The human head transplant surgeon has pitched his idea in the US!

Controversial Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero has pitched his idea to perform the world’s first human head transplant by 2017 to a meeting of US doctors, with the hope of recruiting funds and specialists to help him complete the ambitious project.

Of course, he already has one important volunteer for the project - 30-year-old Russian man Valery Spiridonov, who has a rapidly declining condition known as Werdnig-Hoffman disease, and has willingly donated his head for the surgery.

It sounds pretty far-fetched - and, indeed, the announcement has been met with plenty of scepticism - but during a 2.5-hour presentation at a meeting of the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons in Maryland, Canavero explained how he thinks he can make it work. 

You can read more about the surgery here, but basically it goes like this: first, Canavero will cool Spiridonov's brain right down to keep it alive while it’s cut off from its blood supply. He’ll then cut the heads off both bodies using a special nano blade, before attaching Spiridonov’s head to the donor body. Using a chemical called polyethylene glycol and electrical currents, he’ll encourage the cells of the two severed ends of spinal cord to mesh together, and will then stitch the rest of the blood vessels and muscles in the head to the new body. 

He believes the attachment surgery will only take a day, but he’ll keep Spiridonov in a comatose state for three or four weeks after the operation to allow his system time to heal. Canavero estimates that all up, the patient will take around 12 months to heal fully.

Of course, it’s a big risk - for starters, there’s no evidence that we can actually get a severed spinal cord to fuse in this way, or that we can keep a brain alive for long enough to move it to another body. And then there’s the issue of how to ensure the body doesn’t reject its new head.

"The chances of this working are 90 percent,” says Canavero in the interview. At the meeting he asked the doctors in attendance to suspend all judgment. AFP reportsthat he closed his speech saying: “What you have been taught is wrong … I need your help and I need your assistance. Be Americans.” 

But let’s not forget that other doctors have already broadly criticised the plan, stating that Spiridonov’s fate could be “considerably worse than death” and could drive Spiridonov to the point of insanity.

"I would not wish this on anyone," Dr Hunt Batjer, president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons, told The Independent back when Spiridonov first volunteered. "I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death."