reality and the state of modern medicine, are at least in line with his previous outlandish goals and dubious animal research. Canavero made headlines in the past few years by claiming that transplanting the whole head of a human onto a donor body is currently...

You may have heard about the Italian Neurosurgeon, Sergio Canavero, who plans to carry out the world’s first human head transplant next year. Having secured a volunteer for the operation, the professor has just unveiled a virtual reality system that will hopefully “prepare patients for life in a new body,” an experience that could cause unexpected psychological reactions. Professor Canavero is determined to perform the operation in 2017 on wheelchair user Valery Spiridonov, who runs an educational software company in Russia and suffers from the muscle-wasting Werdnig-Hoffman disease. Assuming the complex transplant take place, Spiridonov will have his head nearly...

In Russia, 30-year-old Valery Spiridonov will be flying to the United States to meet the doctor who plans to perform the world’s first head transplant on him. During the operation, Italian surgeon, Dr. Sergio Canavero, intends to completely remove Spiridonov’s head and reattached it to a healthy body. Spiridonov suffers from a rare form of spinal muscular dystrophy called Werdnig-Hoffman disease. Now, Spiridonov says Canavero will be announcing the plans soon: Today, the 31-year-old is wheelchair reliant due to a muscle-wasting disease, announced his neurosurgeon would explain how the plan was progressing in September. Mr Spiridonov says he is ready...

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...

“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...

Moments before making his Republican presidential candidacy official in Charleston last July, Texas Gov. Rick Perry turned to me and said, "This is gonna be a fun ride!" Maybe not. In the ensuing 110 days, Perry has gone from explosive front-runner to second-tier candidate well down in the single digits with Michele Bachmann and beneath fellow Texan Ron Paul, of all people. He raised more money than Mitt Romney last quarter. But now, with only 64 days left before the opening contest in Iowa's caucuses, what's the nation's longest-serving governor need to do to catch up? That was the principal...

Rick Perry is not the world’s finest debater. Just ask him yourself. “I’m not the best debater up there,” the Texas governor told the Las Vegas Review-Journal as he prepared for his fifth and final debate of the fall debate season. He even tries to make his occasional tongue-tied moments on national television a plus. “I don’t think Americans are looking for the best debater,” he told the paper from Vegas, where tonight’s debate is being held. “We probably have the best debater in the White House, and it’s not particularly serving our country too well.” That’s a good line....

Hidden deep in a Russian forest, and guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot intruders on sight, the medical research laboratories on the outskirts of Moscow were one of the Soviet Union's best-kept secrets. So the carefully-vetted journalists who were allowed past the forbidding perimeter fence on a cold February morning in 1954 were both apprehensive and curious about what lay ahead. Led to a courtyard outside an austere brick building, they waited in the bright winter sunshine to find out why they had been summoned. For a few minutes, only the sound of birdsong and the rustling of leaves...