Plans for full-body transplant in China cause concern

The first patient and his family are hopeful but medical experts say the idea is “at best premature, at worst reckless.

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOWThe New York Times-Sat., June 11, 2016

HARBIN, China — Six years ago, Wang Huanming was paralyzed from the neck down after being injured wrestling with a friend. Today, he hopes he has found the answer to walking again: a new body for his head.

Wang, a 62-year-old retired gas company worker, is one of several people in China who have volunteered for a body transplant at a hospital in the northern Chinese city of Harbin.

The idea for a body transplant is the kind of thinking that has experts around the world alarmed at how far China is pushing the ethical and practical limits of science. Such a transplant is impossible, at least for now, according to leading doctors and experts, including some in China, who point to the difficulty of connecting nerves in the spinal cord. Failure would mean the death of the patient.

The orthopedic surgeon proposing the operation, Dr. Ren Xiaoping of Harbin Medical University, who assisted in the first hand transplant in the United States in 1999, said he would not be deterred. In an interview, Ren said that he was building a team, that research was underway and that the operation would take place “when we are ready.”

His plan: Remove two heads from two bodies, connect the blood vessels of the body of the deceased donor and the recipient head, insert a metal plate to stabilize the new neck, bathe the spinal cord nerve endings in a glue-like substance to aid regrowth, and finally sew up the skin.

“For most people, it’s at best premature and at worst reckless,” said Dr. James L. Bernat, a professor of neurology and medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine of Dartmouth College.

Some Chinese researchers are also concerned that the experimentation is going too far, too fast.

“I don’t want to see China’s scholars, transplant doctors and scientists deepening the impression that people have of us internationally, that when Chinese people do things they have no bottom line — that anything goes,” said Cong Yali, a medical ethicist at Peking University, referring to Ren’s plans.

Amid the medical and ethical uncertainties, Wang and his family cling to hope.

“A medical procedure that sounds impossible may save us,” his daughter, Wang Zhi, 34, said.