Is it possible to search for life through death, soon the first head transplant

The old man on the left of the picture is the Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero, nicknamed the Frankenstein of the Age, who will perform the first head transplant in December. The patient volunteering for the operation (in the middle) is the young Russian Valery Spiridonov, who is paralyzed and has been suffering from chronic muscle atrophy since his childhood. People with such a disease usually cannot live more than 20 years. The operation will be done by cutting off the volunteer’s head, withdrawing his spinal cord and transplanting them into a newly deceased body, to be later stimulated with electrical impulses after a month of coma. As for the young man on the right of the picture, he is the Syrian scientist Qais Nizar Asfari, who is one of dozens of surgeons and scientists who are working within an expanded team to make the 36-hour operation a success at an estimated cost of $10 million.

Dr. Qais Nizar met with the patient recently as part of his research in preparation for the operation. At the end of their meeting, the Russian volunteer told the young neuroscientist: “My body is crumbling day by day and I feel like death as you feel in the damp of London. In the end, everyone is looking for his own interest, or as you like to call it, a last chance of survival. Even those who live in the same house, the wife clings to her husband for fear of living alone if he leaves her. Surgeons want to immortalize their names on my head, philosophers want to see death, life and identity on my body, and you also want to solve your puzzles at my expense. On the other hand, it is in my interest to jump to die to gain life, a jump up by the hands of doctors and a free fall on the body of a man I don't know. I don't care what consciousness is, Dr. Qais, and I don't want to know if I will get another consciousness after the operation, and I don't want to know where that damned one goes when my head goes from one body to another. This is your job and this is what you want to understand. As for me, all I want is to breathe more, to travel more, and to know more. All I want is one last chance of survival.”