Italian neurosurgeon and author Sergio Canavero isn’t shy of headlines. February 2015’s New Scientist cover promised human head transplants by 2017. Despite sustained technical criticism, Canavero has pressed on with increasingly bold claims, cumulating in a recent interview in German magazine OOOM:

Does this not pose serious problems for the human psyche? Are we even capable of cognitively grasping such a situation? Are we able to handle it?

It creates a new situation that will certainly not be easy, but think about what that means.

What are you referring to?

Have you heard of the company Alcor?

You mean the American company that specializes in deep freezing and storing bodies after death?

Exactly. You preserve either the entire body or just the brain. The process is called vitrification. First, your body is frozen at minus 196 degrees Celsius; then, it is submerged in liquid nitrogen. That said, Alcor does not know how many of the company’s clients will be brought back to life. In interviews, spokespeople of the company tend to state that this task is one for the doctors and scientists of the future to solve. It is nice, though, that someone will know what to do with these frozen brains in 100 or 200 years. I have good news for them.

Namely?

We will try to bring the first of the company’s patients back to life, not in 100 years. As soon as the first human head transplant has taken place, i.e., no later than in 2018, we will be able to attempt to reawaken the first frozen head.

That means you aim to transplant one of the frozen brains into a donor body?

Precisely. We can try out whether the method works and whether freezing brains actually makes sense or if we can forget that entire approach.

More concretely, that means: after the (head) transplant is before the (brain) transplant. Once the first head is transplanted, you will turn to the brain?

The process is already under way. We are working on it in parallel.