Would A Human Head Transplant Be Ethical?
The Headless Horseman Wikimedia Commons A couple professors sound off about the ethics of transplanting one human's head onto another human's body. Two days ago, we reported on a controversial paper by Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canaveri about human head transplants. The paper, entitled "HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage," makes a claim straight out of science fiction: that the technology required for successful human-head transplantation is finally here, and that it could be used to help people with irreparable damage to their bodies and spinal cords. But is it ethical? Before human head transplantation could enter the realm of consideration, scientists would have to perform multiple successful experiments on primates, Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, says. And none of those, he believes, would be condoned by any reasonable ethics committee. But say the primate experiments did pass the ethics test....