Valery Spiridonov has been suffering from a rare genetic Werdnig-Hoffman muscle wasting disease his entire life and wants to give Dr. Sergio Canavero the chance to cut off his head and reattach it to a healthy body.
Mr Spiridonov is a 30 year old computer scientist from Russia and says his decision is final about the operation. He wants to get the chance at a new body before he dies.
Dr. Canavero said, "I don't do this because I don't have a life but I think that science is developed by those who are ready to take risks and devote themselves to it."
Mr. Spiridonov says he is afraid but notes he doesn't have many options because every year his physical state is diminishing.
The Italian doctor has been asked by many people to perform a head transplant for them but the doctor insists his first patient will be someone suffering from a muscle wasting disease.
Dr. Canavero has nicknamed the procedure HEAVEN, an acronym for head anastomosis venture. The procedure will involve severing the head from the spinal cord with an ultra-sharp blade and then using a special kind of glue to fuse the two ends of the spinal cord together.
The patient will need to be in a coma for for weeks while the head and body heal together after the muscle and blood supplies are stitched.
Dr. Canavero considers a moral equivalence between this planned operation and that of transplanting an organ. He considers the surgery a high liklihood of success and says he wouldn’t try it otherwise.
Mr. Spiridonov has compared going through with this surgery to the Russian space-race where three hundred scenarios were tried before the first man made it. Mr Spiridonov , of course, would want this to go right the first time.
Head transplants have successfully been done on monkeys, rats, and dogs but never before on a human. Critics say Dr. Canavero's plan is pure fantasy and compare him to no other than Dr. Frankenstein.
The Italian doctor needs a major medical center to perform this operation and has yet to present his plan to the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopedic Surgeons.
He is counting on them to deliever a greenlight and perform the operation by 2017 but if they deny his request to perform the operation he will look to China.
Dr. Hunt Batjer, president elect of the American Association for Neurological Surgeons, told CNN: "I would not wish this on anyone. I would not allow anyone to do it to me as there are a lot of things worse than death."