The Audacious Plan to Save This Man’s Life by Transplanting His Head

And what would happen if it actually works.

- Sam Kean

A few days earlier, the mouse had been sprawled on an operating table while two Chinese graduate students peered through a microscope and operated on its spine. With a tiny pair of scissors, they removed the top half of a fingernail-thin vertebra, exposing a gleaming patch of spinal-cord tissue. It looked like a Rothko, a clean ivory rectangle bisected by a red line. Cautiously—the mouse occasionally twitched—they snipped the red line (an artery) and tied it off. Then one student reached for a $1,000 scalpel with a diamond blade so thin that it was transparent. With a quick slice of the spinal cord, the mouse’s back legs were rendered forever useless.

Or they would have been, except that the other student immediately doused the wound with a faintly amber fluid, like the last drop of watered-down scotch. The fluid contained a chemical called polyethylene glycol, or peg, and as the students stitched the mouse back up, the chemical began to stitch the animal’s nerve cells back together.

Two days later, the mouse was walking. Not perfectly—its back legs lurched at times. But compared with a control mouse nearby—which had undergone the same surgery, minus the peg, and was now dragging its dead back legs behind itself—it puttered around brilliantly, sniffng every corner of its cage.

If peg ever proves effective in humans, it will be a near-miraculous therapy: Despite spending many millions of dollars on research over the past century, doctors have no way to repair damaged spinal cords. But that’s not the only reason the man directing this research—a surgeon in Harbin, China, named Xiaoping Ren—has been garnering attention in scientific circles.