VLADIMIR, June 25. /TASS/. Russian programmer Valery Spiridonov, volunteering for history's first-ever head transplant surgery, said he hopes that Russian scientists will take part in the risky operation.
Thirty-year-old programmer Spiridonov, suffering from genetic muscular atrophy and confined to a wheelchair for life, is a candidate for the $10 million procedure planned by Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero for 2017.
"We believe that the technology of our scientists will be anyway useful for Canavero and other [transplantology] experts," he told TASS.
Canavero said earlier he was convinced that the operation involving some 150 medics and scientists will be successful.
However, Academician Anzor Khubutia, director of the Moscow-based Sklifosovsky emergency hospital, dismissed Canavero's plans as absolutely "reckless".
The idea of transplanting a donor’s head onto a body was first related by Russian science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev in his 1925 novel "Professor Dowell's Head."