Frankenstein becoming real :/

[rtxoff]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530103.700-first-human-head-transplant-could-happen-in-two-years.html?full=true&print=true#.VO8g9WcYrSF

Not sure if this is serious.

[xenomorph555]

At first I red hand, then I realised it said head... creepy. Where to get donors though.

[Scotius]

Head of a volunteer suffering from a lethal, incurable disease. And body of a patient in a vegetative state (braindead) who signed organ donor agreement.

[AngelLestat]

Yeah it has a lot of ethical implications and I think they need a lot more advances to even try it. They just drop the idea to test people opinions.

The religious people of course will be against due the soul aspect.

I am not religious but the body is part of our personality...

To make this more clear.. Imagine that they transplant a head to an opposite se.x body.

The hormones are different, all the electical impulse of the body acts different, each cell of the body may be addicted to different kind of sustains (sugar, smoke, adrenalin, other tastes). All that may restructure the brain and personality.

Edited February 27, 2015 by AngelLestat
translations errors

[Kryten]

No, this isn't going to be remotely possible in this kind of timeframe. Reconnecting the entire spinal cord would be orders of magnitude more neuronal connections than we've able to manage so far, and keeping the body alive without any input from the brain while this is happening is far beyond what anybody's done in that area. That this one guy's statements are being regurgitated by even such sites as new scientist is a pretty shocking indictment of the state of science journalism in 2015, and the only site I've seen with reasonable factchecking is sodding Buzzfeed.

[Yakuzi]

The ethical implications would be enormous...

Biologically/surgically speaking on the other hand. With the vast increase and refinement of molecular and surgical procedures available, it's only a matter of time (decades or centuries, not 2 years) before someone figures out to successfully perform a transplantation like this (biggest hurdles to overcome would be immune system suppression and neural connections as Kryten mentioned above).

I would suggest they'd test it on another (unfortunate?) animal species before naked bipedal apes, though I'm sure(ish) they thought this through.

Edited February 27, 2015 by Yakuzi

[Sidereus]

That this one guy's statements are being regurgitated by even such sites as new scientist is a pretty shocking indictment of the state of science journalism in 2015, and the only site I've seen with reasonable factchecking is sodding Buzzfeed.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backwardâ€â€reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.â€Â

― Michael Crichton

[Sampa]

In short...i don't like it. We should not be messing with stuff like this

[sgt_flyer]

At least, this guy should first focus his research onto the spinal cord fusion aspect before thinking about the rest - if it works, then they might be able to at least partially if not fully restore movement in a person who just suffered paralysis due to a spinal trauma in an accident. (Though doing the same for people who are already affected since some time might not be possible - once the axon is cut from the neuron's nucleus, the severed axon degrades.

So, this research is still interesting for emergency trauma treatments - (outside of the morals of switching heads - finding ways of repairing spinal cords is interesting)

[Skyler4856]

Are they certain that it isn't a body transplant

[Yukon0009]

Okay..........creepy.....

[Tommygun]

Have we learned nothing from previous failed experiments?

[RainDreamer]

I think it is amazing! If perfected, this kind of medical science can let us overcome many biological barriers of our bodies. If head transplant works on a biological body, one day it will works on a cybernetic body. People with disease like ALS can get a whole new body for them to live! So many things that can be achieved. Provide human doesn't use these knowledge on a more destructive path... Let just be willfully naive and hope so.

[Stargate525]

I can't imagine living with someone else's body. I mean... I KNOW this one. Having to learn all the oddities of the new one would drive me mad.

And... Wouldn't it almost be easier to transplant the brain? Open the skull, back of the neck, sever the cord, and swap it out? leaves the corrotid and jugular intact, doesn't interfere with the throat, and you don't have this bizarre... seam... around your neck.

[RainDreamer]

I can't imagine living with someone else's body. I mean... I KNOW this one. Having to learn all the oddities of the new one would drive me mad.

You would get used to it. But if the transfer is not with your consent, you would be living in hell, being trapped in a prison of flesh, where every sensation is alien to you, even when you get used to it, it is still very jarring when what your body is reporting is different from what your brain is expecting. Just ask a transgender person.

And... Wouldn't it almost be easier to transplant the brain? Open the skull, back of the neck, sever the cord, and swap it out? leaves the corrotid and jugular intact, doesn't interfere with the throat, and you don't have this bizarre... seam... around your neck.

Then someone slipped and a scalpel got stuck in your brain... I think keeping the brain in its safe box is better, unless there are reasons to remove it (accidents when the whole face is gone, for example, but the brain still survive)

[Stargate525]

You would get used to it. But if the transfer is not with your consent, you would be living in hell, being trapped in a prison of flesh, where every sensation is alien to you, even when you get used to it, it is still very jarring when what your body is reporting is different from what your brain is expecting. Just ask a transgender person.

Then someone slipped and a scalpel got stuck in your brain... I think keeping the brain in its safe box is better, unless there are reasons to remove it (accidents when the whole face is gone, for example, but the brain still survive)

Ehh, even then. I know the difference between a stomachache and hunger in my body. Who knows about this other one?

And personally, I'd risk the brain being dropped. I mean the argument then is they could also drop my head. And wouldn't it be better for anti-rejection measures having to deal with one organ, rather than an entire complex head?

[Nuke]

i have a feeling that no 2 nervous systems develop in exactly the same way. its like when you make network cables. you generally expect the cable to be wired in a certain way at both ends, if its not it simply wont work or worse cause damage to the hardware. brain is adaptive and so you could train it over an extended period of time to accept the new 'pinout', but i have a feeling this would be prohibitively expensive.

figure out how to fix existing cases of of severed spinal cords before you go playing around with whole head transplants. if you could figure out how to repair even the worst spinal cord damage with 100% recovery then swapping heads should be fairly straightforward. at least make it work in animals first.

[cicatrix]

I may be a bad and spoiled person since the forst thing I thought of having read about head transplantation was all the ways humans can abuse that - imagine body black markets, abductions, etc...

[megatiger78]

this is impossible, do not worry. heads cannot survive 5 seconds minus bodies.

[helaeon]

This has been undergoing research since before I was in high school (about 10 years ago), and back then someone managed to transplant a head from one chimp to another, but it was paralyzed of course. But, the brain survived.

So if this were to work completely they must have also figured out how to repair spinal breaks which is huge.

At the time, the research was looking at possibly cloning a body from stem cells and not worrying about how the brain formed, and plopping the old person's head or brain in a new body, their body. Possibly with some genetic and development problems corrected when the body was at the perfect time to do that. This is also the field as to why people are freezing their heads and not whole bodies anymore. Those people aren't coming back though, those cells are broken irreversibly I'm afraid.

On no two nervous systems develop the same way - that's true. But your brain is incredibly good at adapting and learning new nerve pathways, even when they aren't nerves. Like the prosthetic arms that use muscular stimulation to communicate with the brain. The brain figures out reasonably quickly how to operate the hand by sending specific messages to the pectoral muscle (for example).

[Scoundrel]

The actual concept itself is ridiculous, but the spinoff technologies from pursuing such an endeavour would be staggering. Just off the top of my head: an actual fix for spinal injuries; a clearer understanding of nerve pathways that would allow cybernetic replacement of human body parts (including going "full 'borg"!); the foundation for a cure for motor neuron disorders; better techniques and approaches to repairing severe trauma in patients.

These side benefits is likely why there's even remotely a discussion about the "ethics" of such an abominable procedure.

[Sirrobert]

Are they certain that it isn't a body transplant

Techniqually I think it is a full body transplant yes.

The head is where your personality is stored, so that would be the most logical anchor to define who the new person is. Everything forgein to that person has been transplanted.

Though the different physiology and hormone levels would obviously cause huge changes in personality

this is impossible, do not worry. heads cannot survive 5 seconds minus bodies.

Yet. Why couldn't a head survive without the body? All it gets from the body is blood.

If you can reroute the blood circulation in such a way that you can remove the head without interupting it's blood circulation, wouldn't that make it survive?

[Tommygun]

I'm not sure repairing the spine is necessary.

The University of Pittsburgh did an experiment that had a monkey controlling a robotic arm with just it brain connected to a computer.

If you take that a step further and have the computer act as an interface to control muscle.

The brain also regulates a lot of the bodies functions too, so it wouldn't be an easy task.

I don't see why it couldn't be done, but it will take a very long time to work out.

I can understand the "creepiness" of it, but people denounced the first heart transplants too.

[lajoswinkler]

The ethical implications would be enormous...

Why is everyone talking about this? What ethical implications? There are body donors everywhere.

With that said, a successful body transplant (it's not head transplant, because the head is the main unit) will not occur perhaps during our lifetime. Fixing the spinal cord is... it's just too much to even think about.

Even with that solved, there will have to be an extensive therapy, both pharmaceutical and physical, to actually connect the hormonal and nervous functions.

Nope, won't happen any time soon.

[cicatrix]

There is a 1925 sci-fi novell Professor Dowell's Head. All about ethics of this particular transplantation.