Head transplants: how surgeons have wrestled with ethics and practicalities
Dog and monkey heads have been transplanted with varying degrees of success, spurring breakthroughs in human organ transplants but stirring up controversy, writes Simon Parry
Head transplant surgery may appear to be at the very cutting edge of 21st-century medical science, but surgeons have been attempting the feat for more than 100 years, with varying degrees of success and sometimes stomach-turning results.
American physiologist Charles Claude Guthrie successfully grafted one dog's head onto the side of another dog's neck in 1908, a procedure that is believed to have overshadowed his less controversial medical achievements and prevented him from winning a Nobel Prize.
Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov took up the gauntlet for the Soviet Union in the 1950s, carrying out a series of dog head transplants, all of which led to the animals dying as a result of immune reactions. In the same decade, Dr Ren Xiaoping's predecessors at Harbin Medical University conducted a dog head transplant with a similar outcome.
READ MORE: Chinese surgeon prepares for world's first head transplant
Demikhov went on to pioneer the use of immunosuppressants, inspiring surgeons worldwide and playing a role in making possible the first human heart transplant, in South Africa, in 1967.
The role model for Ren, who hopes to carry out the first human head transplant, is American neurosurgeon Dr Robert White, who, in 1970, conducted his own head transplant operation on a monkey. The animal lived long enough to look around, breathe, sniff at the air and attempt to bite the hand of one of White's colleagues. He repeated the operation in 2001.