World's Successful Head Transplant By Italian Surgeon

Surgeon Sergio Canavero has become famous for claiming to be working on the first human head transplant and he says that the successful test shows that his plans will work.

The successful transplant on the corpse shows that his newly developed techniques for re-connecting the spine, nerves and blood vessels to allow the two bodies to live together will work, he said. It also seems to suggest that the surgery could be done in the 18-hour target that the team has set itself to be successful.

He described himself as having "realised the first human head transplant". That will allow his team to get to work doing the new head transplant "imminently", he said.

Professor Canavero has gained fame and some notoriety for his controversial claims about the first head transplant. He has signed up his first patient, a Russian man called Valery Spiridinov who will have his head frozen and then grafted onto a new donor body, according to his doctor.

"The first human transplant on human cadavers has been done," he said. "A full head swap between brain dead organ donors is the next stage.

"And that is the final step for the formal head transplant for a medical condition which is imminent," he told a conference in Vienna, according to The Telegraph, which first reported the news. The paper claimed that the "world's first human head transplant" had been "successfully carried out", though clearly that won't really have happened until someone undergoes the procedure and survives it.

The surgeon didn't appear to give any concrete proof for his claim, but said that would be made available in the coming days. "The first human head transplant, in the human mode, has been realised. The paper will be released in a few days. Everyone said it was impossible.