5 Things You Need To Know About Head Transplants
Source : Almas Jacob - We Are Watchers
How much time do they have to attach the old head to the new body?
Less than 60 minutes. Once the recipient’s head (cooled to 10 to 15 degrees celsius) is detached, it must be joined to the new body and reconnected to the circulatory blood of the donor within the hour or risk irreversible brain damage.
What would it be like to inhabit a stranger’s body?
Valery Spiridonov, the first planned transplant patient, is undergoing virtual reality training to prepare for “unexpected psychological reactions.” Post-body switch, he will undergo psychiatric assessment and follow up “to ensure the stress or anxiety related to the procedure, recovery and new body is addressed and kept to a minimum,” according to the proposed protocol.
But could he end up an entirely different person?
One possibility is that he could awaken with his entire memories obliterated. “The person who wakes from head transplant surgery might have no consciousness of Spiridonov’s past and no sense of himself as Spiridonov,” University of Warwick philosophy professor Quassim Cassam writes in The Conversation. In essence, Spiridonov would no longer exist. “Instead, the surgery would bring into existence a new person who happens to have Spiridonov’s head.”
What’s the risk of rejection?
Aside from the biggest hurdle — re-connecting the severed spinal cords from two different people and restoring brain-motor function — the major obstacle is keeping the body from rejecting its new head. A head isn’t a single organ, like a heart or a liver. It consists of eyes, ears, nose, muscles, skin — and, most importantly, a brain. “We could, in theory give another body, just like you give another face, another heart, another lung,” said Sergio Canavero, the Italian surgeon performing the head transplant. “But in practice, the patient will die.”
Canavero said any body suitable for any other organ donation would work for a head transplant. “So a standard, brain-dead organ donor. The difference is, instead of saying, look, we’re taking the lungs, the skin, the cornea, we’re taking the body in one single go.”
How did we get here?
In 1908, French surgeon Alexis Carrel and American physiologist Charles Guthrie performed the first dog head transplantation, attaching one dog’s head onto another’s neck. The decapitated head was without blood flow for roughly 20 minutes. While the dog demonstrated “aural, visual and cutaneous reflex movements” when it awoke, according to a paper published in Acta Neurochirurgica, The European Journal of Neurosurgery, it was euthanized after a few hours.
In the 1950s, Soviet transplant pioneer Vladimir Demikhov conducted dog head transplants resulting in two-headed dogs, work that inspired Dr. Robert White, who successfully performed a head transplant on a monkey in 1970.
Who’s paying?
Canavero estimates the bill for his head transplant surgery will come in at around US$13million. “I’m asking today Russian billionaires and also foreign billionaires like (Facebook founder) Mark Zuckerberg, who is already sponsoring much of this life extension research, and this is certainly about extending life, to finance, to bankroll the first head transplant in Russia on Valery Spiridonov,” he said earlier this year. “To save Valery Spiridonov, we need Russia to help us!”
