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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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?

[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: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".

Body transplant

[jamesl]

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

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

[dotancohen]

What could possibly go wrong?

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

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!

[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: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".

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?

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.

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)

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

[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: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.