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Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage
- zizee 12y agoMade me think of this story: But Demikhov became even more famous for another crazy transplant experiment: Dog head transplants. Following a first successful transplant by his colleague Professor A. G. Konevskiy at the Volgograd State Medical University, Demikhov started to regularly exchange heads of dogs. http://io9.com/5776600/the-story-of-the-giant-dog-headed-robot-that-never-was http://io9.com/5776600/the-story-of-the-giant-dog-headed-rob...
- arm55 12y agoI'm glad that there are people out there thinking about these things. I've witnessed first hand some pretty amazing limb functionality improvements through nerve repair and definitely understand his confidence in that realm. However, I can't think of a scenario in which testing this really could be justified. The one that comes to mind first, of course, is a quadriplegic. But really, we'd be putting a real person through an incredibly traumatic procedure with a high likelihood of fatality for a chance at motility. I don't think there'd be much support for that.
- tyleregeto 12y agoA body (or bodies) involved in a fatal accident are perfect test subjects.
- underlines 12y agoWhat if a conscious person 100% agrees to donating him/herself as a subject for such a test (as a Reciever)? What if the bodies come from brain-dead patients who have fully admitted to donating their bodies (As a donor)? I see no problem here if all involved persons accept to the procedure. And yes there will always be shady circumstances, but we also have that today with life-insurances, faked deaths, black market organ trade etc. Why not just ask people? Why do we always have to talk 100 years about it being ethically OK, when there are people that WANT to be volunteers.
- meric 12y agoI think they would probably test it on smaller mammals first, e.g. rats, and practice until the success rate is 90%+, then move on to bigger animals, and so on, and when they perfect the technique, try it on humans. I don't think I'll support it, but I think that would be more easily acceptable if it can be shown the mortality rate can be kept low.
- rtpg 12y ago>In 1970, Robert White and his colleagues successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey on the body of another one, whose head had simultaneously been removed. The monkey lived 8 days and was, by all measures, normal, having suffered no complications.[28] I would think that living only 8 days would be a "complication"
- rosser 12y agoGiven the medical technology available in 1970 and an intent of, "Well, let's see what happens...", the subject's death was assumed and fully expected. Frankly, that the monkey survived 8 days in those circumstances is impressive.
- rtpg 12y agoIt's impressive, but when I read "no complications" that to me means "walking away pretty much unscathed". Just odd phrasing, maybe it's common in this sort of research
- rosser 12y agoPerhaps reading the phrase "no complications" with an implicit unexpected in there would make it more palatable?
- qwerty_asdf 12y agoI would guess that the experiment wouldn't be permitted to prolong the animal's life in such an admittedly abnormal state, since the surgery might be regarded as a form of unusual cruelty in and of itself. It was probably classified as a "non-survival surgery" and a "painful procedure without the use of pain-relieving drugs", since they would be permitting the monkey to re-awaken and test its senses in a lucid state, after a surgery in which they were uncertain of whether the monkey would live. An animal protocol like that usually anticipates euthanasia, after the basic science of the experiment has been satisfied. Since the surgery (and subsequent resuscitation) is the experiment, and it's not a longitudinal quality-of-life study, I doubt they planned retaining the monkey much more than a week after surgery.
- zizee 12y agoIf they can successfully do this, it raises interesting questions/opportunities to grow a brainless clone of yourself in a vat, then transplant your head from your elderly body onto a fresh new body. I don't think the transfer will necessarily make your brain young and fresh again, but it might have unexpected positive effects: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9615779/Transfusion-of-young-blood-could-delay-onset-of-diseases-like-Alzheimers.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9615779/Transfusion-of-you... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325093659.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325093659.ht...
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- Cthulhu_ 12y agoThere have been experiments that show getting 'young' blood transfused has a rejuvinating effect; might be that works on the brain too to some degree. But for now, there will be limits. Not to mention moral issues - is a clone of you sentient? Can you kill it off in order to preserve your own self?
- adrianN 12y agoIf it is a brainless clone then it's not sentient. I don't see the moral issue. It's the same as growing a replacement organ, you just grow all of them at once.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago> There have been experiments that show getting 'young' blood transfused has a rejuvinating effect As proven in the seminal paper by Stoker, B
- zizee 12y agoThere have been experiments that show getting 'young' blood transfused has a rejuvinating effect Indeed, those links I supplied in my original comment were to that effect. moral issues - is a clone of you sentient Definitely an interesting issue, but one I tried to head off by writing "brainless clone" in my original comment. I guess there would be moral questions about how one could create a clone without a brain. The easiest would be to interfere with the fetus to cause brain death, which does introduce the moral quandary. Personally, I would say that a clone with its brain intact should be considered it's own person. A clone would essentially be your identical twin, just a different age. It would not be ok to kill off your twin, even if they have a goatee :-)
- mbenjaminsmith 12y agoCan anyone here better explain the hand-wavy stuff about re-connecting the spinal cord? I (incorrectly or not) think of the spinal cord as bunch of wires, presumably that have to be connected to the correct counterpart individually. In the article they talk about reconnecting the spinal column in ~2 minutes, which seems to rule that out.
- dmitrygr 12y agoThey explained that a few compounds including polyethylene glycol can help glue the nerves together and function (transmit electrical impulses), as they claim, at 10% efficiency. They then state that better compounds exist and that efficiency can also be improved with some other chemicals. At least so I read it
- mbenjaminsmith 12y agoYeah I caught that. I'm wondering more about the alignment problem. You wouldn't, for example, just glue a severed bundle of fiber optics back together without reconnecting each strand individually.
- dmitrygr 12y agoWhy not? Brains adapt very well. Monkeys given a brain implanted electrodes that control a mechanical arm learned to use it in days. I am pretty sure that with some therapy you could use all your limbs quite well if i swapped the neurons that go to them haphazardly. And it would probably take months, not years of therapy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity
- jonmrodriguez 12y agoIf you connected through a silicon interposer you could use an FPGA or something similar on the silicon to rearrange and possibly even transcode the signals as needed. Some sort of precise robot similar to a wire-bonding machine could make bonds between nerve ends and pads on the silicon. And then maybe fill the whole area with something solid like epoxy so the bonds don't move or loosen?
- dmitrygr 12y agoThis may be the coolest thing i've ever read. It also reminds me of an old Russian science fiction book "Professor Dowell's Head" a little
- benatkin 12y agoShouldn't it be called body transplantation?
- JoshTriplett 12y agoArguably, this isn't a "head/spine transplant", it's a "body transplant". Whichever part the brain is in is the important part.
- csense 12y agoWhat if it turns out that people can greatly extend their lifespans, or even live forever, by undergoing successive head transplants -- but every time one person gets transplanted, someone else has to die to provide the body? What if we're headed for a world where the rich and powerful hire body snatchers to kidnap people off the street to provide bodies whenever they need a transplant? What if there are loopholes in the criminal justice system or covert government agencies that will allow people with the right connections to get access to an organized supply of helpless victims?
- dmitrygr 12y agoScary, but science marches on no matter the possible misuses of it. Outlaw it here and China'll do it. Outlaw it there and Russia will. Outlaw it there and somebody will buy an aircraft carrier and pay to do this in international waters. It will happen eventually. Might as well enable it and provide ethical guidance as opposed to banning it and letting someone else do it covertly and with no oversight or considerations of ethical ramifications.
- sqrt17 12y agoSorry, but the "science marches on" bit is bullshit. There's a difference between Russia and China having the atomic bomb and your friendly neighbourhood drug mafia having one. It also makes a difference whether China gets a bad rapping for pumping political prisoners full of anticoagulants before shooting them so that they can serve as organ donors, after the execution, or whether they can do that in the full conscience that such things are considered desirable and normal. If a technology has only criminal uses, it is commonly accepted that research into it is not worthwile. Think of all the exciting ways to build new explosives that are more suitable for suicide bombers, or of all the new and exciting ways of taking planes off the sky with a store-bought laser pointer. These must surely be things that science will pass through eventually, but I doubt anyone will be encouraged or funded to do so.
- fractallyte 12y agoConversely, when embryonic stem cell research was crippled in the US in 2006, South Korea (and others) leapt ahead... China, for instance, has no legislation prohibiting such research - the ethics are judged quite differently in other economic (and even religious) cultures.
- joe_the_user 12y agoThe obvious crazy-sci-fi use of this is transplanting an older head/brain into a younger, cloned body. While this would only happen many years in the future, if at all, to say this raises ethical issues is a serious understatement.
- atmosx 12y agoOh there are tons of similar issues ranging from physics (teleportation/entanglment) to medicine, science is cruel :-)
- sqrt17 12y agoThe other obvious crazy-sci-fi scenario would be a young person who survives a massive organ failure by getting their head grafted onto a 70-year-old donor's body. That sounds pretty intense as a topic for a novel.
- Pitarou 12y agoI foresee a future dominated by wealthy, semi-senile "immortals" in virile, muscular young vat-grown bodies. At least, I hope they're vat-grown.
- redthrowaway 12y agoPlenty of people die from traumatic head injuries leaving otherwise healthy bodies. There's lots of potential donors. Even with new bodies, however, aging takes quite the toll on the brain. Fixing that would likely fix the need for body transplants, and not fixing it would make more than a single transplant a depressing prospect. The clearest use for this technique, were it ever viable, would be just what the article stated: the treatment of otherwise terminal illnesses (or, for that matter, massive body trauma).
- prawn 12y agoArrange in advance to donate your healthy body at the time of your death to someone in exchange for money going towards the future of your family. A form of life insurance.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago> Plenty of people die from traumatic head injuries leaving otherwise healthy bodies. There's lots of potential donors. If this tech is available, I can see much more "accidents" happening.
- Cthulhu_ 12y agoIf it's a human head on some other human's body, I wonder what the psychological effects will be; IIRC, limbs have been transplanted before, and in some cases they were removed again because the recipient rejected it mentally - that's not my arm.
- jzwinck 12y agoThe paper envisions post-op reproduction as possible: "The chimera would carry the mind of the recipient but, should he or she reproduce, the offspring would carry the genetic inheritance of the donor." If the head and the body came from citizens of two different countries, what citizenship would the child have, presuming it is born in a land where citizenship flows from that one parent?
- err4nt 12y agoIt would be the same nationality as the parents Passport
- PhasmaFelis 12y agoAssuming a rational legal decision, as opposed to a pitchforks-and-torches one, I think that legal identity would have to be attached to the mind rather than the body. If the body currently belongs to a recognized citizen, then offspring of the body should be treated as offspring of the citizen, regardless of who may have previously owned it.
- robbiep 12y agoTo all those commenting as though this will be happening next year or next month, the realistic view is that until we have the technology to restore function in a quadriplegic we will not be performing head transplants anytime soon. A project outline is just a project outline- only a step up from a napkin doodle. I have actually sat down with friends of mine over a dozen scotches and made 'project outlines' that involve wiring up circulatory systems to a redundant twin, or a immuno-naive xenograft (read: pig). Came up with some hilarious medical chat regarding the procedure. Whilst it's all well and good to talk about the surgical procedures that would be required and the drugs and machines you could use during different parts of a procedure there's a long way from chat to implementation. Not to say that some human centipede stuff isn't possible given the right twisted individual and correct resources and time
- StavrosK 12y agoWhat's hard about connecting spines? Is it that the nerves don't "match up"?
- robbiep 12y agoIt's been mentioned elsewhere but neuroplasticity means it doesn't matter about 'matching up'. The problem is making the connections stick and regrow. At the moment we can't do this with the spinal cord. Peripheral nervous system nerves regrow if they are lined up correctly, although the fastest speed they will regrow at is 1mm per day. even if you could get central nervous system nerves to regrow like this you are looking at around 4 years for the average person to regrow the nerve to move their big toe (around 1500mm from base of spine to toe). Then you need to ensure that the sensory nerve roots, which have their nerve bodies in the dorsal root ganglion of the spinal cord, will grow up to the brain and integrate in the brainstem with the ascending 'last leg' nerves. Other people are talking about glues and other substances that may speed this up (ie instead of requiring a nerve to regrow it could just attach to the other side and start working, like having a set of ethernet cables from the brain and just plugging them into the other side) however they are all just as experimental as the general concept of removing and replacing a head as far as I can tell
- mkempe 12y agoPart of the plot in dystopic This Perfect Day, by Ira Levine. Heinlein had an interesting twist in I Will Fear No Evil -- old billionaire male gets brain transplanted into body of a young female.
- fuzzythinker 12y agoA new way for sex change coming? The ability to do the almost impossible adam's apple change, along with the body in a single step.
- PhasmaFelis 12y agoThe Adam's apple is actually really easy--google "tracheal shave." The visible bump is just cartilage; shaving it down is an outpatient surgery, and the scar is virtually invisible after a couple of months. But yeah, I also thought of transgender applications. Hmm... I'm not sure if the logistics work if we're getting the bodies from head-trauma victims. For one thing, they'll probably go to saving lives first. Even if there's no immediate need and the body won't keep, can you imagine that conversation? "Yes, we have an eligible female body on ice and waiting for you. Be at the hospital in an hour, and plan to spend the next year or four in recovery. Hope you've got really great insurance." But if we get to the point where donor bodies can be cloned from the patient's DNA and grown in vitro, it should be feasible to flip that one chromosome. That would be a hell of a thing.
- nsxwolf 12y agoIt's a body transplant.