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Professor Dowel's head will become a reality.
Last reviewed: 02.07.2025
The world's first human head transplant may be performed in China next year. The controversial experiment is being carried out by Dr. Xiaoping Ren, nicknamed Dr. Frankenstein by journalists.
The 55-year-old scientist is confident that his knowledge and experience are sufficient to perform such a complex operation on people, and the final preparations will take only a few months.
This Chinese doctor had previously shocked the public with his experiments with animals – according to Ren, he was able to transplant the head of a monkey, which lived for almost a day after the operation.
Journalists managed to penetrate into the holy of holies of Dr. Ren – his secret laboratory, which is located in the North of China. They managed to find out that the specialist has performed more than a hundred similar operations, all of his subjects were animals and, according to Dr. Ren, he is now ready to operate on humans. The scientist is completely confident in his abilities and does not pay attention to comments and criticism, and in response to the nickname given to him in the media, he said that he was simply doing his job.
Xiaoping Ren worked at the State University of Cincinnati (Ohio) for 15 years, but then was forced to leave the United States, since such experiments are limited and banned there. In his native China, Dr. Ren continued to work in this direction, in addition, he received generous funding for his research from the Chinese authorities. It is worth noting that rumors have spread among the Chinese that the scientist conducts experiments not only with animals, but also with human corpses; for his research, Dr. Ren uses various organs of prisoners sentenced to death. But the scientist himself refuses to discuss the ethical side of his research and notes that he is interested exclusively in science.
By the way, a neurosurgeon from Italy, Sergio Canavero, also announced a similar experiment (transplantation of a human head). But the Italian specialist planned the operation for 2017 and even the first patient in the world has already been chosen who agreed to have his head transplanted to another body - Russian Valery Spiridonov, a 30-year-old resident of Vladimir with a hereditary disease that causes atrophy of the muscles of the legs, head, neck and disrupts voluntary movements (walking, holding the head, swallowing, etc.).
The media have already mentioned successful head transplant operations on rodents. The first such operation was performed in 2013 and took about 10 hours.
It is worth noting that head transplantation from an ethical point of view causes a negative reaction and a number of specialists even refuse to talk about the possibility of conducting such operations. As already mentioned, it was the ethical side of the issue that forced Dr. Ren to leave the United States and continue his research in China, which is more tolerant in this matter.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that such research, which the global scientific community considers unethical or dangerous, has been financed in China. Last spring, Junjiu Huang's group, with the consent of the authorities, conducted experiments with human embryos and was able to change human DNA for the first time.