Live Head Transplant

roid · Post by **roid** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 8:47 am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_trans ... _instances

Actual instances

In the 1970s a group of scientists from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland Ohio, lead by Robert J. White, a neurosurgeon and professor of neurological surgery, performed a highly controversial operation to transplant the head of one monkey onto another’s body. The procedure was a success to some extent, with the animal being able to smell, taste, hear, and see the world around it. The operation involved cauterizing arteries and veins carefully while the head was being severed to prevent hypovolemia. Because the nerves were left entirely intact, connecting the brain to a blood supply kept it chemically alive. The animal survived for some time after the operation, even at times attempting to bite some of the staff. [1] In 2001 the operation was successfully repeated again on a monkey by the aforementioned Dr. White. [2]

The majority of neurosurgeons believe that head transplantation in humans will be possible in the near future. The procedure would most likely involve cooling the brain to the point where all neural activity stops. This is to prevent neurons from dying while the brain is being transplanted. In any case, few authorities support the risky procedure. Still, supporters note that the brain, unlike the liver for example, is an immunologically sound organ; there is no risk of the new body rejecting it. Ethical considerations, however, have thus far prevented any attempt by surgeons to transplant a human being's head.

holy crap! who knew about this?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 9:34 am

I know a few people who could use a complete brain transplant.

d3jake · Post by **d3jake** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 11:52 am

Now, would it be the old person on a new body? or the old body with a new brain? If it's the first one, then that might be a useful punishment depending upon who you swap heads to.

Dedman · Post by **Dedman** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 1:52 pm

This is for all you with beautiful girlfriends who got fat.

Will Robinson · Post by **Will Robinson** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:02 pm

This brings about a whole new meaning to the phrase \"Go screw yourself!\"
In fact it could bring a whole new industry to it!

Isaac · Post by **Isaac** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 3:09 pm

makes me wonder what this could lead up to in a thousand years...

Vindicator · Post by **Vindicator** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:44 pm

So lets say a guy gets a new body. Is he gay if he likes how his new cock looks?

Badboy · Post by **Badboy** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 6:02 pm

uh what if they put a guys brain in a chicks body....woah

Bet51987 · Post by **Bet51987** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 6:07 pm

Badboy wrote:uh what if they put a guys brain in a chicks body....woah

First off, she wouldn't be as bright as she was and when she played Descent she would type "Lag" every five minutes. Oh... and she would drive a tank.

Bettina

Dakatsu · Post by **Dakatsu** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 6:20 pm

Bet51987 wrote:
Badboy wrote:uh what if they put a guys brain in a chicks body....woah
First off, she wouldn't be as bright as she was and when she played Descent she would type "Lag" every five minutes. Oh... and she would drive a tank.

Bettina

LFMAO!

Mobius · Post by **Mobius** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 8:04 pm

I have known about this for many years. There are some photos of the surgery floating around the web too. Caution you though: they aint pretty!

Technically, a head transplant is not that tricky in reality. The problem is of course, the spinal cord must be severed in order to achieve \"success\" and I don't know about you, but when I get MY brain transplanted into a new body, I want to be able to walk around, run, jump, and make love using it!

That would be the real trick: making having the old and new spinal cords link up - so that you'd have to learn how to use your body again, from scratch, but that would only take a year - and maybe less.

Duper · Post by **Duper** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 8:29 pm

SAC 2Gig... here we come!

Badboy · Post by **Badboy** » Fri Jun 30, 2006 5:53 am

Lag.

roid · Post by **roid** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 4:14 am

Steven Hawking seems happy enough, thesedays it seems his body's only a life suport system for his head anyway.

I recon with today's neuroscience we could successfully transplant a head and regrow the sliced neurons.

Badboy · Post by **Badboy** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 8:56 am

Yeah..or grow some meat in a tube.

Aggressor Prime · Post by **Aggressor Prime** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 7:00 pm

First, I would believe that a male head on a female body wouldn't work. The organisms would have to be very similar for the two parts to accept each other. And I don't like the idea of cutting someone's head off as a medical practice. Where are you going to get the new body from, kill someone?

Also, this sounds like Robocop. Except you would use a machine body.

roid · Post by **roid** » Sun Jul 02, 2006 9:16 pm

Aggressor Prime wrote:First, I would believe that a male head on a female body wouldn't work. The organisms would have to be very similar for the two parts to accept each other.

Yes perhaps, which is where neurons handy ability to learn/relearn comes in. They'd adapt (with extra help from some artificial neural regrowth encouraging chemicals and/or stemcells. huzzah!). From a larger standpoint, it's doubtful ANY 2 people's nervous systems are trained the same, regardless of sex. So a certain amount of re-learning would be involved regardless (where's Pandora when you need him). In The first few months (at least) post-operation you'd try to scratch your nose, but punch yourself in the face instead. Getting neurons to talk to one another is one thing, but getting them to actually understand eachother is another thing again - takes time. Luckily thesedays we have methods and medications to boost this learning process.

And if you're talking about inter-sex head transplants, then you arn't just transplanting a brain onto a body - you're also transplanting a cocktail of inter-sex hormones into your blood/brain chemistry. Probabaly something else to keep in mind.
The preservation of individual consciousness is what it's all about anyway, and (arguably... as depending on your personal definition of self) that would be preserved.

And I don't like the idea of cutting someone's head off as a medical practice. Where are you going to get the new body from, kill someone?

well it'd be a life-saving procedure. Since i have my doubts about the existance of a worthwhile afterlife, i like the idea of removing a head better than i like the idea of DYING, don't you?

it's plausible you could clone a body for yourself, alla The Island. But short of that, just harvest the body of someone who is brain-dead, ppl's brains die all the time. So, they need a brain, you need a body, pool your resources and party ^_^.

Also, this sounds like Robocop. Except you would use a machine body.

yep, fictional sci-fi is a good source of inspiration for researchers (*). Remember monkeys controling robots via thought has been done too?

* http://www.technovelgy.com a website dedicated to the documentation of such things: new REAL technologys which have been inspired by fictional sci-fi of the past.

Badboy · Post by **Badboy** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 8:17 am

roid wrote:
Aggressor Prime wrote:First, I would believe that a male head on a female body wouldn't work. The organisms would have to be very similar for the two parts to accept each other.
Yes perhaps, which is where neurons handy ability to learn/relearn comes in. They'd adapt (with extra help from some artificial neural regrowth encouraging chemicals and/or stemcells. huzzah!). From a larger standpoint, it's doubtful ANY 2 people's nervous systems are trained the same, regardless of sex. So a certain amount of re-learning would be involved regardless (where's Pandora when you need him). In The first few months (at least) post-operation you'd try to scratch your nose, but punch yourself in the face instead. Getting neurons to talk to one another is one thing, but getting them to actually understand eachother is another thing again - takes time. Luckily thesedays we have methods and medications to boost this learning process.

And if you're talking about inter-sex head transplants, then you arn't just transplanting a brain onto a body - you're also transplanting a cocktail of inter-sex hormones into your blood/brain chemistry. Probabaly something else to keep in mind.
The preservation of individual consciousness is what it's all about anyway, and (arguably... as depending on your personal definition of self) that would be preserved.

And I don't like the idea of cutting someone's head off as a medical practice. Where are you going to get the new body from, kill someone?
well it'd be a life-saving procedure. Since i have my doubts about the existance of a worthwhile afterlife, i like the idea of removing a head better than i like the idea of DYING, don't you?

it's plausible you could clone a body for yourself, alla The Island. But short of that, just harvest the body of someone who is brain-dead, ppl's brains die all the time. So, they need a brain, you need a body, pool your resources and party ^_^.

Also, this sounds like Robocop. Except you would use a machine body.
yep, fictional sci-fi is a good source of inspiration for researchers (*). Remember monkeys controling robots via thought has been done too?

* http://www.technovelgy.com a website dedicated to the documentation of such things: new REAL technologys which have been inspired by fictional sci-fi of the past.

wow nice explination, sounds like you have done this before, where do you work?

Anyway I have seen the Island thats a great movie. But to bring someone alive with someone elses brain isnt really right because they didn't ask for that body they wern't born with it. And it would be tough having to get the neurons and movements of that human to work correct and they might not work 100%. It would be alot of work,

I say If someone dies let them die God has a reason for that, man is trying to play god and bring life into his world. Man will be punished for that.

snoopy · Post by **snoopy** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 8:29 am

Hi, I'm Richard Nixon's head, and with my shiny new body I can rule the world!

Lothar · Post by **Lothar** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 11:42 am

I think it makes more sense to conceive of this as a body transplant than a head transplant... the head is the \"uniquely you\" section you're preserving, and the whole rest of the body is the life support system you're attaching it to.

I don't see any difference between this and a heart transplant, except for the physical mass of a whole body vs. a heart.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 10:00 pm

That's an interesting point... is it a \"head\" or \"everything else\" transplant?

I say lexically it can go either way... when you move a tree from A to B it's called transplanting, though you're not talking about replacing something the dirt lost.

roid · Post by **roid** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 2:25 am

Badboy wrote:wow nice explination, sounds like you have done this before, where do you work? Anyway I have seen the Island thats a great movie. But to bring someone alive with someone elses brain isnt really right because they didn't ask for that body they wern't born with it. And it would be tough having to get the neurons and movements of that human to work correct and they might not work 100%. It would be alot of work,

but no-one gets asked what we want before we're born, much to the disadvantage of transex people. Not to mention the issue that we don't even ask to live in the first place! it's more of a "Surprise! Welcome to the pointless mortal realm! Try the Pizza it's great!" no choice matter.

Badboy wrote:I say If someone dies let them die God has a reason for that, man is trying to play god and bring life into his world. Man will be punished for that.

well... i tell people i'm agnostic until i'm confronted with conservatives... then i tear off my clothes, slit the throat of a male goat, draw big pentagrams over my body with it's blood and wear it's head as a hat, then run around in a circle UNFUNF sodmomising it's corpse while screaming shrilly "GOD DOESN'T EXIST!!!" & laughing maniacly. Then at the end of it all i slam the head down on the carpet... stand atop it...

WRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!

gets the party started

roid · Post by **roid** » Fri Jul 14, 2006 2:43 am

so true about the \"is it a head trnasplant or a body transplant\" thing. Coz such things make one wonder about the nature of consciousness no? Is consciousness really ENTIRELY in your head? perhaps by seperateing the head from teh body, you are doing the equivalent of a LOBOTOMY on the person's personality! Just as a lobotomy seperates sections of the brain and changes who we are - we know that who we are is more than just stored in our brains, the most familure non-brain personality organ people realise is the heart - or maybe the gonads (you know, the \"little brain\"

). Ie: when we transplant a heart, aspects of teh personality are strangely taken with it.

what makes us who we are? what makes us... US?!

so a person who gets ANY form of organ transplant, are they really entirely themselvs anymore? but if they arn't themselves, who are they? and what has happened of the person who donated the heart, are they techniaclly still living while their heart lives in some other body? there are aspects of their persoanlity that are livign on!

with organ transplants we've already crossed the lines of entity seperation, where i can partially be you and you can partially be me.
Where does one draw the line? and wait a sec, who says we NEED a line?

do we perhaps assign our IDENTITY to the biggest mass of flesh? ie: a brain is just an organ. if removed... it could be considered seperate from the greater body. But we all beleive that our consciousness (as we currently understand it anyway) is located in the brain. So are we just our brains? Or are we our bodys, that can be seperated from our brains and seen as SEPERATE to our brain? who are WE? What makes us the entitys that we are?!

if we're just talking MASS, then what about if someone had radical lyposuction surgury, where the weight of the fat removed was GREATER than the mass that's left!

now we're talking about FAT ENTITYS

don't be afriad