Full-Body Transplants Are a Crazy, Wildly Unethical Idea
By Nick Stockton,
Wired
| 03. 02. 2015
For the last week, an Italian neurosurgeon has been executing a full-blown media offensive, talking up his plan to stitch one person’s head to another person’s body. If the powers-that-be would just get over their ethical queasiness, Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group says he could accomplish the feat by 2017.
But full-body transplants aren’t so crazy. In fact, it might surprise you that there was a successful operation as far back as 1818. Well, successful if you ignore that the transplantee freaked out and murdered his doctor’s family. Oh wait. That was Frankenstein. I take it back, full body transplants are totally crazy.
What the hell, going to the moon was crazy too, right? And a maybe-crazy-but-what-the-hell moonshot is exactly how Canavero sees his plan to help patients with severe physical impairments. “Why did the US and the Soviet Union just vie for being the first to space? Because it is about measuring dicks. We want to demonstrate as a country, to say: I am the best,” he says. Canavero’s latest paper glosses over questions of ethics...
Related Articles
By Nicholas Wade, The New York Times | 04.30.2026
“J. Craig Venter” via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.5
J. Craig Venter, a scientist and entrepreneur who raced to decode the human genome, died on Wednesday in San Diego. He was 79.
His death was announced by...
By Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine | 04.27.2026
Why are babies born young? The most natural phenomenon on earth is actually hard to explain — at least on a cellular level. Consider this problem: The components of conception are old. When a woman gets pregnant, she has...
By Jonathan Basile, Los Ángeles Review of Books | 04.29.2026
WILLIAM BATESON, a foundational figure in the science of genetics at the turn of the last century, once recounted the response of a Scottish soldier to one of his public lectures: “Sir, what ye’re telling us is nothing but Scientific...
By Dr. Coco Newton, Progress Educational Trust | 03.30.2026
Have you ever wondered what it means to have dozens of half-siblings across the world – or to never know where half of your genetic identity comes from? A recent episode of Zembla explores the human consequences of the global...
