SALT LAKE CITY — An Italian scientist says that he could be the first person to successfully move a person's head to another person's body. All he needs is $30 million and two years.

"The greatest technical hurdle to such endeavor is of course the reconnection of the donor (D)'s and recipient (R)'s spinal cords," writes Sergio Canavero in a recent paper. "It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage."

Head transplants in animals have been successful before — like the 1970 attempt by Robert White. He moved a monkey's head onto the body of another monkey. The animal lived for another eight days.

However, connecting spinal cords, which would allow for movement and nervous connections between brain and organs, has been difficult and only partially successful in animal patients.

Canavero, who works for the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, said he has a workable method for transplantation that he calls HEAVEN, short for the Head Anastomosis Venture. In short, it involves cooling two bodies down to between 12 and 15 degrees celsius. The heads will then be severed by extremely sharp blades at exactly the same moment.

Then, it's a race against the clock. In his paper, Canavero says that mammal bodies can be held at that temperature for about an hour, meaning there is exactly one hour to re-connect all the various muscles, nerves tendons and arteries.

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The new method for re-attaching the spinal cord, called GEMINI, involves using special polymers like polyethylene glycol to fuse the cells together at the site of the cut. Similar methods have been used in healing severed spinal chords of dogs and guinea pigs.

It wouldn't be perfect, but the neuroscientist said that a connection with as little as 10 percent efficiency would still be useful for some controlled movement in humans.

Not everyone is convinced that this is possible, however. John Silver, a colleague of Robert White who helped with the original rhesus monkey head transplantation in 1970, said Canavero's method is impossible and unethical.

"It's complete fantasy, that you could use [PEG technology] in such a traumatic injury in an adult mammal," Silver told CBS News. "But to severe a head and even contemplate the possibility of gluing axons back properly across the lesion to their neighbors is pure and utter fantasy in my opinion."

"Just to do the experiments is unethical," he added. "This is bad science, this should never happen."

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