Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero plans to carry out the first head transplant within two years.

He says he wants to help people who are paralised or who have degenerative diseases. He already has his first patient ready and waiting: a 30-year-old Russian with a muscle wasting condition.

Dr Canavero, of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, plans to induce a state of hypothermia in both the head to be transplanted and the donor body before surgery.

After the operation, the patient will be kept comatose for three to four weeks to allow healing and fusing of the spinal column. He predicts that, after rehabilitation, the patient should be able to speak in his own voice and walk within a year.

It will, he says modestly, make immortality possible.

”We are one step closer to extend life indefinitely because, when I will be able to give a new body to an 80-year-old, they could live for another 40 years.”

Which makes me wonder how an 80-year-old head would look on a 40-year-old body?

“One of the reasons behind the critics is that many wealthy people will want a new head, as they will be the only ones who could afford the surgery.”

Which is true: the operation will cost $10 million.

We already have spare part surgery: hearts and kidneys can be replaced, new faces grafted onto the disfigured, hands transplanted.

This is the age of frightening science that Mary Shelley could only imagine 200 years ago when Victor Frankenstein built his creature from different body parts.

But is this a step too far?

Medically it probably is, at the moment, but science is evolving so quickly that a successful head transplant can only be a matter of time.

When it does become possible, there may well be questions of ethics and immortality to face but you can bet your mortgage that the wealthy will be at the front of the queue to pay $10 million for another 40 years of life, and another 40 after that, and so on into infinity.

By that time, face replacement will also have been refined to a cosmetic art, and billionaires can be forever handsome and beautiful and endlessly buy new bodies with a built-in six pack or enhanced female curvature. But not, necessarily, on the same body.

Sound like theplot of a totally unlikely science fiction novel?

That’s what the public thought about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when it was first published in 1818 and now body part surgery is the norm.