One scientist thinks head transplants are possible and likely in the near future
Science fiction is full of head transplants and brain transplants, and while we can transplant damn near everything else, and even though there has been very limited success with experimental head transplants in animals, it’s an idea many scientists don’t even want to consider for a number of reasons. But one Italian neuroscientist not only thinks it’s possible, but likely sooner than you might think.
In a new paper, Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Neuromodulation group, discusses how scientists have been experimenting with head transplants on animals for more than 40 years. But these doctors Frankenstein haven’t ever been able to complete the final step of connecting the spinal cord of one subject to the spinal cord of the other. Canavero thinks he’s found a solution:
The greatest technical hurdle to [a head transplant] is of course the reconnection of the donor’s (D)’s and recipients ®’s spinal cords. It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage…. [S]everal up to now hopeless medical connections might benefit from such a procedure.
A head transplant—not to be confused with the equally crazy brain transplant—involves decapitating a head and reattaching it to a donor body. Hypothetically, it’s a solution for quadriplegics experiencing widespread organ failure. It’s not going to help those people walk again, but say their bodies were failing them and their brains were still functioning? A head transplant would be a last resort.
Canavero uses the example of Case Western Reserve scientist Robert White to make his case. In 1970, White completed a head transplant with Rhesus monkeys. It was mostly successful—the recipient monkey was able to hear, taste, smell, and see, and it survived for a while after the operation was complete.
But the procedure is incredible risky. Both patients have to be in the same operating room, and the head being transplanted has to be cooled to between 55 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit. The donor body must also be chilled and placed under cardiac arrest. Surgeons must move fast to attach the head, and once that’s done, the donor body’s heart can be restarted, and the rest of the body’s systems revived. In summary, you have to be killed and chilled in order for a head transplant to happen.
The final step is the all-important spinal cord reconnection. This step has never even been attempted, so this is very, very theoretical. But Canavero cites an experiment from last week from Case Western Reserve and the Cleveland Clinic where scientists were able to sever and reattach the spinal cord in rats with moderate success. The rats were able to urinate again, but they couldn’t walk successfully. Canavero says this is possible in humans, by cutting cords with a super sharp knife then mechanically connecting the spinal cord of one person to the spinal cord of the other, fusing them together using a plastic, like polyethylene glycol.
Even if all of the above steps are completed, the patient survives and the transplant is considered a success, there’s no telling how much psychological therapy someone might require to re-train the brain to get used to the new body. Probably the rest of one’s life. When you’re born, your brain starts building a map of the body– where everything is, your dimensions, where everything is placed, what your hands and feet and knees and nipples look like etc. one of the reasons people often suffer phantom limb pain after amputation is because the brain still thinks there should be limbs where there aren’t any anymore. Now imagine if everything was slightly off from where your brain thinks it should be. That’s a hell of a mind fuck.
Notes