Neuroscientist: First-Ever Human Head Transplant Is Now Possible

dryriver writes "Technical barriers to grafting one person's head onto another person's body can now be overcome, says Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group. In a recent paper, Canavero outlines a procedure modeled on successful head transplants which have been carried out in animals since 1970. The one problem with these transplants was that scientists were unable to connect the animals' spinal cords to their donor bodies, leaving them paralyzed below the point of transplant. But, says Canavero, recent advances in re-connecting spinal cords that are surgically severed mean that it should be technically feasible to do it in humans. (This is not the same as restoring nervous system function to quadriplegics or other victims of traumatic spinal cord injury.)"

Comments

head transplant, or body transplant?

[Trepidity]

I suppose it depends on whether a larger proportion of personal distinctiveness resides above or below the neck, but I would guess it's closer to a head getting a body transplant, than to a body getting a head transplant.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[ducomputergeek]

More over I thought the largest problem today is the fact that our bodies are outliving our minds as more people develop diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[UBfusion]

You mean weather the personal distinctiveness resides in the upper or lower head?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

What are you trying to say?

You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?

 

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[i kan reed]

Our hearts are the first critical thing to go, more often than anything. It's like a metaphor, really.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Samantha Wright]

The title of the article is "HEAVEN: The head anastomosis venture Project outline for the first human head transplantation with spinal linkage (GEMINI)."

I think the reasoning behind the nomenclature is from the surgeon's perspective: whatever part is smaller is being transplanted. After all, no one contests the term "brain transplant," which has been a figure of (mostly rhetorical and science fiction) speech for some time.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

More over I thought the largest problem today is the fact that our bodies are outliving our minds as more people develop diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.

Don't worry. If that happens, the brain - if you think it's important - can always be replaced with an electronic brain. A simple one would suffice, you'd just have to program it to say "What?", "I don't understand", and "Where's the tea?", and no one will be able to tell the difference in most people.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[CanHasDIY]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

Better than anything you've come up with... :P

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[Mabhatter]

How much DOES it really matter? Obviously there are people who's bodies have withered away like Steven hawking, or veterans with their bits blown away in war and they are still conscientiously "whole" people.

So if I can put a head on a new body, can I just attach it to a mechanical one made up of life supporting devices?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[NFN_NLN]

What are you trying to say?

You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?

Grabbing popcorn for thread on "where the soul is contained", in 3.. 2.. 1...

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[clarkkent09]

Terrible pump design? Show me a human designed pump that can operate for ~100 years at 60-100 beats a minute without stopping once and that under normal operation requires no maintenance.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[AmiMoJo]

He might be an industrial pump designer. Those things can easily outlast a human heart.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[king neckbeard]

But by comparison, it's pretty bad. The heart does one thing: pump blood. Compare that to the liver, which has a considerably lower failure rate and performs so many functions it's nearly a living thing on its own.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

Why those contraints?

This pump get 24x7 maintenance, and flow rate is all that matter not how often it pumps.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

You're going to be sad, it's not real. Same as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dahamma]

Wow, seriously? A pump that has an average lifespan of 80+ years, is able to adapt over time to varying long term loads and almost immediately to short term loads 2-3x the average, contains its own distributed timing mechanism and in many cases is capable of self healing. Yeah, that's a terrible piece of work, it is...

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

It gets 24x7 maintenance is prone to an entire list of defects, the timing mech often fails before the rest.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jythie]

If we are going to go with bad designes, we might as well start with the knees.... there is an area where human designers have done better then nature.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[clarkkent09]

First you have to decide on the definition of consciousness. If you take Oxford definition "the state of being awake and aware of oneâ(TM)s surroundings" then sensors throughout your body have something to do with it. I would think replacing your body with a different one (say a very sick or paralyzed or old body with a young and healthy one) would affect your consciousness.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[wvmarle]

It can at least give a whole new meaning to "transsexual"

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Not true. The heart has one trick up its sleeve that engineering can't even come close to. It had to grow itself, in the right place, from a single cell, while containing the code for the whole system.

Good luck with that.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

"Where's the Coffee?" you mean. Otherwise you got a grey market English one.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[lister king of smeg]

and how much energy does a industrial pump run on? and are they self repairing?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[wvmarle]

OK then, show me a man-made pump that can receive a complete overhaul without having to be taken out of service.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jc42]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

70+ years of continuous operation for a pump isn't TOO terrible.

That's only true if you restrict your analysis to a single, central pump. But no "intelligently designed" fluid-distribution system has just one pump. A distributed set of small, specialized pumps (and a redundant pipe system that can route around pump failures) is how any halfway-intelligent engineer would do the job.

There are species of animals that do have multiple pumps. (Google it. ;-)

Of course, this could be considered support for the theory that we (and all vertebrates) were merely prototype designs. We worked well enough that the Designer let us live, while He proceeded with the design of the main species that the world was designed for. There's some debate about which species that might have been. I've always sorta liked the explanations for why the giant squid was the pinnacle of creation on this planet, but there are good arguments that our world was primarily created as a habitat for mosquitoes or earthworms or various other small critters that vastly outnumber us.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dahamma]

Maybe an even simpler definition would be just to look at the term "transplant" - ie. whichever part is literally being moved to a new location during the procedure (assuming as you say in most cases the smaller part is "transplanted" since the surgical team would rather move a 10lb head than a ~150lb body).

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

No, absolutely false. Most deaths by disease are heart disease and cancer. 7th leading cause of geezer death. Most people are lucky to get old enough to get Alzheimer's, which seldom strikes before the late 70s.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Archangel Michael]

outlast probably, outlast and not cause problems with veins, arteries and blood flow ... probably not. Best heart pumps are temporary fixes at best.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

Show me a man made pump that can repair itself, or can be repaired without its stopping.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

Eyes are my favorite example. Why did we get the backwards wiring and the blind spot?

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[SuricouRaven]

In theory, yes - but it'd need a life-support complex that would fill a room.

There was a short sci-fi play on the subject, about a very rich and very old lady who survived crippling illness in just such a manner: She lived as a head-on-a-stick, connected to a huge machine in the room below that kept her alive. Fixed in place and able to interact only through a pair of robotic arms, she became depressed and attempted suicide - something the designers of the machine had forseen, and taken measures to prevent. Her death would mean no more machine, and no more research grants.

This was written pre-internet though. You could probably find plenty of WoW players now who would barely notice the change.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

Why do artificial knee implants fail so often, then? Why are there no pro sports players with artificial knees? When your knees go, your running days are over; I know people who have them and none would agree with your assessment.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[BitZtream]

Yet no one has designed an industrial pump that can perform at the level the heart does ... with the energy usage a heart has, for as long as it has.

So in short, no, no they haven't made something 'better' than a human heart in any way.

Show me a 120 year old unserviced pump please.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

You haven't read HHGTG? That was a direct quote from the book.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[BitZtream]

Really? What artificial knee has out lasted the average human lifespan?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

I suspect it does; the nervous system isn't just your brain. I doubt that a body transplant would affect thought or emotion much, though.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Empiric]

My particular application requirements for your Knees 2.0 are that they gradually increase in size from initial deployment in a 12 inch vertical system, and remain appropriate during stepwise modification toward a 6 foot vertical system with corresponding multiples of mass, without at any point losing functionality, or requiring further human interaction while re-optimizing for the changes in scale.

How's your option looking for this?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[LifesABeach]

I think that the repairing of nerve tissue would be an exciting topic in the medical field. Maybe the use of stem cell therapies could be applied here? But due to certain enlightened rule makers, one has to go to India, I believe, to begin to answer these questions. And I'm certain, India, when they find out how, will be generous in giving of this hard won knowledge.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Empiric]

Evolution called, with its answer to your question.

"It works. Nothing more is necessary. Case closed."

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

Correct sir, but I was suggesting that a as a critique of alternate ideas, not theories, on their creation.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[h4rr4r]

Many times, not sure how I missed it.
I have the nice leather bound edition with the rest of the works as well.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Empiric]

Understood. Same answer there. Your wholly-subjective "objections" notwithstanding.

I'd personally prefer that all eyes were blue. That'd just be me making something up, rather than anything that would be a requirement per any standard, though.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[durrr]

In this case they're not in any demand of replacement cells. They're only cutting the axons, and then try to glue them back together. Unforuntately it's easier to splice your hair back after a haircut than fusing axons correctly.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then people with non beating artificial hearts are dead? It used to be the hearbeat was determinant for the definition. It has become more nuanced than that for a lot of more modern stuff. It is usually based on response to stimulus/brain activity monitoring these days.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[captain_nifty]

Earth is clearly for the beatles. Do you know how many species of beattles there are ~400,000 thats about 25% of all known animal life-forms.

God must love beatles.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[dietdew7]

Minnesota was definitely made for the mosquito.

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[CaseyHogue]

No pump, I know of, can be overhauled without taking it offline. They move too much which isn't conducive to fine adjustments and create a pressurized system that will lose fluids if opened. That's why the bypass machine was invented because during an overhaul your pump if offline. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/health-topics/topics/hs/during.html

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[ubergeek09]

I've seen it. She wanted to die and the doctor that kept her alive wouldn't let her die, because as long as she was alive he had access to her fortune and as soon as she died all of her money would be willed away.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mdielmann]

Yet no one has designed an industrial pump that can perform at the level the heart does ... with the energy usage a heart has, for as long as it has.

So in short, no, no they haven't made something 'better' than a human heart in any way.

Show me a 120 year old unserviced pump please.

Better to say: So in short, no, no they haven't made something 'better' than a human heart in every way. Which really is what matters for us.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Thud457]

Dick Cheney == zombie
'splains a lot, actually

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

God must love beatles.

I'm a mocker.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[alexander_686]

No, using that logic, it is for the single cell creatures. IIRC they outrank beetles in both number of types and outranks in biomass multicellular creatures.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[alexgieg]

I've always sorta liked the explanations for why the giant squid was the pinnacle of creation on this planet, but there are good arguments that our world was primarily created as a habitat for mosquitoes or earthworms or various other small critters that vastly outnumber us.

Pigs. God went out of his way to specifically forbid not one, but two world religions from eating them.

And given Hinduism, maybe cows too.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Joce640k]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

A truly intelligent design would have built-in redundancy in case the main pump fails.

We've got two eyes, two ears, two lungs, two kidneys ... why not two hearts?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[tgd]

What are you trying to say?

You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?

Yes, it does. And that's been known with certainty for at least a decade.

Consciousness arises because of the constant feedback between hundreds of generalized areas in your brain, and the nerves that connect them to the real world. The brain alone is no more conscious than your peripheral nervous system alone.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[smaddox]

There are no demands for an industrial pump with such a low rate or the ability to last 120 years. If there were, perhaps someone would have made one by now.

Also, the heart is not unserviced. In fact they are continually serviced. I'm not sure the exact turn over, but at least over 10 years every cell in your heart is replaced.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[im_thatoneguy]

Terrible pump design? Show me a human designed pump that can operate for ~100 years at 60-100 beats a minute without stopping once and that under normal operation requires no maintenance.

Which is why an intelligent designer wouldn't have a pump in the first place. Especially one which was required to operate indefinitely without periodic maintenance. If I were designing something and I designed it in such a way that it could never be turned off for more than about 30 seconds and that no parts were replaceable or serviceable I would be called an idiot.

We're fundamentally a terrible design. If I told you that your laptop's battery dying would result in you losing all of your data forever and that you couldn't back it up anywhere you would tell me to take my laptop and design and shove it.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Joce640k]

70+ years of continuous operation for a pump isn't TOO terrible.

It's more of a MTBF than a garantee. Some of them fail after a much shorter time.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[dywolf]

well what do you expect from random trial and error?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jfengel]

You can certainly run a marathon on an artificial knee. You can't play pro sports, but you're talking about the top .00001% of all players. If you go down, there's somebody behind you who hasn't had to do a length recovery, and who hasn't had a knee replacement literally rammed into his bone.

Knee replacements aren't actually all that great yet; they've got a lifespan shorter than your original knee. Cartilage takes a pounding. My own personal gripe with the knee is the ligaments, which are exposed and subject to tremendous leverage: my replacement is stronger than the original. (Even though it's actually made of more biological parts, rather than a purely artificial one.)

The real problem with the knee can't be fixed by trying to replace its parts, but to reconsider the way the whole joint is arranged. Most mammals use their ankle joints for purposes that we put our knees to, and walk on their toes instead of on their heels. We mis-adapted that design to bipedal walking, rather than redesigning from scratch, which is what a good engineer would have done. Had we evolved from ground-dwellers, it might have worked out better on the knees, but we came from tree-dwellers who went back to the ground, and some good ideas were lost in the transitions.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[drjoe1e6]

There are species of animals that do have multiple pumps. (Google it. ;-)

Wow. Combine multiple pumps with total cellular regeneration, and you have someone who could live 900, even 1100 years or more. Fantastic!

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[dan828]

Show me an industrial pump that'll last 70 years with no maintenance.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[nitehawk214]

Well if you are only concerned about tea, it is probably an Earl Grey market brain.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Pseudonym Authority]

You're so obsessed with the idea of intelligent design being wrong (which it is) that you look for faults in the body to make your point, then conclude that humans have a terrible anatomy that would never work. And yet, here we are, masters of the entire earth. You are an idiot, and not because of your laptop design.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[dragon-file]

and how much energy does a industrial pump run on?

They actually make artifical pumps to get you by while your wating for a replacement or if you can't find one, they can be perminant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart

and are they self repairing?

No, but you don't have to wait around for weeks with a failing heart while they look for a suitable heart donor.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Grismar]

Clearly, you've never watched a single body-swap movie :).

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[sjames]

If it's such a terrible design, it should be trivial to replace it with a well designed pump, right?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[durrr]

Who cares about that, what matters is that our political leaders can finally become intelligent people!

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[ultranova]

He might be an industrial pump designer. Those things can easily outlast a human heart.

That poor bastard must have died young indeed.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[MiniMike]

Do you know how many species of beattles there are

There are actually only four species of Beatles: Beatlus Johnus, Beatlus Paulus, Beatlus Ringus, and Beatlus Georgus. Two of them are unfortunately extinct.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[GryMor]

You can do that if you have three pumps and you only need the capacity of two (though for our purposes, I'd want to go with 2 packs of 3). If one is failing, seal it off and replace it. The access port is a bit of a problem in the biological setting, but at least you don't get issues with the online maintenance negatively impacting the morphology of the device in a progressively degenerative manner.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Khashishi]

show me a couch potato that will last 70 years with no maintenance

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[ultranova]

This pump get 24x7 maintenance,

If you can design a pump that can be maintained while operating normally, you'll likely become - or at least make someone else - quite rich.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[CastrTroy]

Actually, if you run without shoes, you'll naturally run on your toes. Hitting with your heel first is generally only possible when you're wearing shoes, and not something that would have happened for much of our evolutionary history. There's a lot of stuff coming out about how many of the common injuries occur because we wear shoes, and the kinds of problems caused in running form because we wear shoes.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[dan828]

OK, show me an industrial pump that'll last 45 years with no maintenance.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jfengel]

This is true, but we're not getting nearly the advantage out of it that cats or camels do, with their more biomechanically efficient lower limbs. You're running on your toes by comparison to sneaker-wearing runners, but not when compared to dogs, who couldn't put their heels down if they tried.

We're not dogs, nor are dogs us. But the point was to confirm one of the upthread posts: the knee and leg are not how you'd have designed them. Lots of other animals do better.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[ultranova]

But no "intelligently designed" fluid-distribution system has just one pump. A distributed set of small, specialized pumps (and a redundant pipe system that can route around pump failures) is how any halfway-intelligent engineer would do the job.

You're forgetting one thing: you're mobile. That means that either those extra pumps are redundant, in which case you're wasting precious space and weight lugging around needless baggage, or they're not, in which case a multi-pump design simply multiplies the chances of (cascade) failure.

Furthermore, heart receives constant maintenance. If it fails, it's usually because of some sort of metabolic problem - which would affect all pumps equally - or trauma - which would likely cause massive bleeding and kill you that way, no matter how many hearts you have running dry. Cutoff valves to stop bleeding? More dead weight, with new and interesting failure modes - let's not forget that your current bleed-clotting mechanism can actually kill you if it misfires.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jxander]

To be fair, our existing knees don't actually last our entire human lifespan. Much like antique wooden ships (i.e. HMS Victory, Star of India, etc.) pieces are gradually replaced over the years. A few planks here, a new sail there ... eventually the item in question is actually a completely new unit, divorced of any parts from the original.

The cells that comprise your knee have died and been replaced several times over the years. It's just so gradual that we don't notice, and treat these knees as the same knees we had a decade ago.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dcnjoe60]

He might be an industrial pump designer. Those things can easily outlast a human heart.

True, but can you build one with only dirt as your starting point?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dcnjoe60]

There are no demands for an industrial pump with such a low rate or the ability to last 120 years. If there were, perhaps someone would have made one by now.

Also, the heart is not unserviced. In fact they are continually serviced. I'm not sure the exact turn over, but at least over 10 years every cell in your heart is replaced.

Well then show me a self-repairing pump that doesn't need external maintenance. One that can get the materials it needs from it's surroundings without doing harm to those surroundings, all while not having to shut down for the maintenance to take place.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Script Cat]

Actually... Remember that experiment where they sew the mice together. The question may be, are these GDF-11 proteins made in the head.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/05/09/protein-heart-disease

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[thereitis]

An alternative to a super reliable pump is an array of less reliable pumps (like a RAID in hard disk terminology). If one pump fails, you can switch it out while the other pumps keep the blood flowing. Might want to have them mounted outside the body to make replacement easy.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dcnjoe60]

Of course, the heart cannot exist by itself, so wouldn't you need to include the entire circulatory system in your analysis, in which case you do have multiple pumps (arteries) valves and fluid circuits. In addition the mere motion of the body helps blood flow return to the heart. Take the brain, why two artereries to supply it instead of only one? Obviously, two makes sense for certain redundancies, but in a non-intelligent design, one guided by mere chance, what would be the cause to split the arteriers into two? Or take the circle of willis, if one part gets plugged, the brain still gets its full blood supply. Now none of that proves that there is an intelligent designer, but even for a non-belieiver, the chances of all of that developing the way it did does seem pretty remarkable. One could argue survival of the fittest and these structures would indicate a better design so they lived on, but that would only have been beneficial in later years, after one's genetic seed had already been propigated, so the complex design we have today would not have provided an advantage during a time period where it would have made difference towards passing on one's genetic code, at least not compared to a simpler system.

Again, none of that proves the existence of a creator or intelligent design, but it does make one pause and marvel at the complexity of it all and the realization that without such a creator, the fact that we are all here at all are do to extremely tiny odds of all the right things happening at the right moments.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[50000BTU_barbecue]

We have two circulatory systems, the other one is the lymphatic system. There you will be happy to learn that the pumping is distributed!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymphatic

That's just for the closed-system ones. I consider the intestinal tract to be a pump. Maybe more unpleasant, sure, but just as important. If you don't think it's important, I've got these corks you can try out for a few days...

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

Where the hell have you been? I invented the Spore Penismonster did you not hear of that?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Chrontius]

Our best heart pumps rely on a membrane with a service-life of around 5 years. If you went in every 4 years for a refurbished pump - all the metal parts should last fine, and a membrane swap should be cheaper than a whole new heart - and battery swap, you could probably live indefinitely under such conditions, assuming the operation never got botched.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Chrontius]

Ever seen how a heart-lung bypass machine works?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

ALL deaths are caused by heart failure. That is THE DEFINITION of when death occurs.

Unless your higher brain function gets whacked off by something else, while keeping the base neurological functions intact. According your definition, that would still make you alive, but even though this is a big step up from being Henrietta-Lacks-style-alive, it's still not quite there.

Also, "heart failure" to me indicates that there is something wrong with the organ itself. Would a fatal arterial haemmorrhage count as "heart failure"?

You can also get nuked. I guess that would be "an instantaneous body failure" in your parlance.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[stenvar]

Well, thankfully, engineers don't get to design our bodies.

Given how crucial efficient walking has been essential for our survival, rest assured that the proportions of our limbs are exactly what they need to be.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dcnjoe60]

But we don't have joints designed for cats and camels. Probably if you put shoes on cats and camels, they would have problems with their joints, too, regardless of how much more efficient their lower limbs are.

Millions of years of evolution developed our knees to be what worked best for humans. Then in the past 1,000 years or so, shoes have changed the stresses applied to our knees so that today, we exceed the design specification and they fail.

Is the fault in the design or is the fault in us trying to do something the design was never intended to accomplish? I've saw a kid on PCP once jump off a thirty foot wall, bust his legs and tendons and get up and somehow run (doing even more damage). I wouldn't call that a design flaw, because he obviously exceeded the capacity for his legs to absorbed the impact as designed by nature. Likewise, by binding are feet into shoes and changing how we walk/run, do we not do the same thing? And if so, is it no wonder that our knees go bad?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

Show me a 120 year old working heart please.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

Mine runs Windows it has to shutdown for maintenance reboots.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[stenvar]

That's only true if you restrict your analysis to a single, central pump. But no "intelligently designed" fluid-distribution system has just one pump. A distributed set of small, specialized pumps (and a redundant pipe system that can route around pump failures) is how any halfway-intelligent engineer would do the job.

Evolution doesn't try to make you happy, it simply ends up favoring choices that optimize survival of the species. If you don't reproduce, you don't count. Once you have reproduced and raised a few kids, you don't count. Everything needs to last about 40 years for that; the extra 40 years we're getting are already a byproduct.

Besides, multiple circulatory systems probably would reduce individual fitness anyway: they are overly complex and costly.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dcnjoe60]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

A truly intelligent design would have built-in redundancy in case the main pump fails.

We've got two eyes, two ears, two lungs, two kidneys ... why not two hearts?

Because then we would all be Time Lords and have our own Tardis.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

Dr is that you?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

Funny think is you fall into the idiot category as well for thinking we are masters of the earth.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

And I for my grammar!

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[CanHasDIY]

Lol, I actually googled that term a while back...

Some of the videos I found were downright hilarious.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Dcnjoe60]

...

ALL deaths are caused by heart failure. That is THE DEFINITION of when death occurs. Doesn't matter if your if your head gets chopped off, you're alive until your heart fails.

Death is defined as the cessation of all vital functions of the body including the heartbeat, brain activity (including the brain stem), and breathing.

A stopped heart does not mean one is dead, nor does stopped breathing (although they may indicate death). Likewise, somebody may have no brain activity but their heart keeps beating. During open heart surgery, your heart is intentionally stopped and you are placed on a bypass machine, yet you are not considered dead.

In short, as the definition says, death is the cessation of all vital functions of the body including the heartbeat, brain activity, and breathing.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

You can't compare 4 feet on the ground any two at one given moment to 2 feet and any one at a given moment.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, but if the average battery life was over sixty years you'd be able to afford a lot of places to shove it.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

I'll wait for Knees v2.1 when you bring back the Start button!

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[g0bshiTe]

How many creatures on this planet have a binary cardiovascular system?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jythie]

I also know people with artificial knees who have had their lives turned around by them. Modern implants have gotten pretty good.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jythie]

We also had much shorter lifespans.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[hedwards]

Unless you're replacing the entire vascular system, it does matter a great deal. The vascular system is substantially more complex than the pipe systems to which those pumps are attached. The size of the various parts of the system will increase and decreased based upon things like the temperature and stretch. Try doing that with a pump.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Pseudonym Authority]

You're right. If monkeys, whales, and spiders could work set aside their differences and out an alliance, our rule would seriously be jeopardized. But as it is, I don't see any serious contenders for the throne. In fact, I doubt that there are any other animals that could even remove a forest or create something as useless as a cow, much less change the climate. Bacteria could certainly do it, but it would take them million of years, and we have plenty of time to stop their dastardly plans.

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[hedwards]

This is neat science, but not likely to be of much value in the long run, apart from the use to repair the central nervous system.

It's hard enough to find a match for a lung or a liver, imagine trying to find an entire body that's in usable condition, just lacking a head. It may come up, but I doubt that it's something that's going to be any more practical than having somebody's head alive in a jar.

As for the mechanical one, there's already patents issued for keeping heads alive mechanically, and ultimately, I can't see why not. But, it would seem to be a hellish existence, until they can make a proper mind controlled robotic body.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[hedwards]

My soul is contained in my shoes. Where else would you recommend I kept it?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Anubis IV]

There are no demands for an industrial pump with such a low rate or the ability to last 120 years.

Sure there are. Off the top of my head, the most obvious is an artificial heart, which you seem to have conveniently neglected to consider. With the millions of people suffering from heart disease right now, an artificial heart with those specifications would be a miracle device, and there's been plenty of research into the field, yet no one has managed to do as good as a normal, organic one just yet.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Anubis IV]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment

It stopped working awhile back, but it lasted longer than 120. I actually remember the news stories when she hit her last birthday and then again when she died. From everything they reported she had said, the lady sounded like quite a character.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[jc42]

I think you've read too much Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy!

So is there some part of it that I haven't read several times? Where might I find it?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[king neckbeard]

That's old hat for organs, though, I'm not saying that our engineering can keep up with a heart, but rather, that the heart does a pretty poor job of keeping up with other organs that do even more.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

deployment in a 12 inch vertical system, and remain appropriate during stepwise modification toward a 6 foot vertical system

Idiot. You should be designing wiener implants.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[im_thatoneguy]

if the average battery life was over sixty years you'd be able to afford a lot of places to shove it.

Battery life is between 30 seconds (oxygen/blood) and 40 days (fat/food) depending on which fuel source is most in short supply.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[im_thatoneguy]

You [...] conclude that humans have a terrible anatomy that would never work. And yet, here we are, masters of the entire earth.

I didn't say we would "never work" I said we were a fundamentally terrible design. Luckily our competition is also fundamentally bad. For being highly evolved pond scum we're pretty damn impressive but if I were designing something from scratch without any 'legacy' considerations I wouldn't have a heart, lungs, stomach, pancreas etc. And every part would be easily serviceable and replaceable. Humans would get like a -100 on the iFixit scale.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[fizzup]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

Requirements:

1. 300 liters per hour.
2. 100% duty cycle.
3. 75 year MTBF.

Go!

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[Pseudonym Authority]

What is your definition of species that takes the throne?

No meaningful answer possible, I refuse to respond.

Besides, in terms of survival and reproduction on the planet, we're born more helpless than any other species.

A king without his clothes is just a peasant. Whether or not humans would be the dominate species without technology is irrelevant. We have technology, that is all that matters here (and more importantly: the ability to create new technology to overcome new obstacles).

Besides, in terms of survival and reproduction on the planet, we're born more helpless than any other species

I disagree. It seems to me that the human brain is the most powerful organ that any Earthling has ever been endowed with.

And in terms of probability to survive when dropped onto a random location on the planet we're no match for e.g. sharks

And just what have sharks done to do anything beyond carving out a tiny niche in the food chain? I'm not asking for photographic proof of sharks building a rocket and landing on the moon here, just an example of any sort of coordinated effort to attack humans at large will be fine. Give me the necessary tools and I will have sharks extinct before the end of the decade. Can sharks drive humans extinct? They best they could do is make the beaches dangerous until the harpooners showed up. In the long term after such an attack, we'd train carefully breed dolphins to patrol the coastlines to eliminate rogue, terrorist sharks.

But that may be asking a bit too much of sharks. I'll concede if they so much as find a way to maintain their life functions on land.

There's a reason why sharks have changed much less than other species during the last few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

Yeah, that's the problem with genetic algorithms: they tend to find a local extrema, not the absolutes. That isn't our problem; we have language (written language in particular), and can form organizations that can outlive a single life. That said, failing to change is not a good thing. Changing means adapting to environment; little change over long periods of times can be indicative of reaching an evolutionary dead end. Sharks haven't died out, so that's a good argument that they aren't a dead end, but it isn't a sign that they are the apex either.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[uniquename72]

Beside the point. Hearts fail all the time. If you subscribe to the Intelligent Design hypothesis, wouldn't you expect a lower failure rate of the Designer's designs? Something VASTLY superior to where human science will be in a few hundred years? Hearts that last more than a measly 80 years (on average)? Eyes that don't require glasses or contacts or surgery (like every single person I know)? Joint that are a little less fragile? Systems that don't destroy themselves when brought into contact with certain allergens or viruses?

For a Designer -- who is presumably ageless and immortal, if not perfect -- wouldn't you expect at least a higher success rate? Or is the hypothesis that we're just a test species while the bugs get worked out?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[uniquename72]

That means that either those extra pumps are redundant, in which case you're wasting precious space and weight lugging around needless baggage

Yes, that's why we don't have 2 of any other organs. Oh, wait ...

in which case a multi-pump design simply multiplies the chances of (cascade) failure.

Yes, that's why it's not possible to design a system where one acts as a backup and/or reinforcement rather than as a single standalone actor. Oh, wait ...

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[pspahn]

No maintenance? You mean besides being provided water and nutrients on a daily basis?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[scot4875]

without at any point losing functionality

Ever heard the term "growing pains"? In the 8th and 9th grade, I was unable to run and barely able to walk without pain for months at a time. It effectively ended my track 'career', where I had previously qualified for the junior Olympics and multiple state-level competitions.

"Without at any point losing functionality" my ass. At best you can guarantee "a usable failure mode of operation".

--Jeremy

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[pspahn]

It's not that the parts were poorly designed, it's just that when the designer was considering iterative improvements through genetic selection, it was not taken into account that it may work in the opposite direction as well... iterative degradation through genetic selection.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Pseudonym Authority]

Billions of years of evolution have forced the human body to be able to withstand an incredibly huge and diverse set of challenges.

And every part would be easily serviceable and replaceable.

Every part is serviceable and replaceable, all 100,000,000,000,000 of them. Additionally, all of those parts can be made out of scrap, in place, without disrupting the function of the system as a whole. (Okay, that's not fair, as the analogous part of a machine would be the atomic level. Maybe I'll agree with you more when I'm less high.)

if I were designing something from scratch without any 'legacy' considerations

Okay, let's lay out the requirements so we can get started on Human2.0:

- Must be serviceable at run time.
- Must be able to consume almost any living thing as fuel (preparation of fuel can be as convoluted of a process as you like).
- Must be capable of manipulating surroundings of almost any physically possible configuration.
- Must be capable of traversing almost any terrain.
- Must be self adjusting.
- Must be self building.
- Must be self contained.
- Cannot rely on factory produced parts to continue existence.
- Must have components to cause necessary action (i.e. reflexes to keep the arm from melting when exposed to a corrosive environment) without conscious intervention.
- Must be very fuel efficient.
- Must be producible using only a few cells.

I expect a proposal on my desk by next the year 2613.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[ultranova]

Yes, that's why we don't have 2 of any other organs.

Lungs and kidneys, and lungs share the musculature.

Yes, that's why it's not possible to design a system where one acts as a backup and/or reinforcement rather than as a single standalone actor.

It's possible, just inefficient and - in the case of human body - pretty much pointless for reasons I already stated.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[LMariachi]

Scan a giant tortoise or a bowhead whale and you may well see one.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[presspass]

Except for Stu Sutclif.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[KermodeBear]

In addition, a typical pig will ejaculate 4 deciliters of semen per performance. That is certainly divine.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Empiric]

We're rolling that into the Cloud solution.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[tragedy]

Technically speaking, humans have more than one pump as well. We have one way valves in our veins so that, during vigorous exercise, the repeated compression and decompression pumps blood around our bodies. It doesn't represent a redundant system, however. It's complementary to our hearts, but can't replace the heart.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[theshowmecanuck]

Depends which head you think with.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[fractoid]

If something works well it's God's miracle, if it fails then it was your shortcoming (or 'to teach you a lesson' or 'God moving in mysterious ways'.) You can't win this one.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Livius]

Yes, that's why we don't have 2 of any other organs. Oh, wait ...

Actually the heart contains two pumps - they're beside each other because the pressure in the systemic and pulmonary circulations have to be very precisely co-ordinated.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[thereitis]

From http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/human-biology/two-lungs-one-heart1.htm:

Interestingly, when we are in the embryonic stage of development, we actually do have two hearts. The heart primordia (which describes the stage of the heart's development) in the embryonic stage is actually two hearts, which eventually fuse together into one heart with four chambers. Embryologists in the 1920s and '30s kept the heart primordia from fusing in embryonic frogs, and the frogs that grew up developed two hearts. The same also goes for our eyes. We begin with one primordia of the eye, which eventually separates to form two. If the primordia is kept from splitting, one central eye develops, like a cyclops, says Dr. Neff.

A quick web search reveals people who actually do (or did) have two hearts. Here's one about a guy who was born with 3 legs and two hearts!

In the summer of 1906 George Lippert died of tuberculosis at the age 62. The autopsy revealed his two hearts and also showed that one heart died two to three weeks before his eventual death. Doctors declared that if Lippert had not had tuberculosis he could have easy lived on for many years. He would have been sustained by his secondary heart.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[tyrus568]

While I appreciate what you are saying, the fact is that humans simply cannot grasp the amount of time that a billion years is. Give me a billion years, and I'll come up with _something_ complicated and whiz.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[Common Joe]

You can certainly run a marathon on an artificial knee

My Dad can't. He has two of them. He was specifically told by the doctor he can't run or he will wear out the artificial knees very quickly. I don't remember how long the knees will last since he's not running, but I expect him to go through knee replacement at least once more before he dies. He's in his late sixties. Although he can't run, he does take daily long walks to keep in condition.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[MmmmAqua]

Whoever modded this insightful has a pretty poor understanding of human physiology. The heart gets external maintenance constantly, in the form of oxygen supplied by the lungs, nutrients from the digestive system, waste export from the excretory system, and so on. The heart's surroundings are the human body, and while I see that the parent comment could be read in that context, it doesn't make sense in that context. The heart is necessary for the proper function of all systems in the body, but it is energetically expensive to operate; it does harm to its surroundings by consuming energy and resources.

While I will agree that, as a whole, the heart doesn't shut down for maintenance, individual cells within the heart certainly do as they die and are replaced, or as they commit more metabolic activity to repair than to other activities. The heart, or any other organ, is simply a collection of specialized tissues acting in concert. It's a large machine made up of millions of smaller machines. At any given moment, hundreds or thousands of those smaller machines can be out of service without affecting the overall function of the organ.

Sorry, but biology is fundamentally different from technology and you can't make car analogies here. Biology is a consequence of emergent behavior from chemical systems orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've come up with pushing electrons around or using controlled explosions to make wheels turn.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[MmmmAqua]

[citation needed]

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[RivenAleem]

There are species of animals that do have multiple pumps. (Google it. ;-)

Time Lords, right?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[alexgieg]

that would only have been beneficial in later years, after one's genetic seed had already been propigated

Not really. Life without the benefits of modernity is very hazardous for children, they hit stuff and bleed up a lot, not to mention all kinds of diseases. Getting to maturity in the ancient environment was the exception, not the rule. As such, one can see how having certain proto-redundancies could improve the likelihood of one reaching the age for sexual intercourse, and how it could over thousands of generations develop into an actual redundancy.

Now, evidently once a selective pressure disappears whatever resulted from it doesn't change much, if at all, except perhaps as an indirect effect of something else changing due to different kinds of selective pressure.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

Then I guess my cousin is dead. She had a heart infection, they removed it and she lived for months without a heart, a machine pumping her blood until she got a transplant. She's back to work researching and teaching. So my cousin is a zombie with a PhD?

Your definition of death is out of date. Today a person is declared dead when their brains show no activity.

Re: head transplant, or body transplant?

[JakeBurn]

Under optimal working conditions the human heart will last 120 years. You want to fault the Creator of the heart because people don't care for it like they should? It's definitely not normal for someone's heart to just stop or build up clogs on its own.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[cavebison]

I would guess it's closer to a head getting a body transplant, than to a body getting a head transplant.

Even closer; a brain transplant. Provided we can find a way to keep our brains in tip-top shape forever, all we need to do is clone our bodies and, when it's at a ripe age, pluck the brain out and put ours in. The 2010 film "Never Let Me Go" touches nicely on the subject.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[mcgrew]

Well, artificial knees are surely better than a wheelchair or even a cane. If you needed the implants they certainly would be a godsend, even if you had to have them replaced in twenty years.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[someSnarkyBastard]

masters of the entire earth

You're joking right?

If anything that title would belong to microbial life by a very wide margin or insets (if you want to restrict it to multicellular life). Fun fact, the total mass of all the ants on earth would be roughly equal to that off all humans on the earth. Google it.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[someSnarkyBastard]

Zombie? No, he obviously still possesses a malign intelligence; I was thinking more along the lines of a powerful, if perhaps portly, Lich.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[RespekMyAthorati]

I think his name was "Abby" something.

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[poly_pusher]

This is interesting.

However, I do also wonder what effect the deterioration of the rest of your body has on your brain. If your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, etc. are all in the state of an average 20 year old for 60 years, what would the human brain look like after 60 years?

Re:head transplant, or body transplant?

[FatdogHaiku]

So, a rich guy in his early 40's has a clone made, lobotomized, grown to teenage years using electrical stimulation of muscles to keep it from wasting away, then has his head put on it when his ticker starts to give out in his late 50's... it would take a couple years of rehab to get the new body up to speed but if you don't have a family history of Alzheimer's or other mental degradation, this might really be viable*...

*this option not available to people that don't own legislators...

Misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very misleading.

Re:Misleading

[dotancohen]

This is very misleading.

It is rather misleading when these scientists turn to their ladyfriends and say "Come on baby, give me a little head".

Re:Misleading

[Hentes]

Yes, it is. From TFA:

Connection of a spinal cord from the head of one creature to the body of another has never been attempted even in animals, so Canavero’s paper must be taken as an exercise in speculation.

Re:Misleading

[sycodon]

That's the more interesting news. He is effect coming out and saying he has invented a cure for paralysis.

hmm

[anyanka]

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:hmm

[dotancohen]

What could possibly go wrong?

Why didn't somebody tell me my ass was so big?

Re:hmm

[guttentag]

What could possibly go wrong?

Why didn't somebody tell me my ass was so big?

I think you're overreacting. If it was really that big you never would have gotten your head stuck in it.

That's not a head transplant!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a body transplant!

Re:That's not a head transplant!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's a body transplant!

You're ruining the joke. The doctors secretly hoped that colloquially, everyone would start calling it "a head job".

Re:That's not a head transplant!

[stenvar]

Why? Do they all have an oral fixation and would like to give lots of "head jobs"?

Body transplant

[jamesl]

They are really putting a "new" body on the old head. Therefore this is a body transplant.

Re:Body transplant

[Alioth]

Sorry, I meant median nerve (the radial artery was severed too)

Re:Body transplant

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I wonder would the hormonal controllers in the aged brain cause accelerated decrepitude in the new, young body. But I mean that aside, this is virtual immortality if one were ruthless enough, or alternatively if we could clone human bodies without heads immortality for all who could afford it.

Re:Body transplant

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be critical to sort that out for nerves that connect to vital organs...

Re:Body transplant

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is whose insurance pays for it...

Re:Body transplant

[Valdrax]

But I mean that aside, this is virtual immortality if one were ruthless enough, or alternatively if we could clone human bodies without heads immortality for all who could afford it.

Brain meats decay and age too. Unless you're operating off of some bizarre ship of Theseus theory of identity.

Re:Body transplant

[ebh]

I can also think of some chronic pain scenarios where this might be a viable option.

Re:Body transplant

[Intrepid imaginaut]

A younger support system might go a long way towards rectifying brain problems though. The relationship between all these things is far from clear.

Re:Body transplant

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's not immortality until we can prevent the brain form decaying and dying.

It's still not immortality until you can prevent the new memories replacing the old memories in a way that will make you not you, but someone else after thousands of years. Information-theory-wise, immortality is a notion that doesn't make sense.

Re:Body transplant

[Script Cat]

It might be the other way around. Were to the proteins responsible source from? Head or body.
Like that experiment where they sew a young and old mouse together as a kind of Siamese twin.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/making-old-hearts-younger/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/10220

Re:Body transplant

[Script Cat]

This is probably cheaper that life time care for a quadriplegic.

Re:Body transplant

[tlambert]

It's not immortality until we can prevent the brain form decaying and dying.

It's still not immortality until you can prevent the new memories replacing the old memories in a way that will make you not you, but someone else after thousands of years. Information-theory-wise, immortality is a notion that doesn't make sense.

I, for one, am willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, and test that theory, by living thousands of years. Perhaps I should start a kickstarter...

Re:Body transplant

[manu0601]

I wonder would the hormonal controllers in the aged brain cause accelerated decrepitude in the new, young body.

I bet it will. Hormones play a great role in aging. Growth and thyroid hormones level go down as you get old, and their production is controlled by the pituary gland, which is in the brain.

Therefore I am convinced that if you put an old head on a young body, the body will get "older" features within 6 months

Brain and brain! What is brain?

[mellon]

I just don't know where to start with this one. Star Trek becomes reality.

Hmm...

[girlintraining]

Head of Vecna, anyone? In other news, this plus cloning = "cure" for aging? Now if we can just figure out how to take all the skin and tissue on the skull and transplant that... oh wait. Nevermind. Face transplants.

Re:Hmm...

[l0ungeb0y]

Why not just put a persons twin into cryostasis for use later on? Let's make biological clones the new ruling class with prolonged life.
Even better for triplets and quadruplets! Man in the Iron mask meets Brave New World.

If we could find a way to "grow" an entire copy of a persons body such as via 3D printing with cells that would be one thing. But raising a human from fetus to an appropriate age strictly for the purpose of harvesting it's body strikes me as abhorrent.

And it seems it would make sense to transplant the subject's brain and eyes INTO the host body rather than to transplant the head itself. There would be fewer parts to reattach, mainly just the brainstem to the spinal cord and cerebral arteries.

Re:Hmm...

[CanHasDIY]

Head of Vecna, anyone?

Wellp, there goes my productivity for the day...

Re:Hmm...

[Rinikusu]

See 70s movie "Clonus" or the semi-remiake "The Island" from a few years back.

Re:Hmm...

[tragedy]

But raising a human from fetus to an appropriate age strictly for the purpose of harvesting it's body strikes me as abhorrent.

What if you grew a human with no brain? Would that also be abhorrent? If it still is, then how is it different than growing all the parts separately and then assembling them?

Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can finally realize my dream of dating Honey Boo Boo's head on Kim Kardashian's body.

Re:Finally...

[omnichad]

Does it still count as pedophilia?

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can finally realize my dream of dating Honey Boo Boo's head on Kim Kardashian's body.

At least that's almost normal.

Asking for the reverse would get you labeled a monster.

Immortality, here I come!

[UBfusion]

Provided we find cures for Alzheimer's and other brain degenerative diseases, I wouldn't object living for another 100-200 years, preferably wearing young woman's bodies.

Re:Immortality, here I come!

[dasgoober]

Getting a Silence of the Lambs vibe from this one....

Re:Immortality, here I come!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I just have to ask it..Are you currently a male or female?

Bonus Q: Are you a serial killer?

A: Ask again in 100-200 years.

Re:Immortality, here I come!

[pr0nbot]

Here is a vision of our glorious future:

http://www.musicforthejiltedgeneration.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1-043-0437fd39-Aphex-Twin.jpeg

Re:Immortality, here I come!

[interkin3tic]

If in 100 years, I have my male body detach my head, put it on a shelf, and have sex with my female body, while I'm watching and simultaneously connected to both of them via wireless something or other, does that count as masturbation and/or cheating on my wife?

Re:Immortality, here I come!

[gr8_phk]

Provided we find cures for Alzheimer's and other brain degenerative diseases

You never know. Given recent experiments running "young" blood through a body (in mice) seems to have some regenerative effects. Given enough benefits like that, a head might be able to live a long time while maintaining a decent quality of life. So the obvious villain character that comes out of this is a head who periodically needs a new young body to be transplanted onto to survive. Fortunately the surgical skills needed to perform this are very advanced, so it shouldn't become widespread. Yet?

Re:Immortality, here I come!

[dintech]

That depends, is one of your bodies also your wife?

RE: What could possibly go wrong?

[Picass0]

All hail the KING of the NORTH!!! All hail the KING of the NORTH!!!

cure for paralysis?

[Anonymous Coward]

So with this technique could you cure paralysis? If you were to make the surgical cuts above the damaged spinal tissue and then attach the old head to a new body without the spinal damage?

Re:cure for paralysis?

[pla]

Didn't even RTFS, eh?

Re:cure for paralysis?

[BitZtream]

Sure, in theory.

Except in reality, at no point has any animal actually had their head AND spinal cord attached to a new body. Its a theoretical paper, regardless of what the shitty summary implies.

Re:cure for paralysis?

[hibji]

It's interesting that the article seems to contradict itself.

It says:
"(This is not the same as restoring nervous system function to quadriplegics or other victims of traumatic spinal cord injury.)"

And this later:
"Paraplegics with qualifying injuries (i.e., enough spinal cord left intact to allow for a head transplant) could in theory regain the full use of a (donor) body"

Re:cure for paralysis?

[dinfinity]

It does sound kind of weird. I consider cutting somebody's body/head off to classify as 'traumatic spinal cord injury'

I guess the intended message is that spinal cord injuries differ in where the injury is and that the new techniques do not necessarily enable fixing all spinal cord injuries.

If the injury is below the neck, replacing the entire body should work (as it obviously would for any other ailment below the neck), but this is far more radical (on several levels) than just fixing the spinal cord injury in the existing body.

Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued. There are boundaries we need to maintain for the safety of humanity.

In essence, this could provide eternal life to someone with enough cash. Typically those are not the most outstanding members of society that hold society's best interests as their own. How many nobles slaughtered their own as well as others for the fountain of youth? Go read a history book!

Re:Some things should not be..

[h4rr4r]

Please explain how this would provide eternal life.

Your brain no longer functioning properly is not going to be solved by getting a new body, that will happen with age. Go read a science book!

Re:Some things should not be..

[bill_mcgonigle]

Your brain no longer functioning properly is not going to be solved by getting a new body, that will happen with age. Go read a science book!

When you replace the neurons one at a time with electronic substitutes (say, as an Alzheimer's treatment), at what point is Grandma no longer Grandma?

Re:Some things should not be..

[h4rr4r]

Never, she is always Grandma.
I am hoping for that for me in the future, I doubt it will be available.

Re:Some things should not be..

[MightyMartian]

How would it create eternal life? Unless there's a way to cure degenerative brain diseases, this wouldn't really buy a person that much more time.

Re:Some things should not be..

[Baloroth]

Your brain no longer functioning properly is not going to be solved by getting a new body, that will happen with age. Go read a science book!

Duh, obviously, that's why if the brain's a problem you get a new head! Come on, a five year old could figure this out!

Re:Some things should not be..

[geminidomino]

When you replace the neurons one at a time with electronic substitutes (say, as an Alzheimer's treatment), at what point is Grandma no longer Grandma?

When she's Theseus?

Re:Some things should not be..

[NEDHead]

When Grandma gets a hot body, she is no longer Grandma.

Re:Some things should not be..

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued. There are boundaries we need to maintain for the safety of humanity.

And you've appointed yourself guardian of humanity, have you? Longevity is inevitable, and it's pretty likely that the wealthy and powerful will enjoy the benefits first. There's zero reason why the rest of us shouldn't eventually likewise live much longer lives afterwards though.

Re: Some things should not be..

[Mabhatter]

Well when they want YOUR BODY, and can support just your head "in a jar" so its not murder, just business, then the rich will just TAKE IT... Like they always do.

Re:Some things should not be..

[nedlohs]

Because your head and brain doesn't age, right? It's only the body portion that ages and breaks down.

I also take it you have the same objection to heart transplants?

Re:Some things should not be..

[SuricouRaven]

"Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued."

Screw ethics. Gimme my millenia-lifespan.

Re:Some things should not be..

[BitZtream]

You are an example of why it shouldn't happen.

Most humans are too stupid to realize the implications of longer life. We are ALREADY over populated and unsustainable. We use energy from the planet faster than it is stored. We REQUIRE this energy to support the population of humans on the planet that is WAY past the point of natural balance.

What exactly do you think will happen when people live twice as long? Do you think some other magical solution is going to pop up when lets us cram even more people into the same space.

We can not feed ourselves now, without oil, and the oil is being used ridiculously faster than its being created.

Re:Some things should not be..

[istartedi]

This won't bring eternal life. If we can implant prosthetic neurons into the brain, gradually replacing cellular neurons with artificial ones, that seems more likely to lead towards indefinite life. Perpetual is out of the question because the machine can still get burned up in a fire or something. Once you can download your "essence" into a machine, back it up, save it, etc. Then it gets more interesting. The trouble is, what happens when you make copies? If my "last known good" image was backed up to a remote server and then loaded into good hardware after the aforementioned fire "my" experience would be that I ran a backup and then suddenly got transported to the backup facility. Is it the real me though?

Re:Some things should not be..

[Intrepid imaginaut]

You are an example of why it shouldn't happen.

Oh okay. I haven't made a laughing stock of a malthusian all week and although it's only Tuesday, there seem to be fewer and fewer of you halfheads roaming the internet lately so I guess I'll take it where I find it.

Most humans are too stupid to realize the implications of longer life.

Good thing we have superior master race philosopher-princes such as yourself to show the way then, eh?

We are ALREADY over populated and unsustainable.

No, we aren't. Nowhere near. There is ample food and fresh water for the entire human race right now and plenty to spare. Where there are shortages the problems are invariably political.

We use energy from the planet faster than it is stored. We REQUIRE this energy to support the population of humans on the planet that is WAY past the point of natural balance.

Energy from the planet? What is that? You want energy it's raining on us from all sides and on high. If you covered a single digit percentage of the unused portions of the Sahara with old fashioned PV cells you could easily supply enough energy for all of Europe. And although I'm sure that a superior intellect such as yourself doesn't need this pointed out, that's not a recommended course of action but an illustration of the universe of insane abundance we live in. NO we do not require oil for transportation, NO we do not require oil for plastics, NO we do not require oil for fucking fertiliser, google the reasons yourself.

What exactly do you think will happen when people live twice as long?

We already know what's going to happen when people start living longer healthier lives, einstein, they have fewer children. Half of the countries in the developed world are already at below replacement birthrates. People stop having children or start having them later.

Do you think some other magical solution is going to pop up when lets us cram even more people into the same space.

We can not feed ourselves now, without oil, and the oil is being used ridiculously faster than its being created.

Oil, oil, oil. Try a little science instead. http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.ie/2007/11/314-peak-oil-and-fertilizer-no-problem.html Boom, headshot.

Hopefully this shock therapy has rattled your teeth enough that you'll think twice before unloading another bladderload on the internet.

Re:Some things should not be..

[Thud457]

obxk, errr, obsmbc
just last week, in fact.

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

Longevity via healthy diet, exercise, medication, cures to diseases, etc.. is not the same as being able to remove a part or whole of a body from a different person and use it as you see fit.

Do you have more money than Bill Gates? Ted Turner? Rupert Murdoch? David Rockefeller? Probably not. What if you have a physique that they want? It allows abuse at an unknown level. Naively believing that these people don't cause harm is denying facts. Naively believing it can't be you as a recipient is also denying facts.

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

For posterity, I stated "could" and not "would". Go read an English and basic Rhetoric book! The speculation is fair given the following.

How much of the brains natural decay is based on other illnesses in the body? Lower blood flow with age due to artery congestion? Poisons in the system due to liver, kidney, appendix, intestines wearing out? How about decreased oxygen in the blood from unhealthy lungs? Poor break down of nutrients from aging stomach and intestinal tract?

It's fair to assume that it would make a huge difference based on normal human growth patterns.

In addition to young body benefits, you are discounting that medication, vitamins and specific diets can never prolong the life span of the brain.

I assume that we will make progress in those areas, and the brain can be better for wear than the rest of the body in time.

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

You give an easy to spot fallacy. If I get a flat tire, can I demand to take your whole car? Quite a bit different, so you should hold your comments about whack jobs until you behave unlike one.

A more comparative analogy would be "Do I object to someone having all of their blood removed in order to save their brother's life?" Yup, to me that crosses the line. How about "Do I object to a prisoner getting both kidneys removed in order to give a rich guy a longer life?" Absolutely, the prisoner needs at least 1 kidney to live.

Relatively speaking, how many people die of gunshots or stabbings to the head that could facilitate a body transplant? Not many, but of course as with other things if we allow something like this to be pursued we'd probably see an increase in those types of deaths. You know, just so someone can make enough money to live for a year while giving someone else a new life. It already happens for organs in some countries, so lets not make believe that this would be any different.

Re: Some things should not be..

[Chrontius]

They can have it.

...From the spare-parts bin. I'll be operating a Tachikoma at that point.

Re: Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

1200 people from Bangladesh just whispered "go read a newspaper". People already sacrifice themselves so that someone makes an extra buck, so what's different if they want more time on Earth to make more bucks? Of course we should probably ignore reality so that you can maintain your delusion right?

Re:Some things should not be..

[Areyoukiddingme]

Hell. My mod points expired.

But if you want more like him, just troll environmentalist forums. There's plenty of anti-humans out there. Just fewer on Slashdot. Who knew hating humans could become such a successful business...

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

Currently their are organ transplants upon which a donor would depend on if alive. There is little evidence that anyone is currently murdered for their heart for the wealthy. Although, there is also evidence that the wealthy do get put high on the list of organs. Some of this is due to the wealthy being able to go where the list is short and being able to file a mountain of paperwork.

It's also important to think about this coupled with other technology. It's been 12 years since scientist made headless mice It's conceivable that headless clones of people could be grown. They would probably need to be grown ahead of time though. Might be more effective to just make different models of bodies for people to choose from rather than each individual person getting their own body back.

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

There is little evidence that anyone is currently murdered for their heart for the wealthy.

Your failure to look for and find information does not mean that things do not exist. There is a very large black market of organ thefts, and very well documented.

Your second point is just as bad. Science has been able to clone organs for some time for humans as well, but the black market still exists. Hmm, can you logically comprehend that this market would still exist even if all legal restrictions were lifted? If not, you really really should work on your reasoning skills because they are broken. It would be cheaper to steal organs than clone them, so the market would still exist. It also has something to do with greed, and people wanting things that they currently don't have and doing anything to get them. If Richguy1 want's a new heart, does he want the defected one he was born with that was cloned or an athlete's heart that worked better than average? Richguy2 was born with a tiny penis, and wants the biggest he can find in his own color. If that's you and you wake up having to pee like a woman the rest of your life.. well, you keep on thinking that everyone in the world is a good guy looking out for your best interests.

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

Notice that I did not attack you in any way. You on the other hand have chosen to make your argument about insults and straw men. You provide no evidence of your assertions and claim I am making arguments I am not. I'm not even sure where your stance is because you spend so much time telling me what I think and that I'm wrong. Are you arguing that organ donation is bad because someone might be killed for their organs?

Let's make this easy, if I accept all of your arguments, what do you propose is the solution?

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

Are you arguing that organ donation is bad because someone might be killed for their organs?

You are the one that brought up organ donation, as if its the same as the article covers. It is not the same, and I have corrected you on that twice.

You stated that there is nobody being killed currently for their organs. I told you that was absolutely wrong, and gave you the way to find out how you were wrong.

Correcting false statements is not an attack, it's correcting false statements. There is a vast difference which should be obvious.

The answer to the dilemma in my opinion was given in my original post. The one that where you made a strawman argument that I was against organ donation and blood transfer, remember? If not, go back and read it again. I then pointed out that my opinion is not against organ donation, but donations which could cause someone to lose their life to benefit someone with enough money. Something that you deny based on your opinion, not based on facts, happens today.

Re:Some things should not be..

[mvlmvl]

Accidental moderation undo post...

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

You're confusing me with another poster. I never mentioned blood transfer.

I then pointed out that my opinion is not against organ donation, but donations which could cause someone to lose their life to benefit someone with enough money.

Are you against heart transplants?

And the solution is?

Re:Some things should not be..

[tragedy]

Morally and ethically, this simply should not happen and should not be pursued. There are boundaries we need to maintain for the safety of humanity.

That doesn't make much sense. What problems are you actually imagining? Body theft? Rejection issues would almost certainly make that a non-starter. Sure it might work if someone had an identical twin to dispose of, but that's going to be a pretty rare situation. This could work with cloned bodies, and then you might have the horror of clones raised to be murdered for their bodies, except that growing a clone without a head is already possible and should be ethically no different than growing a bunch of individual organs, bones, cartilage, muscle, skin, etc. and assembling it together. You would have a hard time arguing that finding a way to grow any of those individually would be terribly unethical. If you're worried about anyone living forever, you just need to talk to an actuary or any other professional statistician to have your fears laid to rest.

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

Yup, you are correct it was a different post to start, in my defense autosort on reload seemed to not notice. My apologies for having you confused with a different post. That said, my position is still in my original post and I did answer someone else regarding my position on organ transplants. The answer does not change, nor does my opinion regarding there being a huge difference between an organ transplant or blood transfusion, and being able to put a head onto a new body.

If you read down from my original post searching for my name you can find the opinions. No sense in re-hashing what I have already written. Other points require no re-reading, such as the current black market for organs which causes harm and death to innocents.

Re:Some things should not be..

[Your.Master]

Let's turn this around. Approximately what population do you think is sustainable for the Earth at a high-quality lifestyle given reasonable advances (and are there lifestyle concessions that you think should be made)? Eg. is it about 100 billion? A trillion? Surely there is some point at which we have to trade off significant quality of life at a given tech level and societal stability level to double the population.

All this said, I'm more in agreement with you than with the GP. What's the point of keeping the population down by keeping "quality of life" down? If this truly reduces the carrying capacity of Earth, then over time we'll have to have less humans -- not by artificially reducing their lifespan, but things like birth control. Being able to extend human health is worth it in its own right. But you lose me when you start sneering at "Malthusians" and being self-congratulatory about your "shock therapy". That sort of confidence needs to be supported by positive claims of the carrying capacity of Earth, not just negative claims on a few facts that the GP posted.

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

nor does my opinion regarding there being a huge difference between an organ transplant or blood transfusion, and being able to put a head onto a new body.

That is why I am asking about heart transplants specifically. I do not see where your thoughts are specifically mentioned regarding heart transplants.

I also do not see where a solution is offered to the problem you propose. I have tried to make my questions and statements direct and simple to provide clarity. I do not see the harm in answering my specific questions.

No sense in re-hashing what I have already written.

I've asked you very specific questions which you choose not to answer. Are you against heart transplants is a question that requires a simple yes/no. Why not just say so.

Other points require no re-reading, such as the current black market for organs which causes harm and death to innocents.

Any claim can be made, but you have yet to provide a single source for your claim. It is not up to anyone to prove a negative. It is up to you to support your claim. Stating that the info is out there is dishonest in debate. The reason citing a source is so important is because the source can also be debated. If you refuse to provide a source then no validation of your claim can be made.

Nonetheless, I have looked and I still find little evidence. There are a couple of Snopes entries debunking some of the claims. There is a Wikipedia section regarding illegal organ harvest but the entry lacks any citations. And there are a few reports of people claiming it happens. There are no doctor's reports supporting that it happens. There are no reports outside of claims that it occurs. Additionally, all of the stories around organ theft involve tourists in 3rd world country. On the face of it, it really doesn't make sense to steal organs from people from powerful countries in places where there are plenty of other candidates that would unlikely be missed. I mean wouldn't it be the wealthy west stealing organs from 3rd world people and not the other way around? Now if you wish to provide me with your source, perhaps you can teach me something. If you do not have a valid source you should really reconsider whether your claim is accurate or not.

Even so, without evidence and just for the sake of argument, if I accept your assertion that there is a strong demand for black market organs you still have not offered a solution to the problem. Nor have you provided me any reason to think body transplants would be any different than heart transplants with regards to the motives that might be behind a black market.

Re:Some things should not be..

[DexterIsADog]

You claim fallacy by inserting a condition that wasn't part of the conversation. I said "donor", not "forced donor". You added the "forced" part in your reply to me, in which you got hot for no good reason. My reply to your post, in which you did not identify "forced donor", was extremely reasonable.

And since you like to make assumptions not warranted, I'll make a warranted assumption about you. Since your analogy was "Do I object to a prisoner getting BOTH kidneys removed...", presumably by force, you imply that it's ethical to take ONE kidney from a prisoner by force, or just SOME blood by force, which I find morally repugnant.

As for voluntary whole-body donations for people who no longer have a use for theirs, I think that's just fine, and not actually my business, or yours.

Re:Some things should not be..

[DexterIsADog]

Now you're just being foolish. You're dragging in euthanasia, which has nothing to do with the issue, and you're trying to win by throwing in red herrings and straw men. People who choose to donate their bodies after their deaths (as I have done) can choose to donate an organ, or all organs, or their entire bodies. Your argument makes no sense.

I made that assumption since your analogy was so poorly expressed it was reasonable to do so, and because you made such a foolish assumption about me in your first response.

Once again, my point is that your ethical horror is one of degree only, and is very hypocritical. Since you keep missing the point (I think to showcase what an ethical soul you are), you can take the last response. I'm done arguing with a fool.

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

Untrue, I told you that I had already written my opinion so there was no need to rewrite the statement. A lack of desire to find information does not magically make things not exist. Nor does someone pointing to a written statement in the same thread instead of rewriting the statement mean that they choose not to provide an opinion. If you believe what you stated to be correct, you have a brain not working properly. If it was the first time you had chosen a tactic, I may have a different opinion of you. You have used the same broken logic several times now.

I simply asked you questions. It's not a tactic and I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm simply asking questions. Attacking me or assigning me motives has nothing to do with the debate. Telling someone to go find it themselves is considered poor form and would never be accepted in a formal debate.

Same statement as above applies. You stated very clearly that currently people are not harmed for organs. Google is very easy to use, and you can easily find that your statement is not true. If you want me to be a dick, I could post some "let me google that for you" links, but there is no need. You were and are dishonest, and your failure to look at facts does not make facts non-existent. It means that you have a delusion that you don't want to get rid of by reviewing facts contrary to your belief. Stating that you can't find evidence that I'm correct while conceding the point is a circular statement with no logical definition since the two statements conflict and negate each other.

I have asked you for information. That is not being dishonest. I've made very clear that I cannot prove a negative. I never said people are not hurt by organ transplant. I can't say that, because one cannot prove the absence of something. I said there is little evidence and asked you to provide it. I'm open to spirited debate. If you want to assign motives to me you may, but it will not change the rules of debate, evidence or logic.

My last point on that topic is that if it was so hard to find information on the subject, why is there a whole Wiki [wikipedia.org] page on it?

Yay, finally a link. Thank you. It even has sources. Good. That's all I needed. Now, you will see that my only contention was that there was little evidence of people being murdered for their organs. You might want to look under the section of Media Portrayal to see that illegal organ trade is not the same thing as killing people to harvest organs. The link I was referring to lacking citation on Wikipedia was related to illegal harvesting Even so, I consistently conceded the point to you so that we could move on to solutions and your opinion regarding heart transplants.

I don't propose a solution to the black market organ trade, because that is not the subject the post is about. The post, and article are about whole body transplants, which is for the 3rd time different. If you donate a kidney, willing or not, you can still live. If you donate your body, willing or not, you don't. I would agree that body snatching is a speculation. That speculation is grounded in what we currently know in criminal activity, combined with what we know humans are capable of. Humans are not all good, and we can't ignore that when talking ethics and logic.

This is one of the reasons I always used the example of a heart. I am not talking about kidneys or organs that the donor doesn't depend on. Precisely for the reason you say. A person needs a heart to stay alive. Do you think heart transplants are different to body transplants as it relates to our discussion? Or do you think they are the same and the science of heart transplants should be limited? Or any other option. How does a heart transplant compare?

What I did propose a solution to, is limiting t

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

I'm pointing out a reality, where people are being given choices that they may not be healthy enough to make. If we already have this issue today, why would that reality change with body donation? It would not, and your assertion that it would be different is not grounded in reality.

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

I haven't even stated a position. I also did not state that people weren't harmed by illegal organ harvests, I simply said there was little evidence of it. I also conceded the point several times. What topic am I diverting? I'm trying to understand you're position but you are very busy assigning a motive to me and being defensive. I'm asking you things. Why are you so defensive when I haven't even disagreed with an opinion? You can choose not to answer why a body transplant is different than a heart transplant. I was just hoping to learn something new and hear a different perspective. I seek understanding.

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

I also did not state that people weren't harmed by illegal organ harvests, I simply said there was little evidence of it.

What? I'm sorry, but you can't redefine words on the fly and maintain any form of logic. This is another string of broken logic. You obviously see no problem with Bill Clinton redefining "is", therefor you can never be wrong and never have to review facts.

Not answering an unrelated question is not being defensive, it's trying to maintain focus and continuity of the current stream of thought. I can suggest you spend a whole lot of time studying Socrates to learn why continuity of thought is important. He's a great example of a great mind.

Re:Some things should not be..

[similar_name]

This is the first paragraph of my original post. I stated

Currently their are organ transplants upon which a donor would depend on if alive. There is little evidence that anyone is currently murdered for their heart for the wealthy. Although, there is also evidence that the wealthy do get put high on the list of organs. Some of this is due to the wealthy being able to go where the list is short and being able to file a mountain of paperwork.

I specifically mentioned hearts (and an advantage to the wealthy) because as I understood your posts you are arguing that body transplants are wrong because the motive for misuse is too high and that the difference with other organ transplants are that the donation of a kidney does not kill the donor. I am open to having misunderstood you. The reason I ask about heart transplants is because I thought that your opinion on them would clarify for me your objection to body transplants. I could make assumptions about your opinion on heart transplants but I do my best to guard my assumptions and biases.

My motive is only to learn as much as I can. I want to absorb your viewpoint and attach it to a million other thoughts that are in my mind. Whatever your thoughts, I will ask you questions that help me have a deeper understanding of your conclusions.

You may notice in our debate that I frequently come back to the heart. It was what I wrote about from the very beginning. You may also notice in my first post that I mentioned cloning headless bodies. You addressed this with the concern that it is likely cloned bodies would cost more and create an economic barrier that would lead back to the concern for harming people. I understood that headless clones would not solve your concerns because I recognized the valid consideration for costs.

I am currently uncertain about the full extent of objections to body transplants regarding undue harm to innocent people. I have conceded the point that harm is a factor. The reasons I ask for evidence is simple. I want to know the specifics of the information you are basing your viewpoints on. It's good that you did provide it because I was mostly focused on the illegal harvesting end of things and once you posted a link I could understand better the trade part. Interestingly, there is little evidence of illegal organ harvesting and plenty of evidence for illegal organ trade. It's a subtle difference but I can certainly accept the the latter implies the former. It is also interesting that most illegal trade is in organs that do not require the donor to be dead. Kidneys and livers are big. I wonder if it is whole livers or partial.

I asked for a solution and you stated there was no absolute 'fix'. I understood. It clarified for me your position. . I then asked how you would suggest mitigating the problem.

I mention hearts because accepting all factors of your viewpoint (as I understand them) it would appear hearts may be a good proxy to understanding the pros and cons to body transplants from a moral perspective. However, I may very well be wrong and it is unlikely that I am aware of all factors (one could argue no one is aware of all factors regarding any topic). This is why I ask about your opinion on heart transplants.

Of course I enjoy Socrates via Plato and others. :)

Re:Some things should not be..

[s.petry]

Thank you for not rehashing false information. Since it's a Holiday and I have a bit of extra time let me see how well I can express my opinion.

First, it would be important to classify the heart as a single organ required for life. There are numerous other organs that would fall in to that same category. Additionally, there are singular organs which facilitate procreation, and still more singular organs that would be required to make our appearance (nose, mouth, etc..). It would be best for me to lump all of those organs into the same class when discussing something like the heart, because the morality of transplant and donation would be the same for teach of those organs.

I leave out the brain from the list above very intentionally. The brain is the single organ that defines who we are. While one may argue that other aspects of our appearance define who we are, I simply point out that during our lives our body is constantly changing. If our mind remains our own while our body undergoes physical changes, then our physical appearance can not truly define who we are. You can read the works of Renee Descartes to help understand this perspective.

Those thoughts out of the way, let me further clarify that there are two types of donation. One where a person gives up a part of themselves while alive, the other where a person is diseased and can not offer consent to the removal of parts (which includes any part of the human body, including blood). A person signing a sheet prior to death does not change that point of consent. A person who is dead may have changed their desire to donating an organ prior to death and not been able to communicate that change. I would agree that legally we accept their signature from prior to death, just like we accept the signature of family members offering the donation in lieu of the deceased being able to communicate their desires. This establishes the donors into those that are able to communicate willingness, and those that can not. It is important to note that people that are unable to express their desire based on other reasons (coma, anesthetics, etc..) would still be in the category that can communicate willingness.

Deceased When a person is unable to communicate willingness there should be no legal or moral issues with donating organs, with numerous caveats and either prior consent or consent of immediate family. Caveats include that the process for receipt of donations must be fair and impartial. The removal of organs should be performed in a way that respects the body (no mutilation). Financial incentives for donation should be minimized to reduce illegal harvesting of organs. The health of the organs should be tested to ensure recipients receive healthy organs. There should be no attempt to acquire or damage organs that have been excluded from donation. There should be no attempt to coerce additional donations from the family. I could become more detailed, but in the essence of time and continuity will end this list of caveats. I will add that many of these protections are already in place to some degree.

Living Consensual When a person is willing to donate, there should be no legal or moral issues with donation with numerous legal and moral caveats (as with those that are unable to communicate). A person should not be allowed to end their own life in order to donate an organ (which does indicate that a person could not donate their heart). A person should not allow the mutilation of their body in the process of donating an organ. Any financial compensation from donation must be minimized to nullify the risk of people harvesting organs for profit. If the person would damage their body to the point where they would become a burden on society the donation should be denied. Risks associated with certain types of operations both for the donor and recipient should weigh heavily on whether or not the operation is allowed. Most of these items are things we currently do, with the exception of reducing the valu

Re:Some things should not be..

[ashSlash]

Your so-called 'shock therapy' seems to consist almost entirely of ad hominem and naive futurism. The GP is absolutely correct - our civilisation in its current form is by definition unsustainable, because we depend on burning vast quantities of oil, natural gas and coal on a daily basis. These are resources that will not be replaced on any timeframe that is meaningful to the current civilisation. It is not a foregone conclusion that we can maintain current societal complexity (read 'standard of living') without them.

You suggest the world needs only install solar panels over a single digit percentage of the Sahara desert. We'll be parsimonious and say that's 1% of the Sahara's 9,400,000 square kilometres, giving us 94,000 square kiometres of solar panels. Hmmm. I see your point though - there is certainly a vast amount of energy out there to be tapped... if only it will be economically (or energetically) viable:

"In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (132,000 TWh). This is equivalent to an average power use of 15 terawatts (2.0×1010 hp).[7] The annual potential for renewable energy is: solar energy 1,575 EJ (438,000 TWh), wind power 640 EJ (180,000 TWh), geothermal energy 5,000 EJ (1,400,000 TWh), biomass 276 EJ (77,000 TWh), hydropower 50 EJ (14,000 TWh) and ocean energy 1 EJ (280 TWh).[8][9][10]"

Yes, that's a whole lot of potential. However, in your simplistic analaysis, you overlook that the fact of the world having such massive potential renewable energy to be harnessed is no assurance that we will have the energy or money to be able to do so. In fact, with Energy Return On Investment (EROI) declining, we are relying on continuous improvements in renewable tech for these energy sources to be competitive. Efficiency improvements are helping maintain affordability to some degree also, but remember that becoming more efficient with fossil fuels only maintains their affordability; people are able to continue to use them for many discretionary activities (a rephrasing of Jevon's Paradox). And for most uses renewables simply aren't there yet, even in spite of generous subsidies in many parts of the world (e.g. power companies paying 4x their own retail unit cost back to those 'feeding in' to the grid). The most overlooked subsidy of all, however, is all of the fossil fuels embedded in this renewable tech. As EROI continues to decline, it remains to be seen how affordability of renewables will keep pace. We may see a 'receding horizons' scenario, where increasingly expensive fossil fuel, embedded at every stage of producing renewable tech, renders said renewables increasingly unaffordable.

In short, there are many blind spots and a hell of a lot more doubt concerning this whole situation than you seem to think.

Body transplant

[Alioth]

I'd really argue that because who you are is really all in the head, this is a body transplant rather than a head transplant.

TFA says that the idea is still rather speculative, but if it were to work I have to wonder how long it would take the brain in the head that was connected to a new body to figure out how to make the new body work. I doubt all the individual axons would connect perfectly in 1:1 fashion in the same way as it were on the old body. In fact I'd be surprised if any axons connected to the same corresponding one in the new body.

As an aside as a teenager I suffered a very serious injury to my wrist when my right hand went through a pane on a glass door. The glass basically sliced my wrist open to the bone. Aside from losing a lot of blood from the severed arteries, the radial nerve was completely severed and was microsurgically reconnected that night. The radial nerve basically gives your hand sensation from the thumb to the middle finger, and when the nerves first grew back, the sensations would come out in the wrong place - if I touched the inside of my middle finger the sensation would come out elsewhere on the hand. However after a few months things got "remapped" and the sensations all now come out in the correct places. I'd imagine this would be a more serious problem if a nerve that conducts some sensation is now connected to one that's supposed to activate a muscle.

dire consequences.

[nimbius]

three words should put an end to this chicanery: Immortal Dick Cheney.

Re:dire consequences.

[Black Parrot]

three words should put an end to this chicanery: Immortal Dick Cheney.

I think "should be possible" already deflates the hype.

Re:dire consequences.

[DigitalSorceress]

OH GODS NO!

but yeah, it feels like some dystopian SF novel just got closer to reality - uber rich folks having virtual immortality by having their brains transplanted into new, fresh bodies - folks selling their (or others) bodies in some twisted Max Headroom "body bank" style.

As others have said, "What could possibly go wrong"

Re:dire consequences.

[SuricouRaven]

Easiest way to get new bodies would be via the justice system: First you pass a law that mandates harvesting the organs or entire bodies from executed criminals (easy to justify), then just start lowering the standard for the death penalty to increase the supply of spare parts.

If you're really evil, you might have to frame a relative to gain access to their sweet genetically-compatible pieces.

Re: dire consequences.

[CaseyHogue]

Seriously, did we learn nothing from Futurama & the cautionary tale, "A Head in the Polls"? "[...] nobody can be elected president more than twice." "That's right, no 'body'. But as you can plainly see, I've got a shiny new body." www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvYm68dOQ4k

Re:dire consequences.

[guttentag]

three words should put an end to this chicanery: Immortal Dick Cheney.

Wouldn't that be "Dickchenery?"

Re:dire consequences.

[HiThere]

But think of the consequences of having to take immuno-suppressive drugs for the rest of your life. They aren't good.

OTOH, there was another article today (yesterday?) that proclaimed "Mouse cloned from blood cell!" (But I do wonder if they've solved the "Dolly" problems.)

Head transplant or body transplant?

[hyades1]

I think this question can be answered with a coin flip. Call it in the air, guys...heads or tails?

Re:Head transplant or body transplant?

[dkleinsc]

I'm the same person I was 400 years ago. Sure, they replaced my head 3 times, and my body 4 times, but I'm the same person.

(for other examples of this, see Ship of Theseus Paradox)

Re:Brain and brain! What is brain?

[msauve]

I'm thinking more about how Futurama got it wrong.

not for quadriplegics or other victims ?!

[csumpi]

"This is not the same as restoring nervous system function to quadriplegics or other victims of traumatic spinal cord injury."

Why? Is it possibly because someone (like wealthy social network founders, etc...) would pay lots of money for keeping their heads going vs quadriplegics or other victims don't have the money required to "enrich" science?

Re:not for quadriplegics or other victims ?!

[EvanED]

I would guess it's the controlled nature of a transplant.

From TFA:
But Canaveroâ(TM)s proposal is different: By cutting spinal cords with an ultra-sharp knife, and then mechanically connecting the spinal cord from one personâ(TM)s head with another personâ(TM)s body, a more complete (and immediate) connection could be accomplished. As he notes in his paper:

âoeIt is this âoeclean cutâ [which is] the key to spinal cord fusion, in that it allows proximally severed axons to be âfusedâ(TM) with their distal counterparts. This fusion exploits so-called fusogens/sealantsâ¦.[which] are able to immediately reconstitute (fuse/repair) cell membranes damaged by mechanical injury, independent of any known endogenous sealing mechanism.â

What I don't know is why they couldn't do the same thing for spinal cord injury patients, just cutting out the injured part.

Re:not for quadriplegics or other victims ?!

[EvanED]

Mmmmm, Slashcode. The pinnacle of Internet message board software.

Re:not for quadriplegics or other victims ?!

[BitZtream]

The paper is theoretical.

Its never actually been done. The summary is a lie. No animal spinal cords have been reattached and actually worked.

Never take any article approved by timothy as having any truth what so ever. He's an idiot by every known definition of the word.

Re:not for quadriplegics or other victims ?!

[Charliemopps]

Because Quadriplegics have actual damage to their spinal cord. Usually it's in the neck, near the skull. Sometimes it's even brain damage. They need a working spinal cord to graphed onto the new one.

Re:not for quadriplegics or other victims ?!

[csumpi]

OK, so let's put brain damage apart for a second and let's just focus on spine injury.

Why would you not be able to transplant nerves from a donor, replacing the damaged section of a nerve, and attach it on both ends instead of one?

MARS ATTACKS!

[NEDHead]

No further comment necessary

Re:MARS ATTACKS!

[GodfatherofSoul]

Some would argue the chihuahua head on her body is an improvement.

Star trek

[AMDinator]

So, Spock's Brain wasn't such a crazy episode after all!

Re:Let's do this!

[lobiusmoop]

Karl Pilkington is up for it.

Re:So guy or girl dosent matter?

[DexterIsADog]

I mean common who isn't interested in keeping both halves consistent. Though I guess it would finally be possible for a man to be trapped in a hot female body. And we can all guess how that would go.

Yes, we certainly can. Lots of hot sex in this story. I think Heinlein was more than a little interested in being a hot chick and getting spanked and fucked.

http://www.amazon.com/I-Will-Fear-No-Evil/dp/0441359175

The body can affect the mind

[davidwr]

You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?

By consciousness I assume you mean the "personality/soul/essence of your 'being'/whatever you want to call it."

Yes, it does.

I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused (re: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3929305&cid=44166849 above), etc. That is, there are things that I would never do when thinking clearly but if I'm starving, fatigued, in pain, aroused, or otherwise operating far below my normal rational though, I might do (and later regret).

The "sack of meat below [my] neck" has a lot to do with this.

If you don't believe me, imagine how your personality would change at least temporarily if you were an 80 year old man who was in chronic pain whose libido left with his prostate removal a decade ago waking up with the body of a healthy 21 year old with a libido to match. You very well might forget your moral compass for a few seconds and make a remark to an attractive member of the hospital staff that you would regret as soon as your brain re-engaged and overrode your new hormones.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[h4rr4r]

Sure it can impact your mood and such, I take a drug every morning that most people make their own of that does that.

This does not mean the drug changes who I am.

I have no interest in discussing souls or chakras or other BS.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[jythie]

souls and chakras asside, hormones produced in the non-head body do have a significant impact on personality, and it could be argued that personality is shaped by one's condition in life, which the body is a pretty significant element of.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[IndustrialComplex]

This does not mean the drug changes who I am.

I wonder then, why are there so many instances of insulin deprived individuals exhibiting uncharacteristically violent/aggressive behaviors, or slipping into comas.

Something as simple as an over/underactive pancreas can dramatically alter the behavior of a person. Last I checked, that organ wasn't located in the brain.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[Dahamma]

I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused

No, your "personality" doesn't change in response to these stimuli - the definition of personality IS an individual's response patterns to these. You are thinking of "mood".

Re:The body can affect the mind

[BemoanAndMoan]

Yes, it does.

Sorry, you are comparing causative and cognitive experiences.

In this context (head on a new body), hungry and horny or arthritic are as environmental as living on a ship, up the side of a mountain or in the middle of the desert. Differences in environment shape your experiences, but your mind is the system that defines how you react to them. So, losing a body is just a magnification of what a person would experience if they lost, say, an arm or leg. Some will excel in their new circumstance, some will wither, some will continue to plod along. That's because there's no change in the conscious self, only the circumstances in which the self now exists.

Your examples are too reductive. Switching bodies isn't going to make you like eggs any better than the last body, or hate birds or want to go fishing. The body, on the other hand, will never get to fishing again if the brain now attached to it doesn't like to.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[DeadDecoy]

Actually, there is some evidence that your personality is shaped by your interaction to external stimuli. Cognitive psychologists have found evidence to suggest that we experience the world in an embodied fashion. That is, when we think about cool ice tea, we simulate the concept by activating neurons that would be responsible for interacting with the object: site, touch, taste, etc. The same could be said for mood, as we use metaphors such as warm or cold to describe our temperament or our perceived temperament of others. When it comes down to making precise definitions such as mood and personality, the brain can present some rather fuzzy grey areas. That is, there is still a lot we do not know about it and it's hard to know precisely what impact our bodies have on its development.

Ben Bergen provides a nice review of lit in his book: Louder Than Words.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[Fitch]

imagine how your personality would change at least temporarily if you were an 80 year old man who was in chronic pain whose libido left with his prostate removal a decade ago waking up with the body of a healthy 21 year old with a libido to match. You very well might forget your moral compass for a few seconds and make a remark to an attractive member of the hospital staff that you would regret as soon as your brain re-engaged and overrode your new hormones.

Having it put that way, I think you can sign me up right now!

Moral compass... that's funny. I'm only 42, and I'd kill to have a 21 year old's body again. Literally. I could take so much better care of myself having learned the hard way (knees, back, diet, etc.).

Re:The body can affect the mind

[Fitch]

Edit: I should have quoted "myself" in that last sentence to highlight the irony...

Re:The body can affect the mind

[Dahamma]

Actually, there is some evidence that your personality is shaped by your interaction to external stimuli.

*Shaped* by a *longer term* process, sure, but your "personality" isn't by definition (and this definition is purely a construct of the field of psychology anyway, there is no inherent physical/biological structure that is a "personality" of course) changed just because you are cranky since haven't eaten in a few hours.

All I was saying is the OP has his definitions confused. Personality is (roughly defined as) the semi-predictable *pattern* of how one responds to these situations, not individual responses themselves.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[similar_name]

This does not mean the drug changes who I am.

I have no interest in discussing souls or chakras or other BS.

I think about the self often. I'm curious. How do you define yourself as both not changing from a drug and not discussing 'other BS'. Personally, I'd make the case that drugs (and anything else consumed including food), does change who you are. I'm just confused that you define yourself as something unchanged by a drug without eliciting a spirit. I guess I'm looking for clarification on how you define the self. Do you exclude mood as a part of who you are?

Re:The body can affect the mind

[brantondaveperson]

I tend to get very angry, but it doesn't change my personality.

That doesn't compute. It has changed your personality, albeit temporarily. You argue that your personality is an immutable property of your brain alone, but I don't think that there is any evidence for this at all. Your personality, observable to others only through your behaviour of course, is a property of the sum of your brain and all the chemicals floating around in it. Not all these chemicals are manufactured in the brain.

An AC below mentions also the sympathetic nervous system, another non-cranial input into your personality.

Put it this way, I bet your personality would change if your head were transplanted, mars-attacks-style, onto a small yappy dog.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[brantondaveperson]

I could take so much better care of myself having learned the hard way.

I wonder if you would though? Or would the sudden influx of testosterone (sorry, I'm assuming you're male here) change your personality to the extent that you again wouldn't care until it was too late?

Re:The body can affect the mind

[hedwards]

No, it hasn't changed my personality, personality is relatively durable and exists over decades and longer. By that measure drinking changes people's personalities.

Which is bullshit, drinking doesn't change people's personalities, it just lowers the inhibition and judgement revealing what was already there before imbibing.

What's more, neither you nor the GGP have actually put forth any actual evidence that a person's personality is changing because of changes to the body rather than changes in thought patterns.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Are you sure? I'm fairly positive most people don't make their own cocaine. ;)

Re:The body can affect the mind

[brantondaveperson]

revealing what was already there before imbibing.

So is it being sober that changes people's personalities?

I don't think either side in this discussion has presented any evidence one way or the other. Saying "I feel it is thus" is not evidence, for either camp. I googled a bit, and found these links, but I accept that they don't constitute evidence by themselves either;

http://healthland.time.com/2013/01/04/our-personalities-are-constantly-changing-even-if-we-think-theyre-not/
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/weight-gain-linked-with-personality-trait-changes.html

Part of the issue may be defining what 'personality' really means. Is there any basis to make a declaration that we all possess an unchanging and unchangeable personality, that we are always the same as we were yesterday? And if we do change, then surely at least some of those changes must be driven by triggers other than whatever happens between our ears?

Re:The body can affect the mind

[dintech]

I know my "personality" changes a bit when I'm hungry, tired, in physical pain, aroused

I'm not sure this makes sense to me. This is all just stimulus external to the brain arriving through the nervous system. It's like saying I react differently when my eyes see there's a burglar in my bedroom compared to when my eyes don't see that.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[hedwards]

I never said that personalities don't change. They change as a result in shifts in ones knowledge of the world and neurobiology. Brain damage can result in a change in personality, but pills and drugs don't change ones personality on a short term basis.

And no, being sober or being drunk does not change a person's personality. It will potentially change the expression of that personality. Taking drugs, medical or otherwise, does not cause a person to become somebody else. No matter how convenient it might be at times, the fact is that if you take a psychotropic drug, it does not cause a person to change who they are.

If it's a day to day change, those changes aren't the personality, but the lack of stability may be the personality.

Re:The body can affect the mind

[Agent0013]

And the number of neurons in the gut has led people to call it the second brain. Plus there are the gut microbes that directly communicate to the brain to change mood and influence behaviour. There is much more to who you are then just the grey matter in the skull.

Complicated Consequences

[NEDHead]

For example, we have face transplants, now the possibil;ity of head (or body) transplants. So, if you take a blonde, peal down her face and attach a head with a brain, will this ruin all the "Dumb Blonde" jokes?

Hey, is anyone here worthless?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a body with crohns and I'd very much like a not-shitty body.

So if you are worthless and crap, but have a good body, I'll pay.

But really, you can see where this is going to go. (the part with me and crohns is true)

Re:Hey, is anyone here worthless?

[DamnStupidElf]

There are plenty of suicidal people with perfectly healthy bodies. You may have to deal with being a hormonal teenager again, though.

I hear cackling

[maas15]

I'm fairly sure the author of the paper was laughing maniacally during most of it's writing.

Interesting

[kilodelta]

So effectively you could keep a clone on ice and when the time comes just transplant your head onto the clones body. Pretty cool!

But I'd prefer learning how to fix the issues that would lead to the necessity of a complete head transplant.

Re:Interesting

[MikeDataLink]

Check out a movie called "The Sixth Day". You're idea? :-)

Re:Interesting

[Khashishi]

Just make sure the clone never wakes up, or it might just want to kill you and take over your assets.

Re:Interesting

[tragedy]

So effectively you could keep a clone on ice and when the time comes just transplant your head onto the clones body. Pretty cool!

Sure. Of course we'd have to solve the problem of reviving a frozen human body first. More likely you'd have to do careful planning and start growing the clone at least five or six years (some acceleration might be possible with growth hormones, but even without that, such a body should be able to support an adult brain, carefully monitored) before the procedure. There are some clear potential ethical problems. For one thing, without artificial wombs, you're going to have to have a surrogate mother which raises severe ethical issues. Although, there's no reason the surrogate mother can't be another clone. The other issue is, of course, the question of the rights of the clone. It's possible to grow a clone without the majority of its brain. With some other support systems, it might be possible to grow one without any brain at all. If that can be done, then it's ethically no different than growing organs individually and re-assembling them. Of course, growing headless human bodies inside other headless human bodies (probably stripped down ones with no limbs,extra-bones, etc.) is still very viscerally disturbing and most people can't tell the difference between that and unethical.

OT: Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Your sig: "...Dear God, I would like to file a bug report..."

It's already been filed.

Re:Brain and brain! What is brain?

[lxs]

Eeew. Smug Earthlings in pajamas telling everybody what to do. I'll pass thank you.

Say Jack

[puddingebola]

"Say Jack, there's something different about you today? Did you get a haircut? Wait, no, I know what it is, you had your head removed and grafted onto somebody else's body... didn't you?"

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

[cellocgw]

Ooh, you bad person, forgetting to put "spoiler alert" in there. :-)

Funny thing (ha ha) -- in our world, there are people whose last name is "Capodilupo" . I suppose it's a fine point that it's not "Capodilupoterribile"

Said to Nixon's head, best line in Futurama

[GodfatherofSoul]

Robot Satan: "Well, it's back to hell for me! C'mon Nixon!"

I don't know about this

[kaizendojo]

It didn't work out too well for Ray Milland and Rosie Grier...

Head transplant?

[night_flyer]

don't they mean body transplant?

Futurama was right?

[sabt-pestnu]

If they can keep the head alive by keeping blood flowing through the major blood vessels in the neck, they they've got the basics for at least a short term maintenance system.

Add a few electrodes for the voice synthesizer, some electroencephalography to provide direction for the mechanical arms and ... how about a decorative glass container with a buffering fluid to prevent damage in transit?

On the plus side, we really don't have Nixon's head to kick around anymore.

Robo-Nixon

[SilentStaid]

Oh. God. No. http://theinfosphere.org/images/2/29/Robo_Nixon.png

Paula Deen

[drukqs]

So I should move forward with my plans to transplant Paula Deen's head onto the body of that ripped guy from the Old Spice commercials?

Re:Paula Deen

[TechyImmigrant]

>So I should move forward with my plans to transplant Paula Deen's head onto the body of that ripped guy from the Old Spice commercials?

Only if you transplant your head onto Paula Deen's diabetic body.

Solution we don't need...

[Bearhouse]

Apart from reminding me of the "so bad it's great" 'The Thing With Two Heads'...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069372/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

I think what we need is to get people to use the ones they have first, before we start swapping 'em out...

Of course, this is probably not the scenario envisaged; probably the other way round.
Which raises the question; we don't have enough donors as it is - what do you do, save potentially many lives with separate heart, kidney, liver etc. transplants, or give some lucky person a "new" body?

As always, SciFi predicted all this - coming soon to a private clinic near you; old rich dudes coming out from an extended stay with suspiciously-young bodies at same time as "missing persons" list grows...

Futurama, here I come!

[dywolf]

Why bother with the body?
if they can transplant the head and hook it up so it works and lives... ...then they can put it in a jar.

Someone go dig up Nixon. We need his DNA!

Re:Futurama, here I come!

[jellomizer]

N I X O N S BACK!

Re:Futurama, here I come!

[Jaza]

I heard on the grapevine that Nixon's Head is actually getting quite tired of its pickle-jar abode. This is just the news it's been waiting for.

Hybrid aka Zaphod Beeblebrox

[Yergle143]

So we can attach the head but it won't have motor control...how about attachment to a functional headed torso and call it done? Then run for President of the Galaxy.

I've always wanted boobies

[Chewbacon]

Aside the whole paralysis thing, this sounds like a better method for gender reassignment surgery.

Been there, done that, with Hitler's head.

[sconeu]

The Day After Tomorrow.

Variation on the movie scene

[ThatsNotPudding]

You slowly awake in a strange hotel room, only to find your head in an ice bucket, your valuable, sellable body missing, and a note advising you to get to a hospital.

Though the note would have to be taped to the ice bucket lid, I suppose.

Re:Variation on the movie scene

[martas]

So that's where the three heads in Spirited Away come from!

Re:So guy or girl dosent matter?

[Randle_Revar]

Heh, Heinlein was interested in a lot of things. Have you read his late stuff? (Time Enough for Love, To Sail Beyond the Sunset, etc...)

Great for those looking to get ahead

[Progman3K]

The first person to get an additional head grafted onto their shoulders should be declared president of the galaxy!

Lawsuit!

[interval1066]

First XPlant of a wrestler's head to a geek's body, who want to place their bets?

agile development

[znrt]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

hey, this is still work in progress!

(if we don't fuck everything up first, a production release of human_specimen_worth_its_salt is expected soon, bear with us just some million years more!)

Wonderful news, but...

[AngryDill]

...what are the odds of finding a viable donor head?

Slight problem

[DrXym]

In an organ transplant your body can reject the organ. In a head transplant the body could reject the head. At that point your royally fucked. Though I guess if you're looking at a head transplant you probably are anyway.

body harvesting

[Lumpy]

So now old very rich men can pay for some young homeless man to have his head removed and achieve immortality at the cost of others lives.

You know it will happen, just wait for it.

Re:body harvesting

[DamnStupidElf]

Or more realistically in our capitalist economy the rich guy and the homeless guy swap heads and bodies and the homeless guy gets paid the riches. Business as usual and the formerly rich guy can go make another fortune. There are plenty of people who would rather die old and rich than work hard in their youth. I think that makes a market.

Re:body harvesting

[tragedy]

There was a _Tales from the Crypt_ episode like that with George Burns. He played an old, rich man interested in an attractive young woman. This doctor approaches him and offers him him a donor body for a fortune. It's actually done piecemeal, a bit at a time. At the end, he has all of the young man's body and none of his fortune. The woman he's interested in, naturally, ends up with the donor, who now has the old body, but also is filthy rich.

Hmmm. Also reminds me a bit of a _Twilight Zone_ episode where a couple are interested in new bodies from a company that offers healthy new bodies. They can only afford the ten thousand dollars for one body swap. The husband is in almost constant pain from his age-related medical conditions. There's a subplot where the husband tries to double his money playing poker but nearly loses it all but is let off the hook by the card shark he goes to and, in the end, he gets a new body first. However, he quickly decides to switch back to his original body (they have a money back guarantee) based on some crazy 50's TV moralizing about aging gracefully with his partner, etc. Bear in mind that his original body is in almost constant pain. All I could think watching it was that it was some stupid rigged false dilemma. He should have just used his new, strong, healthy body to work hard for a few years and save up the money for his wife to follow him if he loved her that much. Maybe I'm missing something about this whole dignity of aging gracefully thing, but it seems to me that most of the dignity comes from accepting what you cannot change. As soon as it's actually possible to change it, all of that goes out the window.

Re:body harvesting

[tragedy]

Well, it might happen except for the whole rejection problem. Maybe the blood-brain barrier will protect the brain from rejection, but not the rest of the head, and probably not the brain either. For this to work, it's pretty much going to have to be a clone body.

Re:Reality catching up with fiction

[BitZtream]

Theoretically, they could just magically repair the spinal cord with unicorn farts ... and that is just as real as this story. The summary is a lie, its just a paper written about possibly doing it. No animal has ever had their head attached to another body and done anything other than die quickly.

Hope for congress, SCOTUS?

[fyngyrz]

...and other dead-above-the-neck types?

I can't believe they actually tested this.

[Qbertino]

I can't believe that some scientists actually had the bizar idea to test this on animals. What sick brain actually thinks "Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat ..."
Creeeepy. ... Perhaps scientists doing stuff like that should be locked away or at least have their permissions revoked or something.

My 2 cents.

Re:I can't believe they actually tested this.

[tragedy]

What sick brain actually thinks "Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat ..."

Well, I think what kind of person they are mostly depends on what comes after the ellipses. For example:

Gee, I wonder if I could transplant the head of this goat to the body of that other goat ... thus paving the way to save countless people from unnecessary medical suffering.

It's gruesome, certainly, but a scientist doesn't have to be insane or evil to wonder about it.

Re:I can't believe they actually tested this.

[fygment]

Yes the scientist does have to be insane or evil.
Fact: prior to now, the scientist would have known that the procedure could not be successful.
Fact: _now_ the procedure could not be successful.
The Question: So, any practical experiment with a reasonable possibility of success is impossible which begs the question: why ever would a scientist cause something to suffer to do this sort of thing?
The Answer: because pulling the wings off flies and burning them slowly to death with a magnifying glass got old. And because slowly torturing people to death is illegal in most countries. So, next best thing is to see what you can get away with as 'medical' experiments on animals (even though secretly, the scientists sure wish they could just jump to human experiments).
Sick sick sick evil or insane

Re:I can't believe they actually tested this.

[tragedy]

Nice fantasy. It's also certainly possible that some people who have performed such experiments were deranged. The fact is, some of the experiments have been successful and have produced combined animals surviving well past decapitation, but paralyzed. Gruesome, but so was much early medical experimentation. The first blood transfusions were mostly fatal. Same is true for most early transplants of any kind. I'm not saying I approve of the mistreatment of animals, I'm just saying that you're wrong if you think that anyone who would ever do such a thing could only have evil or insane motivations.

Already Been Tried in the 60's I think.

[guitardood]

"His brain is gone!" - Dr. McCoy

Citation Needed

[BitZtream]

Canavero outlines a procedure modeled on successful head transplants which have been carried out in animals since 1970.

Bullshit. Cite one example of a successful head transplant, and by successful, I mean the animal actually lived on its own, without life support, for more than the time it takes for the heart to stop beating after having its head severed.

Guess what ... its NEVER happened.

Too bad..

[Virtucon]

Ray Milland is dead. Maybe we could get Rosey Grier and some CGI and remake "The Thing With Two Heads?"

Ironic QOTD

[dancinfrandsen]

The quote footer on /. while reading this story: The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.

Dating Sites

[Bastian227]

Those profile pictures may not be photoshopped.

head transplant

[Independent_forever]

I remember back when Jurrassic Park was released and the character Malcolm had a line that so works for this ridiculous notion--"your scientists were so busy worrying about if they could, they forgot to ask if they should"

Re:So guy or girl dosent matter?

[DexterIsADog]

I've read nearly everything he wrote. He did start losing me with "Friday" though. And he was one racist mofo... :-)

Toughest matching service ever.

[Valdrax]

Aside the whole paralysis thing, this sounds like a better method for gender reassignment surgery.

You know, and the whole murder / bodytheft thing.

I guess you could try to find a matching service, but given all the factors involved, I doubt you're going to have an easy time finding someone who wants to swap bodies with you who has the same tissue type, same skin color, compatible build, equitable age & health, etc.

So we could have a...a...Nixon-Obama hybrid!

[jddj]

Oh wait...have one of those already. Check the oval office...

Chicken in Black

[hackertourist]

see Johnny Cash's take on the consequences...

Body Rejuvenation?

[crontabminusell]

I wonder how long it will be before we can clone our own body, grow it in a vat, and get our head strapped to it in order to beat old age. Disposable designer bodies, anyone?

Re:Body Rejuvenation?

[Githaron]

Twenty five year old equivalent body with a three hundred year old head?

Re:Body Rejuvenation?

[crontabminusell]

I imagine a little (ok, maybe a lot of) plastic surgery will keep the head looking ok. =)

Can we capture and transplant consciousness?

[Beeftopia]

Head meat and brain meat decays. So, capturing the consciousness and implanting that somewhere would be real immortality.

However, in the meantime, I'll settle for looking like this guy. Provided there are suitable donors of course.

Re:Walt Disney

[CanHasDIY]

So does that mean they're going to thaw out Walt and put his head on another person's body?

Queue up the "Hitchhikers' Guide" fans so they can really be Zaphod Beeblebrox!

It seemed like a good idea, until the first time I walked into Kosher Joe's Deli...

Let me guess.

[wcrowe]

Available mainly to the super wealthy who want to live forever.

Saudi Arabia can provide the bodies of beheaded criminals, Christians, and the like.

Dick Cheney will never go away!

[bussdriver]

Just prey your body is not a match for his head or you'll have an accident! (like what happened when he got a new heart?)

Ok...

[multimediavt]

But, says Canavero, recent advances in re-connecting spinal cords that are surgically severed mean that it should be technically feasible to do it in humans.

Ok...you first.

only available in China

[Khashishi]

Where else will you find healthy living body to transplant?

Re:only available in China

[Githaron]

Brain dead people. Of course, you would have to deny the mutiple people waiting for those organs.

Overheard in recovery

[kdogg73]

Oh, oh, that's much better. Wait... wait. Oh, my! What have you done? I'm backwards. You flea-bitten furball! Only an overgrown mop-head like you would be stupid enough to...

Discorporation prior art a while back?

[Etcetera]

Discorporation talks about the related, but distinct notion of simply keeping a severed head /alive/, in a manner now wholly reminiscent of Futurama.

Anyway, if you're interested: If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive...Discorporation and U.S. Patent 4,666,425

same as restoring function to quadreplegics

[iggymanz]

just saw off the crippled person's head and put on a new one. problem solved.

f.u.c.k - ethics? long life?

[Tim12s]

Well... this changes everything. Enter the world we fear the most from people with long life and enough cash to ensure hegemony over the many.

Waiting list ...

[Skapare]

... for new heads, is probably still going to be hard to get on.

Myocardial Infarctions, Human and Animal

[Guppy]

Or like a terrible pump design. Intelligent design my ass, more like idiotic design.

The human heart really is badly designed. More specifically, the routing and number of our coronary arteries -- any interruption in flow that lasts for more than maybe 20 minutes or so can debilitate or kill a human.

In the development of animal models for human diseases, models of "heart attacks" created by deliberate blockage of cardiac blood vessels showed that many species did not suffer the immense amount of damage seen in humans. Guinea Pigs, in particular, were especially resistant; even with massive blockages, their excellent collateral circulation provided near immunity to myocardial infarction.

If we replace every part...

[taucross]

Is a head transplant a body transplant in reverse? If someone gives me a head transplant, then gives me a body transplant, am I still the same person? Questions will now be answered thanks to the awesome, insane power of science.

I will fear no evil

[MichaelSmith]

Anyone I wonder if anybody will try a transgender brain transplant?

Good luck finding a body

[booch]

I don't think it's very likely that you'd be able to find a body to transplant your head onto.

The donor body would have to be a brain-dead (or persistent vegetative state) living body. (We don't know how to revive a body after it's been dead for a few hours.) Brain-death is not all that common, especially with a healthy body. Now find the families of those brain-dead folks who would not object to their loved one's head being sawed off for their body to be attached to another person's head. Not gonna happen.

stephen hawkings head on a 20 year old body

[mostadorthsander]

ad infinitum...

I have a plan.

[DavidJacobs1170]

Eat like a slob and play videogames all day. Get someone to exercise everyday at eat healthy foods regularly. Pay ridiculous amounts of money to the healthy guy to switch heads. Rinse and repeat. The money part's gonna prove tough though.

Re:So guy or girl dosent matter?

[Randle_Revar]

>And he was one racist mofo

Uh, evidence? Aside from "The Sixth Column", he was paid to rework Cambell's story on that one. He tried to reduce the racism, but it is pretty integral to the story... He never agreed to another contract like that.

I saw this episode...

[agapeton]

It's called "The Brain of Morbius" (Doctor Who)