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The Plan to Save a Life by Head Transplant
- kilroy123 10y agoHow is this procedure remotely legal? This man undergoing this "surgery" has virtually a 100% chance of dying and being killed in the process. I'm baffled by this, and can only assume it's all a big publicity stunt by the doctor.
- imagist 10y agoHe has virtually a 100% chance of dying with or without the surgery.
- k__ 10y agoMaybe for the greater good? He dies with or without it, if he wants to help humanity with his death, why shouldn't we let him?
- duncan_bayne 10y agoPresumably because the patient is a mentally sound adult, and judged capable of making his own decision.
- NamTaf 10y agoHow is sending people to Mars remotely legal? The astronauts undergoing this "mission" have virtually a 100% chance of dying and never making it back. How is a heart transplant remotely legal? The patient undergoing this "surgery" has virtually a 100% chance of dying and never waking up. How is crossing the Atlantic remotely legal? The crew undergoing this "voyage" have virtually a 100% chance of dying and never making it back. There's a lot of things that we as humans do to push the frontier of societal knowledge with the understanding that the first to venture into the unknown may well not make it back. It's (to me) a fascinating crossover between living as an discrete individual and living as an integral part of a higher collective. It's inevitable that as we progress, we'll continue to seek out those who through their specific circumstances are willing to risk that sacrifice to help the "greater good". As the article says, informed consent plays a significant part of making this more acceptable.
- matt_morgan 10y agoIt should really be called a "body transplant."
- jwn 10y agoThe article does mention that, but I don't think simply defining the base of the transplant as the section with the most mass accurately describes the situation. What part of the body defines a person's identity? Is it the head, or the rest of the body? I can see a case where the brain is considered the center of mass (from an operation standpoint).
- sevenless 10y agoGoing by center of mass means that for a sufficiently large tumor, you'd be talking about a patient-ectomy.
- jwn 10y agoI think that underscores the point about flexibility in naming operations ;)
- cthulhujr 10y agoCan it be defined as what is being replaced and discarded? When you have a heart transplant, they replace the heart with a new one and discard the old heart. In this case, they're discarding the body, so I see it as a body transplant. As others have noted, mass is meaningless in this context. Edit: The sources on wikipedia's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant article all call it a head transplant... so, I assume people more knowledgeable than I on the topic have already "talked it out". Head transplant it is!
- matt_morgan 10y agoI like that; and I like defining it as what part goes with the self. Your definition is probably cleaner but I think most of us feel like the "I" goes with the head no matter what else may change.
- sevenless 10y agoReading all those different, excruciatingly difficult surgical steps it sounds like it would be just about easier to give him a robot body, Futurama-Nixon style.
- maxerickson 10y agoThe head transplant boils down to 3 problems: microsurgery, nerve regeneration and immunotherapy. Each of which is incredibly complicated, but the understanding is there to do things like full hand transplants (they don't restore full function, but the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical). We have no idea how to artificially provide all the functions that the body carries out. We have some baby steps like dialysis, but how would the life support system deal with infections? Or take a look at the problems that various heart assist systems have with clotting and coagulation (blood likes to stick to the artificial surfaces).
- pmoriarty 10y ago"the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical" I don't think ethics works that way. Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical. Nuclear weapons are a case in point. Few will deny that they're very useful and effective weapons, but many believe their use to be unethical, no matter how useful they are. Chemical and biological weapons, and cluster bombs are other similar examples.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- SamReidHughes 10y agoFortunately we all understood this to be in the context of performing a medical operation.
- pmoriarty 10y agoI'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that usefulness trumps ethics in medicine but not in warfare? If so, why do you think that?
- Matt_Mickiewicz 10y agoAnybody else find the photo of the russian dog grafted onto the back for another disturbing?
- justbees 10y agoI want to know if anyone did NOT find it disturbing. So, yes, I found it disturbing. Related -> a cool synchronicity happened to me while reading this article. The Roky Erikson song Two-Headed Dog came on and I realized it must be referencing that experiment!
- justinlardinois 10y agoTo be honest I found it amusing. It looks so silly that I can't see it as real.
- Joeboy 10y agoHah, I experienced no such synchronicity but was motivated to put it on anyway.
- coredog64 10y agoYes, I'm more than a little freaked out by that.
- favorited 10y agoAnime flashbacks...
- broahmed 10y ago"...Christiaan Barnard, a South African who performed the first human heart transplant, technically killed the first donor, a brain-dead woman, by taking her off life support without her family’s permission and giving her an injection of potassium to render her legally dead." I was surprised to read this and naturally did some googling. I couldn't find anything about Christiaan Barnard taking the donor off of life support without her family's permission. Anyone know of evidence for this statement?
- irrational 10y agoRussians doing a head transplant? Why are they remaking that x-files movie?
- Raphmedia 10y agoI can't wait to order a nice fit dead body and transplant my head on it.
- mmastrac 10y agoWhy not just order your own clone (without a brain for ethical issues) instead?
- TD-Linux 10y agoThe delivery time is abysmal.
- Namrog84 10y agoI've always assumed if we are cloning humans for harvest and if you are cloning yourself that somehow your clone doesn't have to age the same way you did. But to the best of my knowledge you'd have to wait 18-25 years for adequate donor of your clone. It's a weird thing. Hopefully we don't do this (Ala The Island) but can just repair replace lab grown organ or in place replacement.
- Raphmedia 10y agoI remember a story (but can't remember the name) where they cloned babies at birth so that they would have spare parts of the correct age.
- maxxxxx 10y agoI wonder how a different body will affect the personality of the person. With different hormone levels you probably have different emotions.
- smellf 10y agoThe article goes into this. Not only the hormones that come from the body, but also the donor body's gut flora and differing physicality from the host's would in some ways make it a new, third person who emerges from the operating room.
- maxxxxx 10y agoI am at work so I could only skim the article. I am unsure about the ethics and I doubt they will succeed but it's certainly very interesting.
- sxcurry 10y agoI really wish they would quit torturing animals for this kind of garbage. If people are so desperate to live on, why not proceed directly to human experiments?
- rtkwe 10y agoIt's pretty simple human lives have more ethical weight than animals in pretty much every culture, and I agree. Also there's a massive amount of unknowns when it comes to biology most experiments won't work but we have no way of testing without trying it out.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 10y agoI see where you're coming from. One of my best friends does spinal cord research to repair severed spinal cords. This involves damaging the spinal cords of primates. It makes me feel uneasy, but there really is no other way and certainly experimenting on a person is less ethical than experimenting on an animal. No one wants to harm the animal.
- euyyn 10y agoExperimenting on the animal before doing it on the person is understandable. But it raises more ethical concerns, not fewer, due to the fact that the animal cannot possibly consent to the experiment.
- duncan_bayne 10y agoI think that's an example of category error. Animals aren't capable of consent because they aren't capable of comprehending either consent, or the experiment in question. If they were, they'd be human by any sensible definition. To rely on consent to perform animal experiments is like relying on my sandwich to consent to me eating it. It's just not a thing sandwiches are capable of doing.
- euyyn 10y agoNobody relies on consent to perform animal experiments, because animals can't consent, so I'm not sure where you're trying to go with that. Unlike the sandwich you're eating, animals are capable of suffering, which is why experimenting with them raises ethical issues to start with. Some people are incapable of comprehending consent, and are incapable of comprehending scientific experiments. Those people can't be subjects of experiments, precisely for that reason. You seem to be arguing for the opposite.
- 1812Overture 10y agoSeems like it would be a good idea to try this with a brain-dead head first to look for issues of tissue rejection etc before trying this on living person.
- sokoloff 10y agoFrom the article: Ren also wants to choreograph the surgery with cadavers and, as a final test, swap the heads of two brain-dead donors.
- 1812Overture 10y agoThanks, must have missed that.
- shmerl 10y agoSounds like Professor Dowell's Head[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Dowell's_Head https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Dowell's_Head