Well, it was successful with monkeys in the 60s or 70s, whenever they tested it. Then made it illegal. So I'm interested to see the results of this experiment and how people react to it.
Seriously, this is amazing stuff! The fact that the one thing (aside from ethics) holding something like this back is the fusion of the spinal cord is just amazing to me. So, what he is saying is that if we were able to figure out how to re-fuse that spinal cord, this could occur? Edit: Question to anyone: what are the ethical problems people have with this?
I agree. I think it's awesome and kind of funny that we've gotten to the point of making things previously illegal, legal again because we're just so damn curious as a species :). I'm excited to see how this turns out.
Isn't it odd that parts of our body are held in more reverence than others? Why is the head so damn important? We do heart and liver transplants.... we even transplant eyes. Why shouldn't a functional body be transplanted on to a head? Obviously, we should perfect the process prior to attempting it in a practical way, but still, why do people have a problem with this? Is it because the body being "harvested" would have to have be only brain dead prior to transplant? Interesting stuff.
I think it has to do with how we recognize people. If I look at you and see your face, I'll recognize it next time I see it and assume that the body bearing that face, and that head is the same and that the entity within that body is the same as the one I interacted with the last time I saw the face. You could get a new internal organ and I would never know, you would appear the same.
I think the difference with transplanting a head is that ,as you need a live one to transplant, a person ends up dead. Like do we use vegetative state organ donors heads?
Yeah, we would need to use a vegetative state persons body and put a functional head on it from a quadriplegic, right? I suppose that would be a tough pill to swallow, but if a family was going to pull the plug anyways....
It's pretty crazy to think about what circumstances would make this borderline ethical. I don't know how my heart brain feels about it, but my science brain thinks it's awesome.
This is a really crazy thing to happen! On the first read, it reminded me of the Hindu mythological being/God Ganesha, whose head is slit by his father, unknowingly, and later an elephant's head, another Lord's 'vehicle', really, was transplanted onto his neck to revive him.
I almost got Ganesh tattooed while I was in Thailand this winter.
Imagine if this operation is the first step in healing spinal cord injuries. It would be revolutionary.The real issue is when we get down to the physiology of the situation. One of the problems that is brought up is the ability to heal the severed spinal cord, which is what would happen if you cut a head off and put it on a different body. You would try and fuse that spinal cord together. Our current technology doesn't allow that healing to occur," he said.
I was talking about this procedure with mk tonight and I mentioned that the fusing of the spine is the one big hurdle preventing it. I used the case of a quadriplegic benefiting from a head transplant and then he said, "why wouldn't they just fix his spine at that point?" -Becasuse at this point, they would have figured out how to re-fuse a spine, right?
In its current form, you could use this technique to keep a quadriplegic alive whose body/multiple organs systems were failing. Long term, with the way medicine is going I don't see much use for this kind of surgery. In the next few decades we'll just make you a new bit, rather than taking an old bit from someone else and forcing it to work with immunosuppressants. However I still think it's a worthwhile use of resources because of the possible benefits for the treatment of spinal cord injuries.
Don't suppose you have a link to a report on this? I'd love to read more.
Successful in the sense that a head was transferred from one to the other and continued to work lol. I also thought there was a life support due to legality component involved in the actual death, I haven't looked at the case since my freshman O chem class almost 10 years ago so my details are a little hazy.