[5] He attracted media attention in 2015 after claiming to be very near towards the successful execution of a human head transplant and detailed out a rough version of the proposed surgical procedure.
[4] The first person to volunteer for Canavero's procedure for head transplantation was Valery Spiridonov, a Russian computer programmer who has spinal muscular atrophy, a muscle-wasting disease.
[9][4] In January 2016, Canavero and his team issued a press release wherein they claimed to have performed a successful head transplant on a monkey who supposedly survived the procedure without any neurological injury and was kept alive for 20 hours.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist, criticized their press releases prior to publishing in peer-reviewed journals and remarked it to be "science through public relations".
Thomas Cochrane, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School's Centre for Bioethics, also criticized the press release for generating unwarranted excitement and commented that the operation was majorly about "publicity rather than the production of good science".
[9] In 2017, Canavero and colleagues performed a rehearsal human head transplant on two cadavers at Harbin Medical University.