It does not bother Valery Spiridonov that the procedure has never been attempted before, and that almost the entire medical profession believes it is doomed to failure. Nor even that he has never met the surgeon who wants to operate on him, a man described by his colleagues as “nuts”.

Mr Spiridonov wants a head transplant, and he believes that it could happen as soon as next year.

The Russian computer scientist, 30, who suffers from a rare muscle-wasting disease, said that he had volunteered for the unprecedented and implausible procedure knowing all of the risks.

“In the end it is like with astronauts,” Mr Spiridonov told Mail Online. “Before the first man we sent into space, 300 different scenarios of something going wrong were