It’s in a journal Surgical Neurology International, which I’m not sure how legit it is; they’ve published a bunch of his previous work on spinal cord repair (cited in his self-identified “Heaven: The Frankenstein Effect” project–another sign of clownishness).
Is his previous work anything?
http://surgicalneurologyint.com/surgicalint_articles/heaven-the-frankenstein-effect/
Here is a long article from the Atlantic about the proposed surgery. (Warning: The photograph of the Soviet dog-and-a-half will haunt you).
It sounds to me from this article like the surgeon is both accomplished in his field and quite crazy.
Isn’t this a known hoax?
Later on in the thread, it’s acknowledged that even if the experiment did happen (and nobody’s verifying that), the film itself is of a re-enactment at best.
Reading further, it seems that there’s just barely enough uncertainty for it to be an actual debate, with evidence on both sides. That in itself is strong evidence of this being a hoax, given that a real experiment would rely upon incontrovertible evidence for it to be taken seriously by the scientific community.
Of course, this was in a time and place when Lysenkoism was the law of the land, so we’ve circled back around and answered our own question.
As far as “is the journal legit?”:
Surgical Neurology International is an Internet-only open-access journal. Its impact factor (based on how often its articles are cited in other published research) is a bit hard to evaluate - based on this listing it comes in near the bottom of all neurosurgery journals (assuming “missing” is a valid impact factor). Elsewhere it is cited over the past few years as having an impact factor between about 0.6 and 1.7, which sounds at its best to be low mediocre.
As for the (highly speculative) article itself with its, um, stimulating references (i.e. The Shocking History Of Electric Fish), I am just a wee bit dubious about its conclusions. For instance, the idea that neurons take several days to die seems at odds with our current knowledge about brain death.
Bottom line: I wouldn’t be hasty about investing in this guy’s company (if he had one), and wouldn’t count on bringing Ted Williams back to help the Red Sox this year.
In one of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, Violet narrowly escaped being the patient in such a procedure, intended to be attempted by Count – I wanna say…Chocula?
Olaf.