Henk Middelkoop
Let I say first that medical innovation and progression is a thing I really stand for and support. Every day many lives are disrupted by the hearing of cancer, ALS or other deadly diseases. There are (not jet) fully covering treatments, but there has been made a lot of progress the last years.
What I am very afraid of is, that we are forgetting about the enormous risks these new technologies can have. It can have a great positive impact, but it has its downsides too. Think of the large illegal trade in organs, mainly in poor countries, were people are selling their organs to rich people, namely in the western parts of the world, for relatively a pittance. And in some cases people are robbed from their organs and left behind. This wasn’t foreseen when it became known that it is possible to trade an organ to someone’s else body and that people won’t have to die, because of a bad functioning or missing liver et cetera.
This Italian scientist, Sergio Canavero, is very convinced that he will be able to transform someone’s head to the body of someone else. He already found a disabled Russian man, who is willing to cooperate in a surgery, voluntarily! When you hear him explain the technique used by this operation, it even seems to be clear to me. Just cooling down the head, removing the neck weave and cutting through the spinal cord, after which it can be detached to the spinal cord of the other person. Seems to be pretty clear.
But with this technique arises questions. First of all, is it really possible to do this kind of surgery? Second, do we want it to be possible? There are more uncertainties like: are we still the same kind of person in another body? If we don’t want it to be possible, the first question is already answered. Without experiments, we cannot proof that this technique is feasible. Personally, I think that this kind of techniques gives room for more terrorism and harm in the medical sector. What if a rich powerful person needs a head and no one wants to give it to him, what will he do? He could buy it from a retarded person who is bribed easily with money. He could be forced to give it also. As you see, these are possibilities to happen. We already saw it with the transportation of organs. Do we want to have these possibilities?
As I already mentioned, medical progression and innovation is more than welcome in this already very emotional and painful world of deadly diseases. But we have to take into account the possible downsides of these techniques and the results they will have for everyone on the planet, not just the sick people in question. They may make the world a worse place to live than it already is!