New Scientist has an article titled 5 things you're dying to ask about head transplants. Yeah, someone said we can expect to be able to do head transplants in a few years, so the media are all wound up and asking stupid questions. Here are the questions New Scientist thought were really important.
What’s the difference between brain and head transplants?
Could the transplant technique work for a cryogenically frozen head?
Would the surgery be psychologically damaging?
I’m a registered organ donor. Could my body be used for this?
There’s one more. It’s so stupid and misleading that I had to single it out.
Would there be any benefits apart from getting a healthier body?
If the recipient head is older than the donor body, they may get a rejuvenating boost. Infusions of young blood can raise physical endurance and cognitive function in older animals. A study is now seeing if young blood has the same effect on people with Alzheimer’s.
Look. Transplanting your head to another body would involve severing your spinal cord. We do not have a way to repair damaged spinal cords in any reliable, significant way; there have been a few promising leads that hint at partial restoration of function in spinal cord injuries, but no, you would not be getting a healthier body. You would be getting an inert, insensate, 150 pound organic life support system attached to your isolated head. The physical endurance of your body is relatively irrelevant if it’s paralyzed.
The guy who is proposing this surgery, Sergio Canavero, is making exaggerated claims for spinal regeneration that are not supported by any credible scientific evidence. He’s claiming that the patients would be able to walk within a year.
It’s all bullshit.
Do it in mice first; if it’s as simple as fusing cleanly cut ends of the nervous system with ethylene glycol, I’d expect to see at least a preliminary demonstration in animal models. It hasn’t been done.
Someone’s been watching too much Beverly Hillbillies. Yes, I’m old enough to have watched the Hillbillies. Get off my lawn.
If he can transplant heads, it should be trivial to cure quadriplegics and paraplegics. Why isn’t he proposing to do that?
Also, where are they getting all those healthy, head free bodies from?
Motorcyclists.
PZ:
No, we don’t, and spinal surgeries have an abysmal success rate. If it weren’t so, there wouldn’t be so many people dealing with bad spines, including myself. :grumble grumble:
“Also, where are they getting all those healthy, head free bodies from?” – IS
Hmm, I know that motorcyclists are also called “donated organs in spe”, but currently we don’t have enough organs to keep young people with damaged organs from dying, but I guess it’s more important to keep old people with big wallets from dying.
He’s proposing CYBERMAN!!! Where they just replace the body with an anthropoidal mechanisms. Easy-peasy.
He’s just assuming; a body, severed from a head, is still fully functional, and another head can just be attached (the wiring is just a little complicated). We just need a little time to work out the wiring details. “Be right back, in a few years.”
Umm. I’m a motorcyclist, and you may have my body over my cold, dead…
erm…
As you were.
Giliell @ 3
Step One) Ensure that the poor and socially undesirable across the planet are provided with excellent healthcare and nutrition.
Step Two) Make debt punishable by beheading.
Step Three) Profit.
Okay, perhaps that’s slightly too cynical. I can’t imagine such a thing–were it even possible–benefitting us plebs, though.
it is true but the definition of the word few is not a number but a comparative amount as used here. compared to a human live or civilization the development of agriculture or life on earth? A few probably means 50 to 100 yrs. as opposed to the latest 5 year plan.
uncle frogy
Let’s just cut through the bullshit with this simple question: What has this guy actually done?
I too am a biker, and believe me when I tell you, you are not going to want this body when I’m through with it.
This is reminding me of the old Head of Vecna thing from D&D…
@shala: classic!
Pfft – curing nerve injuries is a cinch; salamanders do it all the time.
And for head transplants – ask a flatworm
Perhaps the good doctor is just trying to ask the age-old question:
Why won’t god heal amputees?
Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies: “Full noggin replacement”
If she could do it why not now?
A distinction should be made between spinal cord surgeries (of which, aside from tumor removal, there really is none) and vertebral column surgery (what is typically called spine surgery).
Properly indicated, most vertebral column surgeries have half-way decent success rates. (80%+) Problem is, those indications only occur in about 1-2% of the patient population that has back/spine problems, and a fair number of the 98-99% still get offered spine surgery, due to various factors (chief among them, in the US system, spine surgeries are mondo profitable for everyone involved except the patient….), when, honestly, they probably shouldn’t be.
I think it was Ed Brayton who once described a person as the world’s only surviving brain donor.
The solution, of course, is to keep the donor body’s head and just attach yours ala Rosie Greer/Ray Milland.
Amphiox @18:
Been through my own vertebral column surgery, with steel rods to mitigate my scoliosis. Think it’s been about a decade, and I’m doing well. Downside is that the base of my spine takes on more wear and tear, so I certainly hope surgeons make progress in pace with my entropy.
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I remember reading about a survey where they asked children (I forget what age, but pretty young) about what would happen in a pig-human brain transplant, and most seemed to expect the human body to retain the same identity, but with some pig-like thoughts and behaviors. I almost expected the media to ask questions suggesting a similar line of thought.
Of course, there are those urban legends about donated organs affecting the personality of the beneficiary.
Bah, we gotta figure out how to keep the heads in jars first, then give ’em robot bodies.
New Scientist is just doing the logical follow-up to their heady story on nut transplants.
They forgot to ask the most important question:
Me @24
I see “q cite” doesn’t work here.
The question is “Will they have to remove my head from my ass before replacing it?”
Maybe this is what he has in mind.
Yeah, transplant me on a Giant Freakin’ Robot. But, fix the neural regeneration stuff first
Wasn’t this the plot of the last X-Files movie?
Unfortunately because of the Tea Party legislature, in Georgia you will NOT be transplanting your head onto a glow-in-the-dark human/squid hybrid. Damn!
“Do it in mice first”
I seem to recall this was done on monkeys back in the 60s/70s. Partly successful, in that the monkey(s) survived, albeit not for much more than a week.
And suddenly I’m reminded of that movie, Face/Off and an article that referenced it but took a more realistic expectation for face transplants: There’s more to a face than skin, namely the bone and muscle underneath it. So no, transplanting someone’s facial skin onto you won’t do much to aid identity theft.
Am I the only one thinking of Professor Dowell’s Head? It’s an old russian SF novel where a mad scientist tries exactly that. Or, actually, a not-so-cometent mad student, wo keeps the head of said professor alive because he can’t figure out spinal cord reconnection on his own
From Modern Family, last night:
Dylan: “But I can sense that’s she’s okay. It’s like we share the same brain.”
Alex: “Who has it now?”
Just think of it! Immortal, increasingly addled Donald Trumps and Koch brothers! Time to pass an age-limit on supreme court justices and congressbeasts before they catch on. Maybe we should cull the rich now before we wind up with immortal Paris Hiltons and Kardashians. Dick Cheney is already vampiring off some motorcylist’s heart -imagine a world crawling with prune-headed immortal plutocrats!
Edgar Rice Burroughs did (chessmen of mars) and his suggestion was a swift sword-stroke to the head…
I think Mary Roach wrote about this in Stiff:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Demikhov
My personal favorite severed-head-kept-alive-by-mad-scientist movie: http://youtu.be/3Wx3Ryjcmtk
In “Sword of the Lictor” by Gene Wolfe, the protagonist meets an ancient emperor, who has had his head transplanted unto the body of a servant, though the old head remains. He manages to defeat the emperor due to a flaw in the method; only the voluntary nerve paths had been transferred. So, when the protagonist strikes at the head of the emperor, the hands of the body reflexively protect the old head, instead of the new.
Even the most conventional solid organ transplants don’t get you back to normal (unless you have an identical twin with a fully compatible organ to spare). You are stuck with an on-going regime of immunosuppressants that has its own share of problems. It beats dying, if that’s the alternative, but it’s not something you do on a lark.
In this case, you’re going to have to contend with the new body’s immune system rejecting your head–deservedly so, one might argue in this case. You wouldn’t do it for cosmetic reasons. Whether you’d do it to save your life depends on how desperate you are I guess.
Mandatory STTOS reference: “Brain, Brain, what is this brain?” If Bones could do it, maybe it’s not so hard.
I’ve heard of this full body transplant proposed before, somewhere. In that discussion, the target patient population were quadruplegics whose bodies were deteriorating for various reasons (including intractable pressure sores threatening risk for life threatening infections).
The idea being that they will remain quadruplegic before and after the procedure.
#30, Jimthefrog:
But if true that would be fantastic news! This level of technology would be more than adequate to keep the most deserving citizens with us for a long, long time. Think what the world could be like if it doesn’t have to part with great minds such as Dick Cheney or Donald Trump, who, no doubt, would happily invest in a spare body every couple of days.
Let’s see, one bodyswap every six days (“more than a week” * “not a monkey” – safety margin) over a thousand years (let’s start small) would add up to roughly 61,000
peoplebodies a head (hah!). Totally worth it. Plus there’d be plenty ofpoor peopleavailable spares thanks to anti-abortion laws, stripped down education, lack of support and such. And I seem to remember some US states were recently struggling to find new means of execution for their ample prison populations. There’s an angle there that could work out very well for (almost) everyone.Come to think of it, it would only be insane to not do this. Igor, prepare the laboratory and set up the lightning rod!
This story caught my attention because I recently read “Use of Weapons.”
While it is a well known fact in certain circles that Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch co-own a small island in SE Asia where they maintain a facility in which they raise war orphans from whom they harvest organs in their quest to live forever, it has not been proven that they have expanded their plans to include maintaining a stock of young men to transplant their brains into in case of massive organ failure.
Another example of brain transplant is Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil. A crusty old dying billionaire [typical in later Heinlein} has his brain transplanted to the body of his murdered hottie secretary whose personality remains in the body.
No! Do it to Julia!
(Sorry… I had to)
Frankly, the technology that would enable a quadriplegic to neurally control a robotic body (it’s a brain implant plus a wifi transmitter plus a suit of powered armour, all technologies already in the works) is likely to be available far sooner than any process that can regrow/reconnect severed spinal cord axons.
LykeX @37:
I though Severian struck at the old head, which was still running the boring stuff like the heart & lungs. Didn’t he get the idea when he saw the old head mouthing the words “kill me”?
It’s about time to reread those books. I love that series.
Halfway through “Use of Weapons” right now. That was a neat little trick, aye?
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Even if we did solve the spinal cord problem, the drugs required to keep transplants from being rejected would shit all over that “healthier” body, right? I was on a very low dosage of a kidney transplant drug for a while (immune suppressants are occasionally used for really severe eczema, it turns out) and I had instructions to go back to my doctor immediately if I so much as thought I might be getting a cold.
Okay, but is anybody working on Futurama-style head jars yet?
Cheney needs to start out with getting a hemorrhoid transplant.
Larry Niven wrote a lot of stories based on organ transplants – running a red light would get you broken up for parts. In one, the organ-legger keeps the body whole, gets his brain transplanted in, and takes over the victim’s identity.
(In another, mental patients that had been frozen awaiting a cure are revived so they can’t be chopped up. When they are told what was going on, they all freaked out, except the paranoids, who just shrugged.)
I’d say it is very difficult to splice two spinal cords together. There are a lot of strands, and no identifying marks, and no reason for the two to match up in cross-section. You’d have to track every nerve end-to-end. (I get the vague impression that the brain can adapt to some odd changes (upside-down glasses, for one), so just maybe it could learn that the arm controls now work the leg, but re-tracking the whole body would take some serious time, and that would nly be the voluntary functions.)
@8
Well then I’m proposing what I call ‘Ironsides’ to fight them off.
used tolike this blog. Now its opening spam pages in new browser tabs. Even catholicandproud dont stoop that low.
Doesn’t happen to me. Perhaps you should be looking at your own browser settings?
The Poopyhead @4
Or, as we called them in ER, donorcyclists.
Although when we do figure this one out, the arguments between Full Body Transplant Recipients and Transactivists will be “fun”.
Colin J #48
It’s been a while since I read them myself, so I may have gotten it backwards.
Damn good books, though.
“You would be getting an inert, insensate, 150 pound organic life support system attached to your isolated head.”
So… it’s really more of a weight loss plan?
In addition to The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, there’s They Saved Hitler’s Brain. I’ve never seen it, but I hear it’s pretty bad.
Steve Martin gave the subject a fine comedy turn in The Man with Two Brains. And Doctor Who battled The Brain of Morbius transplanted into some lobster-like creature.
I only recall reading one SF novel featuring head transplants. That was Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day in which it was standard practice — but only for the elite who ran the world.
In about 1000 years we will have Nixon again as president of Earth: http://couldthishappen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Robot_Nixon_body.jpg
Well, thanks for raining on my parade, PZ.
I was just getting my hopes up that I might be able to trade in my head for a more handsomer one.
Lawrence Sanders’ bureaucratic dystopia “The Tomorrow File” includes a very important brain being taken, head included, off the body and kept alive in a glass tank.
Also includes some gay sex, book-loving terrorists, and enough word reworking to nicely set the “near future” world apart.
That stuff about strikes me as superstition.
There’s a Dick Cheney joke somewhere in here, but it just isn’t coming to me.