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Terminally Ill Man Willing to Have World's First Full Head Transplant
- stevep98 12y ago"the new body would come from a donor who is dead but otherwise healthy".... LOL
- inspector-g 12y agoWhile the procedure itself is clearly outlandish, is it that difficult to imagine a patient that died from brain-related complications (leaving the rest of their body in otherwise good shape)?
- bjwbell 12y agoFunding & staff are not there! Key quote "The cost... is estimated at over $10 million, ... the doctor has failed to secure funding for the surgery itself and for the staff of 150 doctors and nurses"
- nostromo 12y agoMore of a body transplant, no?
- gd1 12y agoThis annoys me too. It's not a "head transplant". You can't get a new head. You are your head. You're getting a new body is what's happening.
- big_maybe 12y agoWell technically you can get a new head. Once we figure out how to laplink your brain data over.
- manicdee 12y agoHow sure are you of that? What if it turns out that the brain is only a user interface and hardware abstraction layer to the body, with "you" actually being a colony of microbes living in the body (mainly the gut)?
- sridca 12y agoThis comment summarizes my opinion on this subject: "The doctor can easily prove his technique works by transplanting the heads of two rats, preferably a white and brown one. If they survive and could walk around, not only will he get all the funding he wants, but the Nobel Prize in Medicine."
- raverbashing 12y agoWell, I'd think rats pose different problems, but the essence is right. I believe heart transplants were first attempted on sheep (wikipedia failed me on this one)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Simp 12y agoSeems like it has already been done: In 2002, other head transplants were also conducted in Japan in rats. Unlike the head transplants performed by Dr. White, however, these head transplants involved grafting one rat's head onto the body of another rat that kept its head. Thus, the rat ended up with two heads.[10]
- dimitar 12y agoThis has been done over 100 years ago with dogs.
- toxicFork 12y agoI consider that to be even better! Did the other rat's head have any way to control anything in the body, or was it more like a guest?
- bjwbell 12y agoI'm guessing it's more like it died after a short period of time. If you look at the history of head transplants (yes a gruesome area), they ALL end badly for the subject.
- nsns 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
- cbd1984 12y agoAs it stands, there's a simple answer: The brain. The person is defined by having a specific brain; you can swap out literally everything else and the person will still be the same person. This will be more relevant when pieces of the brain are being swapped out.
- suchow 12y agoThough I find it hard to relate to, many people consider their bodies to be essential to their identity — they wouldn't be them without it. These people find our intuition about what is essential similarly foreign.
- cbd1984 12y agoSome people have body dysmorphia issues, and some people just really identify with looking a specific way. I understand that. However, some people really identify with living in a specific location, too, but we don't usually regard moving day as the death date of the person who moved.
- Sharlin 12y agoTo be fair, AFAIK we don't really know how much the rest of the nervous system is "attuned" to being connected to a specific brain and vice versa. That is, even if the brainstem could be 100% connected to the spinal cord, we don't know how hard it would be to adapt to the new body. Could it result in something resembling the alien hand syndrome [1] or body integrity identity disorder [2], for instance? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorde...
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- shultays 12y agoIs this even legal? If a procedure is 100% lethal, wouldn't it be murder? I mean it is murder even if both parties agrees right? What is different in this case
- copperx 12y agoYou're right; if the doctor demonstrates no malice it would be involuntary manslaughter, not murder.
- cbd1984 12y agoIf the procedure is 100% lethal in theory, it's doctor-assisted suicide, which is legal in some jurisdictions (in America) and illegal in others. If the procedure is 100% lethal in practice, but survivable in theory, it's medical research, and if good, non-coerced informed consent is given, I have a very hard time seeing any prosecutor prosecuting the case as even manslaughter or similar. After all, there are other procedures which are only performed when there's a small hope of success; CPR out in the field is one of them. (High-end survival estimate is less than 20%, more likely less than 10%.) http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/health/cpr-lifesaving-stats/ http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/10/health/cpr-lifesaving-stats/ http://apps.health.qld.gov.au/acp/Public_Section/Resuscitation_Planning/resuscitationPlanning2.aspx http://apps.health.qld.gov.au/acp/Public_Section/Resuscitati...
- creshal 12y agoAnother comparison would be bone marrow transplants, which can have a survival rate of 15-20% in some cases… but it's still better than not doing anything.
- 20kleagues 12y agoMedical science has to move forward, no?
- nextw33k 12y agoMedical science has, however this Doctor is just making an outlandish claim. There have been no tests on animals that worked and he's just hoping his method of joining the spinal cords will work. This isn't medicine, this is just someone with a superiority complex.
- onion2k 12y agoOnly within certain ethical constraints. Otherwise you're giving the nod to things like eugenics, which is demonstrably a bad idea.
- amelius 12y agoThe assumption of the doctor is that all nerves in the spines of two organisms are organized in exactly the same way. IANAMD, but this seems a bold assumption.
- quadrature 12y agoCertainly IANAMDAW but cases with people who have suffered from paralysis have shown that the brain has the capacity to rewire things through physical rehabilitation exercises, so maybe it is possible.
- neals 12y agoSeems difficult to exercise something like liver function and stuff. But yeah also IANAMDAWTF and the man is dying. Go for it, I'd say.
- donkeyd 12y ago> the new body would come from a donor who is dead but otherwise healthy Seems like a waste of a bunch of organs that could change many people's lives...
- Simp 12y agoOn Wikipedia i find 'It is argued that several up to now hopeless medical conditions might benefit from such procedure.[9][15]'. Many people's initial reaction is disgust. Which i don't blame them for. But what if we can move past this? It might be a great medical advancement.
- blackkettle 12y agodoesn't it just replace it with another (nearly) hopeless condition? success presumably means total quadriplegia - and this exacerbated most likely by 'total body rejection' - or maybe even 'head rejection' depending on who is in control!
- shiggerino 12y agoI'd suggest focusing on reattaching people's own severed spinal chords, to perfect the procedure before doing something as risky and speculative as a whole head transplant. If he can demonstrate that he can reliably reconnect all the correct nerves in one person's spinal chord, it would be a major breakthrough for millions of patients with spinal chord injuries, and then we can begin talking about connecting other people's, which I assume have different "pin-outs".
- david-given 12y agoFixing a broken spinal chord is probably rather more difficult (based on my extensive and indepth knowledge of the subject [ * ]), as there's likely to be a substantial section of damaged chord --- crushed, for example. A clean cut through an undamaged chord would provide two relatively undamaged surfaces. I have heard of work in regenerating severed spinal chords in rats. I'd be more inclined to be worried about whether the neurons on one side can usefully bind to the neurons on the other. AFAIK the nerve mapping in the spinal chord is more or less random. The rat experiment wouldn't test this, of course. [ * ] Disclaimer: while I have in-depth and extensive knowledge of some subjects, this is not one of them.
- shiggerino 12y agoThat makes sense, but as you say, the clean cut might not help the mapping problem. Even if you can somehow figure out which ones belong where that must be some very challenging microsurgery. Maybe it would be possible to make a electronic, prosthetic section of spine that can be reconfigured on the fly, a bit like an FPGA, that might be useful for both injuries (where a damaged section needs to be replaced) and clean cuts with unknown mapping. Unfortunately these kinds of brain-computer interfaces seem prone to scarring, weakening the signal over time.
- david-given 12y agoIt's probably easier to just let them hook up randomly and then stimulate the brain into relearning the mappings. Infants do this as a matter of course (that's what a lot of the random flailing babies do is for). An adult brain may need a substantial amount of chemical help, though. Ah, here's a short article on the work with rats: http://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-drug-boosts-nerve-regrowth-rats-spinal-cord-injuries http://www.iflscience.com/brain/new-drug-boosts-nerve-regrow...
- zamalek 12y agoMore on Dr. Hunt Batjer's opinion of the operation: > The problem is, fusing a head with a separate body (including spinal cord, jugular vein etc) could result in a hitherto never experienced level and quality of insanity.[1] [1]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/man-undergoing-head-transplant-could-experience-something-a-lot-worse-than-death-says-neurological-expert-10164423.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/man-undergoing-hea...
- anon4 12y agoExciting stuff, to be sure.
- fla 12y agoThis TED talk from Dr. Canavero explains it a bit further. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmGm_VVklvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmGm_VVklvo