Frankenstein may not be just fiction anymore....

Some recent headlines in the world of medicine have been unusual and a little unsettling, they sound like sci-fi more then actual reality.

One of them was in September ' Doctors grow nose on man's forehead' on ABC News Medicine Unit. Yes it is exactly what it says. A young man Xiaolian 22, in China, injured his nose in a traffic accident in 2012, subsequent infections lead to the corrosion of the damaged cartilage in the nose. Doctors could no longer fix it, hence they decided to grow him a new one at the Fuzhou hospital in China. Now that the nose is grown, doctors can transplant it to his face successfully.

Then yesterday read this headline ' Severed hand kept alive on man's ankle ' on BBC World News. Xiao Wei in China severed his right hand in an accident at work, his arm extremity was in such a bad shape that surgeons could not re-attach the hand immediately. To keep the hand healthy and alive, the surgeons then grafted the hand to his  left ankle and supplied it with a steady blood supply. After about a month the surgeons successfully reattached the hand to his right arm. According to latest reports from his doctors Xiao Wei will need several surgeries before he can regain full function of his hand, which is highly likely.

But the most disturbing one was in July 2013 'Human Head Transplants Could Become Reality' on ABC News Medicine Unit. Here is part of the report;
' In the journal Surgical Neurology International, Canavero outlined a procedure for taking the head of one person and transplanting it onto the body of another. It involves inducing hypothermia and cutting the spinal cord with an “ultra-sharp blade” so it can be fused with the donor’s spinal cord.
“This is, of course, totally different from what happens in clinical spinal cord injury, where gross damage and scarring hinder regeneration,” Canavero wrote.
He outlined a hypothetical scenario in which the body donor is a brain dead patient. He said the recipient could be anyone dying of cancer or anything else  that leaves the brain intact.
For the head transplant to work, two surgeries would have to take place in the same operating room in which both spinal cords would be severed simultaneously but only after all other cuts had been made. Then, the donor body’s spinal cord would be “chemofused” to the recipient head’s spinal cord using a substance called polyethylene glycol, or PEG. Canavero called his surgery the Heaven surgery, for “head anastomosis venture.” '
Heaven! Really? I would think more like Hell! This is not an issue of it being scientifically possible or not, to me it is a matter of whether it is ethical or not. Who gets a transplant? Whose body and whose head? Do we honestly want Frankensteins to be a reality? 
Mankind loves to challenge nature and overcome it's limitations, but trying to make this happen would not be wise, there is just so much meddling nature can take. Let's keep this one limited to our scifi books and movies...