Chinese Doctor Performs Head Transplants On Mice

An anonymous reader writes: Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese surgeon, has performed roughly 1,000 head transplants on mice since 2013 and says that monkeys are next. Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates. With $1.6 million of funding so far, he says, "We want to do this clinically, but we have to make an animal model with long-term survival first. Currently, I am not confident to say that I can do a human transplant."

Comments

Work with cloned mice

[Karmashock]

The immune response would have to be serious.

if you have two genetically identical mice then swapping their heads should be more viable.

The interesting thing in so far as humans would be doing the same thing.

Forget the ethics for a moment. Lets say you got a clone of yourself... doing a head swap would be less of a big deal than grabbing some random other person and doing a head swap with them.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Antique Geekmeister]

The idea of "new bodies for old" is an old one in fiction and in science. This was explored in some dramatic detail in Lois McMaster Bujold's stories of "Miles Vorkosigan". Old people would have a clone made, the clone raised in foster care until mature enough to support a full grown brain, and then the brain transplanted. Raising the clone required raising them to at least puberty, to support the brain and mature nervous system of the transplant candidate, and they were certainly sentient beings being sacrificed.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's where they ripped off "The Island" from!

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Sentience hasn't historically caused much grief for the perpetrators of violence in the past, nor for third party observers on second thought. Everything from other tribes, countries, their women, their children, within group competitors, weaker group members and, of course, animals have been fair game. If sentience has been a necessary and sufficient condition for moral consideration, it hasn't shown.

For those who doubt the sentience of animals, I can offer you the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Copy and paste into your favourite search engine if you are among the minority who care.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this technology a viable way to work around term limits?

Oh the joy of it!

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

A more ethical approach would involve not having the clone's head be there at all, just don't have it develop, replaced with some computer interface that exercises the body and the nerves that go into the rest of the body.

Though this is not a long-term solution, in any case, because the brain will deteriorate with age. Having it attached to a healthy body will surely help, but it won't be enough. Something like sens is what's required, and thankfully it does not involve transplanting heads. :) This is more a solution for handicaps and stuff like that.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, calling it successful because some lived for a whole day is not what I would call successful. Oh, the operation was a success but the patient had the bad manners of dying... Obviously you don't have it all in hand or they would go on living.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing everyone always ignores is that no matter what, eventually your brain dies. Whether in you or after you've been uploaded to a computer or another brain or what have you. And when that happens *THAT* you is dead. *YOU* still experience the pain of death. YOU still cease to exist. There is something out there with your memories and thoughts, but they are not you any more than a photo album or journal is you.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like governor Brown of California has done?

Of course he did a different trick. He claimed that the term limits simply did not count his previous terms as governor because the law was created after them so he had the full limit still availible.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

It is commonly dealt with in overly dramatic trash.
I say "trash" because it is just plain stupid for the donor bodies to be sentient.
Sentient bodies roam around and hurt themselves.
That is just added to get the "OMG, trying to be immortal is evil!!!1!one!
Yeah death!
Dying is good!
We should all be happy to die!
If we die, our resources are freed up for babies!" message that permeates a lot of science fiction/fiction, across.

Most people are suicidal, they just do not want to know the exact time they will die.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

If you work with an inbred mouse strain then they are genetically identical (aside from denovo mutations.)

Re:Work with cloned mice

[KGIII]

What if you care, already know, and just do not want to read more proselytizing? Your "tone" indicates that it probably is. I think you will find the majority care, to some extent, but most do not consider it a major concern. I *do* pay attention to it as my karma is mildly important to me. However I needn't be preached at. Today is Sunday, I did not go to church.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that everyone like you always ignores is that no matter what, cells are always dying. Constantly! Even brain cells! And then they get replaced by other cells! But that doesn't mean you cease to be you.

Will it be easy to transfer a person to a new body, new brain, or an artificial brain? Heck no. But I can see no reason why, given advanced enough technology, "I" must die in order for "me" to live on.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[KGIII]

That is a standard finding. It is called grandfathering and, I am not sure, I believe it is assumed to be the default unless otherwise specified. However, I have seen both grandfather and non-grandfathering clauses written into laws.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Megol]

It's possible to make a clone without brain, there are a lot of potential problems with that like blood vessels and nerve paths simply not existing.

The "ethical" way to do it would probably be to make a clone with an intact brain however never letting it become conscious.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Immune system is not defined just by DNA, your clones likely being much younger and definitely having different background as a result will have very different immune system as well.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Megol]

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

We animals are always dying when it comes to our individual cells however still the collection of cells (including absorbed microorganisms and bacteria) is still alive.

BTW why would one experience any pain if one knows that one is dying? Sedation and pain killers removes that.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ranton]

The thing everyone always ignores is that no matter what, eventually your brain dies. Whether in you or after you've been uploaded to a computer or another brain or what have you. And when that happens *THAT* you is dead. *YOU* still experience the pain of death. YOU still cease to exist. There is something out there with your memories and thoughts, but they are not you any more than a photo album or journal is you.

This is very easily solved as a concept, although the implementation will obviously be insanely difficult. As another poster mentioned, your brain cells are constantly dying already. You still feel like you probably because it happens so gradually. So the answer to replacing your brain is the same; do it gradually. Conceptually you would be hooking your brain to a helmet filled with electronics that slowly replace your brain functions. At the end of the process your brain is completely electronic and you are still you. This is the theory anyway.

If you consider this scenario to be the same as you experiencing death, then you have already died perhaps hundreds of times in your lifetime so far.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Well sure, but you want that new body to be rockin', right? It needs to work out with weights, go running, etc. You'd need to fit it with something cyborgish if you were going to do that without it becoming conscious.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[NicBenjamin]

That's actually how term limits work.

You get elected in 1990 to a term that doesn't count for term limits because there are no term limits, then term limits get added and your 1994 election does count towards your limit.

In my home state of Michigan John Engler served three terms as Governor after enacting term limits in his first term. Harry Truman would have been eligible for infinite terms because the 22nd Amendment was passed during his tenure and "this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term."

But he was hideously unpopular in 1952 so he didn't run.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[sexconker]

The thing everyone always ignores is that no matter what, eventually your brain dies. Whether in you or after you've been uploaded to a computer or another brain or what have you. And when that happens *THAT* you is dead. *YOU* still experience the pain of death. YOU still cease to exist. There is something out there with your memories and thoughts, but they are not you any more than a photo album or journal is you.

This is very easily solved as a concept, although the implementation will obviously be insanely difficult. As another poster mentioned, your brain cells are constantly dying already. You still feel like you probably because it happens so gradually. So the answer to replacing your brain is the same; do it gradually. Conceptually you would be hooking your brain to a helmet filled with electronics that slowly replace your brain functions. At the end of the process your brain is completely electronic and you are still you. This is the theory anyway.

If you consider this scenario to be the same as you experiencing death, then you have already died perhaps hundreds of times in your lifetime so far.

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.
You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not true. While not popular, Orch-OR and other theories for consciousness most certainly do exist, have made predictions, and are being experimentally investigated.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[stjobe]

There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.

There are several scientific theories - multitudes even - about what consciousness is, how it arises, and what qualifies.

You should also try studying some philosophy; philosophy of mind has been the subject matter of thousands of books, theories, discussions, and theses all the way back to Plato.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ranton]

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.
You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

Obviously science has not progressed far enough to know how to model the human brain in a computer, or else we would probably be doing it already. So I guess I concede that we can't transfer the human brain yet, but I never said we could. But it is silly to believe we won't figure this out eventually. I would be surprised if it takes us 50 years.

I was only responding to the idea that if you transfer your brain to another medium, the old you dies. This is potentially true, but very unlikely. People can lose large portions of their brain without dying, and if those portions were replaced with synthetic computing devices I don't think anyone would think the old them has died.

Worse case scenario would probably be like what happens to someone suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS), where their personality changes to the point where they seem like a new person. In this case they would likely become more capable instead of less (like an MS patient), but their personality is still likely to change considerably.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[nospam007]

"You get elected in 1990 to a term that doesn't count for term limits because there are no term limits, then term limits get added and your 1994 election does count towards your limit."

So if the driving age is lowered to 14 year 'terms', it applies only to people who were born after the law was published, because previous year 'terms' don't count?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[flargleblarg]

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?

The part which does not understand the Force, of course.

"I suggest you try it again, Luke. Only this time, let go your conscious self and act on instinct."

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.
You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

Obviously science has not progressed far enough to know how to model the human brain in a computer, or else we would probably be doing it already. So I guess I concede that we can't transfer the human brain yet, but I never said we could. But it is silly to believe we won't figure this out eventually. I would be surprised if it takes us 50 years.

I was only responding to the idea that if you transfer your brain to another medium, the old you dies. This is potentially true, but very unlikely. People can lose large portions of their brain without dying, and if those portions were replaced with synthetic computing devices I don't think anyone would think the old them has died.

Worse case scenario would probably be like what happens to someone suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS), where their personality changes to the point where they seem like a new person. In this case they would likely become more capable instead of less (like an MS patient), but their personality is still likely to change considerably.

Its simple, do what they did in Freaky Friday.. Disney is ahead of science! Again! They have Walt Frozen below Epcot in a secret bunker waiting for a cancer cure.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[orangesquid]

I'd suggest reading some David Lewis and Saul Kripke. This topic of who is the real "you" has been elaborated upon in fantastic detail :)

Re:Work with cloned mice

[rmdingler]

Neurons in the cerebral cortex are never replaced, or added to, from the time we are born.

Many (perhaps more than half) cardiomyocyte heart cells in a septuagenarian are the ones she was born with.

A part of you has always been in the current state of things. 75 to 120 years mostly well-lived is more than enough for me.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who doubt the sentience of animals, I can offer you the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.

Well, if that's the view you take, then our biology is such that we are meant to kill such sentient animals. In that case, rather than inferring a prohibition on killing animals, you raise the question why we have prohibitions on killing people.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a fascinating article on some of the associated concerns.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[sexconker]

None of those "theories" describe the physical manifestation of consciousness,

Re:Work with cloned mice

[sexconker]

None of those "theories" describe the physical manifestation of consciousness.
They can't.
I don't need to study philosophy. The sum total of human knowledge on consciousness is that one can know oneself is conscious but can never prove (or disprove) the same about anything else.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[sexconker]

Obviously science has not progressed far enough to know how to model the human brain in a computer, or else we would probably be doing it already. So I guess I concede that we can't transfer the human brain yet, but I never said we could. But it is silly to believe we won't figure this out eventually. I would be surprised if it takes us 50 years.

I was only responding to the idea that if you transfer your brain to another medium, the old you dies. This is potentially true, but very unlikely. People can lose large portions of their brain without dying, and if those portions were replaced with synthetic computing devices I don't think anyone would think the old them has died.

That "replaced bit-by-bit" shit doesn't even fly at car auctions. There's no chance in hell society would accept a fully-replaced human as the original.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Huxley never wrote anything like that in "The Island"... Oh... you mean the movie.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.

Consciousness is an emergent property of having a bunch of neurons together. Get enough neurons interacting and processing sensory data, and you get consciousness.

You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

Bullshit. You only need to know how individual neurons work in order to produce artificial ones, and a process to replace existing ones with artificial ones. You certainly don't need to understand how the mind works in order to gradually transfer consciousness from a biological brain to an artificial one.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

Obviously science has not progressed far enough to know how to model the human brain in a computer, or else we would probably be doing it already. So I guess I concede that we can't transfer the human brain yet, but I never said we could. But it is silly to believe we won't figure this out eventually. I would be surprised if it takes us 50 years.

I was only responding to the idea that if you transfer your brain to another medium, the old you dies. This is potentially true, but very unlikely. People can lose large portions of their brain without dying, and if those portions were replaced with synthetic computing devices I don't think anyone would think the old them has died.

That "replaced bit-by-bit" shit doesn't even fly at car auctions. There's no chance in hell close-minded idiots like me would accept a fully-replaced human as the original.

FTFY

Re:Work with cloned mice

[NicBenjamin]

Only if there's a specific clause in the law saying that.

Electoral term limits laws need that kind of thing or you could get interesting Court rulings about ex post facto laws. ie: if John Engler's first term didn't count towards a limit at the time, can you retroactively say it counts towards the limit after the fact?

Therefore they all include a clause explaining precisely which current (and former) office holders get grandfathered in.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

Let me guess: you believe in a magical bearded man in the sky.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[doug141]

You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

I respectfully disagree. A lot can happen by accident. It even gets called a name sometimes: 'serendipity.'

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Prune]

one can know oneself is conscious

No, you can't.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Prune]

And this is the trick: continuity is a core aspect of the experience of consciousness; otherwise, this scenario is identical to killing the original and "activating" the cloned mind.

One thing that could throw a kink into the scenario, however, is the possibility (albeit, IMHO, less than even) that some core aspects of consciousness are encoded as quantum information, in which case it cannot be cloned (by the no-cloning theorem). Some hints that this may be the case are to be found in recent experimental research: the most important result is http://www.researchgate.net/pu... but also see http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... and http://iopscience.iop.org/1742... as well as, for an overview of this area, http://journals.sfu.ca/jnonloc...

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Prune]

Whoops, I mixed up the order of the links. [1] is just Bandyopadhyay's commentary that links his experimental results to those theories of consciousness.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Karmashock]

You could also damage the brain so it never really obtained what you'd think of as human level intelligence.

If it sort of had animal intellgience it would be hard to feel that badly about killing it eventually... I mean, we do that with animals all the time.

People are going to be upset. But think about it like this... if you can figure out how to morally justify it to yourself... you'll live. If you don't... you'll die.

What is going to happen here?

People are going to find a means of justifying it to themselves because they want to live.

I'm not especially interested in body swaps etc. I just find the morality of it interesting and how people would of course justify it if it meant life.

Life needs no justification for itself. And death has none. To paraphrase the old Roman maxim about victory and defeat.

I think the long term solution to the whole death problem is going to be more a matter of genetic engineering at first, then some sort of cybernetic singularity.

Long after I'm dust in the wind. Possibly thousands and thousands of years... who knows. But I think that's where its going.

I envy those generations. Live that long and know that much. Oh well.

*gets back to converting microwave into a time machine*

Re:Work with cloned mice

[someone1234]

You don't even exist, so your statement is invalid.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.
You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

Yes there is. Just because you don't know it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Consciousness is the pattern of electrical and chemical signals, (including to a lesser degree, hormones,) being passed around between neurons. This has been EXTENSIVELY studied, and is easily evidenced by the changes to consciousness AND personality, by the way, that occur as the result to changes in the physics or chemistry of the brain. If you swap the entire brain, and do so without KILLING it by hypoxic insult during the swap, and manage somehow to attach all the million or billion or however many nerve fibers that attach it to the peripheral nervous system, the "self" goes with it.

There is nothing magical (by which I mean either magical or transcendental or 'holy') about the mind, the self or consciousness. It is even pretty well documented what parts of the brain are generally responsible for what functions, from where the body's skeletal nerves map into the cerebral cortex, to which parts control breathing and pulse.

As for what you're responding to, well... even if you made an exact, atom-by-atom replica of the brain or a body, what you'd have would be an indistinguishable copy of yourself which would not feel as if he (/she) is any more a COPY than YOU are. However, yes... if the original instance of you dies, that instance still dies independently of what the other copy has happen to him/her, just as if you kill a (non-conjoined) twin nothing actually happens to the other just because you killed that one. Once the (impossibly difficult in practical reality) copy process is complete, the copies are fully and completely independent of each other. When your brain stops working, your "self" or consciousness ceases to be in any real, meaningful way. It doesn't "go" anywhere. The brain can be likened to a computer, an analog one, one whose purpose is to drive and coordinate activities within the body. Don't get confused about the word analog here. I don't mean it in the common sense as being the diametric opposite of "digital," nor of any suggestion of roundness of face with sweeping hands. Only that its functions by comparing (or making analogies) between inputted signals it receives from its own memory, or from the body internally, or externally through the senses. For example, if the occipital lobe receives an image of a bear approaching it, (getting progressively larger in the field of view of each eye, and causing the eyes to track more and more nearly crossed to keep it centered in field of view, and if the nerves that contort the lenses... you get the idea,) it passes this information to a few places, one of which goes hunting for previous times seeing an object like that. Another passes it to the part that says simply, "hey, something's approaching me, rapidly," which in turn lights up commands to the adrenal glands, but again, you get the idea. Presently, you realize that it's a BEAR and you should probably respond in some way to its approach such as perhaps considering [fight|flight|shitting your goddamned britches].

The "self" or the consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, the thing that refers to itself by the pronouns, "me," "myself," and "I," (in English, at least,) is simply the program running on that analog computer. The implications of this make some people uncomfortable, because one of the things the realization that we are all just basically computer programs is that other species computers, and the main programs running on them, such as those in dogs, cats, cows, fish even, are not really qualitatively different from our own, and we are not magically different from them. There's obviously a QUANTITATIVE difference in the sheer complexity of the thoughts we are capable

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

one can know oneself is conscious

No, you can't.

I certainly do. It is the one thing in all of existence that I have absolute personal proof of, most everything else is conjecture.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

You only need to know how individual neurons work in order to produce artificial ones, and a process to replace existing ones with artificial ones. You certainly don't need to understand how the mind works in order to gradually transfer consciousness from a biological brain to an artificial one.

You're basically right, though practically... in order to transfer the program on a computer while it's running, when it has not been built with the ability to transfer, (no copy command!) you'd need to know (as a bare minimum,) the physical structure of the computer, or brain in this case. You'd need to make a neuron-by-neuron copy, since one of the ways in which the brain is unlike a conventional, digital electronic computer, is that the very structure of it changes as a function of its inputs, the processing it does on those inputs, and on the reaction it sees in the world without to actions it takes based on the processed data. You'd need a copy of a brain as it is, neuron and synapse plus all supporting hardware, bathed in the same soup of chemicals balanced the same way, to have any hope of transferring the program.

I doubt it's practical, since it probably continues to change as long as it's lit-up electrochemically, so you'd not only have to copy each and every last nerve and connection, get the chemistry right, but you'd have to do it INSTANTANEOUSLY. Good luck with that.

As for the program itself, I suppose if you could magically copy your brain and body, atom by atom, but the new body were not alive as such, at the instant it's created, (no pulse, no electrical activity,) but is otherwise exactly identical, I suppose there's no particular reason that shocking the heart into beating wouldn't cause circulation of blood necessary to supply oxygen and nutrients to the new brain copy, and why as long as you supply adequate oxygen, (perhaps by using a ventilator,) why brain activity wouldn't start more or less spontaneously... rebooting as one might after being rendered unconscious as by for example, an electrical shock.

Unless you're going to tell me that no one has ever been alive after experiencing ANY time under any set of circumstances whatsoever, a complete cessation of brain electrical activity... the physical analog computer that is the brain stores information in its electrochemical pathways, and no doubt is mostly analogous to ROM, or E-PROM, so that if you cold-boot it, it comes up mostly in the same state and condition as that when it went down, provided it did so without being damaged.

However, while no electrical or chemical activity is occurring, to the point I was making before, no experience is being had either, no new memories being made or recorded, no ideas being had or mulled, no dreaming is occurring, and it's a sure bet that no "out of body" nonsense is happening.

On that note, while I've brought it up, since it takes time for a brain to form new memories, (it's not, as I understand it, instantaneous, correct me if I'm wrong,) the experiences some people report, assuming they're not deliberately made up by the conscious mind, when waking from a traumatic event often involving long hallways with lights at the end of them, etc., are probably an effect of the rebooting process, since memory as consciousness fails (during for example, anesthesia, or when losing consciousness due to lack of oxygen, etc.) and are either an artifact being conjured during reboot, or are what the brain makes of what to it, is the extraordinary event of going from being OFF to ON.

Kind of like all the little squiggles you see on a screen for a split-second when you first power a computer up, on its screen? Imagine if the computer had to interpret that as possible input it's supposed to do something with, and so compares it to other things it's got in memory. Or something like that.

Transfer of consciousness is probably not going to happen within any of our lifetimes, although other such remarks have been made that turned out to be wrong, so... who knows?

REMEMBER: When someone says, "that's impossible!" what he really means, whether or not he realizes it, is "I don't know how to do it."

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.

Consciousness is an emergent property of having a bunch of neurons together. Get enough neurons interacting and processing sensory data, and you get consciousness.

You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.

Bullshit. You only need to know how individual neurons work in order to produce artificial ones, and a process to replace existing ones with artificial ones. You certainly don't need to understand how the mind works in order to gradually transfer consciousness from a biological brain to an artificial one.

He wasn't talking about awareness or sentience, those are what you are talking about. He was talking about consciousness (the experiencing of existence/environment). For instance; an AI built on current cpus etc could potentially be aware or even sentient but it could never be conscious, it could never actually experience existence such as the color blue, because there is nothing in a cpu designed to produce physical consciousness. Perhaps once the physical components and required conditions for consciousness are fully known and verified we could create a system where a digital mind is connected to the consciousness device and a feedback loop created to simulate us. But until then no.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

"Forget the ethics for a moment"... yes this seems to be what many Frankenstein / Mengele wannabes do and this moment seems to be lasting a looooong time...

Re:Work with cloned mice

[sociocapitalist]

The thing everyone always ignores is that no matter what, eventually your brain dies. Whether in you or after you've been uploaded to a computer or another brain or what have you. And when that happens *THAT* you is dead. *YOU* still experience the pain of death. YOU still cease to exist. There is something out there with your memories and thoughts, but they are not you any more than a photo album or journal is you.

The me that got up this morning is not exactly the same me that went to bed last night either, and yet I am still me.

At the point where something is simulated with 100% accuracy it is no different than the original.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you so much for those links!

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Karmashock]

Yahtzee! Some tool just invoked Godwin's law.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

That "replaced bit-by-bit" shit doesn't even fly at car auctions. There's no chance in hell society would accept a fully-replaced human as the original.

The skin is the part of you that other people actually see. It is fully replaced in 7 years - all new cells.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

So if the driving age is lowered to 14 year 'terms', it applies only to people who were born after the law was published, because previous year 'terms' don't count?

The other way around. In the beginning, there were no "driving age" and no "drivers licence". You made a car, you could drive it. As the first car accidents happened, various sorts of "local driving permits" became necessary, and eventually a system with tests and driver's licences. For a long time, there were people around who never took any test because they became professional drivers long before the testing regime started. They got their early driver's licences by default.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Eloking]

The thing everyone always ignores is that no matter what, eventually your brain dies. Whether in you or after you've been uploaded to a computer or another brain or what have you. And when that happens *THAT* you is dead. *YOU* still experience the pain of death. YOU still cease to exist. There is something out there with your memories and thoughts, but they are not you any more than a photo album or journal is you.

The thing that everyone like you always ignores is that no matter what, cells are always dying. Constantly! Even brain cells! And then they get replaced by other cells! But that doesn't mean you cease to be you.

Exactly this!

That thought came to my mind a while ago. Eventually, our whole brain replace itself but we never cease to be, well, ourselves. Even though it's a generally accepted concept in /. community that our mind is our brain (and not our soul or anything religion related), it's mind blowing to think that I'm still myself even if our brain replace itself every 7 years (or 10 depending on the research). Or is my being is slowly disappearing to be replaced by perfect copy of myself and the memory of my past is actually the remain of my old self?

It's a complex but very fun concept to play with, but it's also quite terrifying sometime.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

What if you care, already know, and just do not want to read more proselytizing?

I don't know, STFU?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[azav]

Nice to have spare parts around, isn't it?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[azav]

> BTW why would one experience any pain if one knows that one is dying?

Did you forget the phrase, "want to", in your question above?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[coofercat]

True, but if you've got too fat to get out of bed, then having a fitter, slimmer, maybe 'ripped' body on stand-by could be useful (even if the body was the same age as your head). Likewise if you get injured, or have some localised disease or whatever.

I wonder what the psychological effects would be? I mean, I'm very used to my body - if I got a new one, would I miss the old one? Would I look at myself and think "who's that!?"? What about when gettin' it on with the Mrs? Would it feel like someone else was doing it all and I was missing out? I guess with a life expectancy of one day, it's not too much to worry about right now.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[Twinbee]

I believe in souls/spirits/whatever, but some kind of god? Neah... probably not. At least not one who interacts with anyone, but probably not anyway.

So we have this weird universe where all these soul thingies are eternal. No god needed.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Ol Olsoc]

> BTW why would one experience any pain if one knows that one is dying?

Did you forget the phrase, "want to", in your question above?

"Want to" what where? The concept of immortality, whether via religion and it's post life rewards of worshipping some deity in life, so you can worship it forever, or by things like brain transplants, is quite abhorrent to more people than you might think.

I don't "want" to die - but I really don't want to live forever. Heaven, hell, or eternal existence on earth, all are repugnant.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[bluefoxlucid]

That's an old myth. BNF and BDNF support neuroplasticity by allowing the growth of new neurons; your cerebral cortex continuously creates, destroys, activates, and atrophies nerves throughout your life. That's precisely how you learn.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[bluefoxlucid]

the physical manifestation of consciousness is an elaborate trick your brain plays on itself. At every moment, you are a different person than the one who inhabited your body a moment before.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably believe that "you" wake up the same person every morning as "you" went to sleep the night before. But can you rigorously prove this even to "yourself"?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[topology]

Exactly this!

That thought came to my mind a while ago. Eventually, our whole brain replace itself but we never cease to be, well, ourselves. Even though it's a generally accepted concept in /. community that our mind is our brain (and not our soul or anything religion related), it's mind blowing to think that I'm still myself even if our brain replace itself every 7 years (or 10 depending on the research). Or is my being is slowly disappearing to be replaced by perfect copy of myself and the memory of my past is actually the remain of my old self?

It's a complex but very fun concept to play with, but it's also quite terrifying sometime.

So you are not a static object. You are an evolving pattern. Is there really much to make a big deal about?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

ship of theseus

Re:Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not entirely accurate. There is growth during the first year, late single years, and again during post-puberty. There is no reason the body can't be stimulated to produce more.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[lexman098]

Whether my consciousness exists in the dream of another being or a computer simulation, I *do* exist. It's inherently self-proving. I think, therefor I am.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[kalqlate]

Your "photo album" analogy is ridiculously wrong because the cloned brain, whether digital or biological, is animated, not static like a photo album or journal. The cloned brain could be given a robotic or virtual body, and it could behave like "you", and it would have no choice other than to feel that it IS "you". As far as it and anyone other than the original "you" is concerned, the clone IS "you".

Re:Work with cloned mice

[StikyPad]

I agree with you to an extent -- consciousness is processing sensory information and stored memories -- but what is unconsciousness? It's more than being "off"/dead, but it's less than being conscious. I'd love to be able to sleep only when I wanted (and always when I wanted, for that matter), but we don't really know much about what sleep is, and yet most living creatures spend a significant amount of time doing it.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

The problem with with asking if an animal is "sentient" is that any test rigorous enough to rule out some species will, if applied fairly, also rule out 90% of humans, and I do not just mean the young and the enfeebled. Ultimately, however, we do not need to know sentience or consciousness (be careful), what we need first is "is this entity entitled to protection under the law?

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

He wasn't talking about awareness or sentience, those are what you are talking about. He was talking about consciousness (the experiencing of existence/environment). For instance; an AI built on current cpus etc could potentially be aware or even sentient but it could never be conscious,

You're confusing terms. Awareness implies consciousness. I guess you meant something different. Can you please explain again?

... it could never actually experience existence such as the color blue, because there is nothing in a cpu designed to produce physical consciousness.

There is nothing in you with the purpose of generating consciousness either. It just emerges from the interaction of billions of neurons.

Perhaps once the physical components and required conditions for consciousness are fully known and verified we could create a system where a digital mind is connected to the consciousness device and a feedback loop created to simulate us. But until then no.

I disagree. And your proposed solution (single-step mind transfer to an external device) will mean death for the original mind anyway.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

I agree with you to an extent -- consciousness is processing sensory information and stored memories -- but what is unconsciousness? It's more than being "off"/dead, but it's less than being conscious. I'd love to be able to sleep only when I wanted (and always when I wanted, for that matter), but we don't really know much about what sleep is, and yet most living creatures spend a significant amount of time doing it.

I don't know the processes of the conscious/unconscious mind. I could try and guess, but without a background in neurology that would be pointless.

In any case, that doesn't matter for the purpose of gradually replacing a natural brain with an artificial one.

Re:Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

You only need to know how individual neurons work in order to produce artificial ones, and a process to replace existing ones with artificial ones. You certainly don't need to understand how the mind works in order to gradually transfer consciousness from a biological brain to an artificial one.

You're basically right, though practically... in order to transfer the program on a computer while it's running, when it has not been built with the ability to transfer, (no copy command!) you'd need to know (as a bare minimum,) the physical structure of the computer, or brain in this case. You'd need to make a neuron-by-neuron copy, since one of the ways in which the brain is unlike a conventional, digital electronic computer,...

No.

Your assumption is not correct, and the rest of your post, being based in an incorrect assumption, is also wrong. The brain doesn't need to "have been built" with the ability to transfer or copy itself, and we don't need a perfect, "neuron-by-neuron" copy. Brain cells die and are born every day by the thousands and we do just fine.

We don't need to know and understand the whole physical structure of the brain, and we certainly don't need to understand the mind. We only need to understand and be able to replicate the components the brain is made of: neurons. If you can replicate a neuron, and manage to develop a process to replace existing ones (granted, with all their axons and connections), then you can gradually completely replace a natural brain with an artificial one, without impact to the mind it supports.

Re: Work with cloned mice

[ag0ny]

I believe in souls/spirits/whatever,

Why? Based on what evidence?

Anyone else get the feeling

[John Jorsett]

that we're moving into "Island of Dr. Moreau" territory?

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[mikeabbott420]

I was reminded of Typhon and Piaton from Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Grishnakh]

Doubtful IMO. While there have been quite a few sci-fi stories and movies about clones being used for organ harvesting, I really think we're going to figure out before long how to grow replacement organs without a clone. There's already a lot of work being done on this, and I think they already are doing significant work like this with artificial skin. This is what all this stem-cell research is all about, after all: being able to grow things quickly and easily, whether it's a replacement eyeball or liver or heart, or some artificial meat so you don't need to kill animals to enjoy a burger.

And think about it: why would you want to wait 20 years for a clone to grow to maturity so you can harvest its organs for yourself so you can live longer, when you could just grow yourself a new heart (without a host body at all) using stem cells, in just a few weeks or so?

Not too long after that, we're going to figure out many more rejuvenation therapies, and aging will simply be another disease to be fought against and eventually eradicated. You won't need to do a head transplant, because you can just have some pharmaceuticals (possibly including some nanites) injected into you periodically and maintain your age at 25 indefinitely.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[drinkypoo]

And think about it: why would you want to wait 20 years for a clone to grow to maturity so you can harvest its organs for yourself so you can live longer, when you could just grow yourself a new heart (without a host body at all) using stem cells, in just a few weeks or so?

Let's just take it a step further: stem cells seem to just know what to do if you can deliver them to the site. What if you had a treatment that would kill off old cells, and direct stem cells to the proper locations efficiently? Why bother growing a new body when you can just repair the one you've got?

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. After all, it's pretty easy for us to grow a new body right now: just fertilize an ova and let it grow. Nature has no problem growing bodies relatively quickly, it just isn't as good at repairing existing ones for some reason. Eventually we're going to figure out how that growth stage really works and use it to our advantage.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

that we're moving into "Island of Dr. Moreau" territory?

Nope. "Mars Attacks" territory...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pvf3yBnk7E

I like the way he's managed to keep them alive for a day at best after he does the operation and then says "Currently, I am not confident to say that I can do a human transplant." Obviously has a good sense of his own limitations and abilities, lol.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Hognoxious]

Thing is, everything deteriorates. Bones, organs, skin. So you can either do a few hundred transplants, or one.

Re: Anyone else get the feeling

[ceoyoyo]

Nature is pretty good at repairing bodies, but different species put more or less energy into repair. Mice last months. Many birds last a few years. Some parrots can live over a hundred years. Some tortoises and whales can live to over 200. Several species do not exhibit increasing mortality with age, meaning that they are effectively immortal but for disease and accident.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

"aging will simply be another disease to be fought against"

Depends on the society in question.
Look at how the world has changed in the past few hundreds of years, at one time, death was a very common part of the life cycle. People would have lots of siblings and through out their short lives, they'd see many of them, their spouses and children die early.
These days, we take for granted that we'll see our parents grow old enough they won't be able to support themselves or that they'll die surrounded by most of their children and grandchildren.
On the other hand, there are a few countries that still dole out the death punishment, not because it's a holdover from some past century, but for the power that act signifies.

PS should / can we take them seriously after that Baidu thing a few days ago? After all, they have the same education system in their backgrounds ...

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Grishnakh]

Thing is, everything deteriorates. Bones, organs, skin.

The problem is, they don't have to. There's lots of organisms where they're completely able to rejuvenate themselves on a regular basis. A good example of this is lizards which regrow their tails: their tails are easily pulled off, as a defense mechanism, to let them escape predators. The tails grow back relatively quickly, with no scarring, cartilage, skin, and all. Young children heal skin wounds pretty quickly and easily in humans. Some (simpler) animals go beyond this: you can cut them in half, and the two halves grow into separate organisms. Nature has already evolved mechanisms of repairing injuries, sometimes to an extreme degree. There is a theory, I believe, that we more-complex organisms don't usually do this as well because there's a direct relationship between healing ability and susceptibility to cancer. Smaller animals with short lifespans can afford better healing power because they're not going to live long enough for cancer to be a big problem, but animals with 100-year lifespans have to have much more robust cancer-protection mechanisms.

So if we rework our systems to have better healing, we can deal with the side-effects in other ways, since we have medicine and hospitals these days.

Re: Anyone else get the feeling

[Grishnakh]

Several species do not exhibit increasing mortality with age, meaning that they are effectively immortal but for disease and accident.

Which ones are these?

I think we're going to get to that stage before long, thanks to the availability of medical technology.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[freeze128]

No, more like Face/Off.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[ATMAvatar]

Not just organs - we're even starting to grow limbs in a lab.

Re: Anyone else get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Some crabs and other forms of simpler life. You can count trees too depending on how you define alive. Good search online for everything else. Why should I do that for you? The results are a simple search away.

Re: Anyone else get the feeling

[KGIII]

Lobsters as well.

Anyhow, I seem to recall a study that indicated that animals (including humans) all pretty much got the same number of heartbeats baring illness. The theory they postulated was that small animals, like mice, have a very high heart rate where turtle hearts are much slower beating. I have not looked into this further and the theory is to my own. It was on talk radio so it was quite likely on NPR as that is what I tend to listen to. I can not speak to the validity, I am not an expert in the field. It made me "meh" when I heard it.

Re: Anyone else get the feeling

[ShanghaiBill]

Several species do not exhibit increasing mortality with age

Which ones are these?

Sharks do not age in the same sense that people do. But they also don't stop growing, so it becomes increasingly difficult for them to find enough food to sustain their body. Wild great white sharks can live for more than 70 years.

Koi (ornamental carp) have been known to live more than 225 years.

An aspen tree in Utah is believed to be more than 80,000 years old, and weighs more than 6000 tonnes. Although it has hundreds of trunks, they are all connected to the same root system, and constitute a single organism.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[MrL0G1C]

You got something against GMO?

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[The_Rook]

Ladies and gentlemen, I can envision a day when the brains of brilliant men can be kept alive in the bodies of dumb people.

                                        - Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[turp182]

The current edition of Smithsonian magazine has a great article on organ growing developments (and brain things, quite awesome).

Skin grafting is coming along and there are several people with bladders grown from their stem cells (taken from their bladders I believe).

Per the article, there's a lot more activity in this area that I would have expected. Per person organ regeneration is the goal.

Re:Anyone else get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

If this super healing does pose a cancer risk we don't need it turned on all the time. All we really need to do is learn how to turn on this healing, temporarily, to fix an organ or regrow an appendage then turn it back off again.

Re: Anyone else get the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous since I've already moderated.

I first saw the heartbeat theory in one of Isaac Asimov's science columns in Fantasy & Science Fiction. He concluded that humans last about 4 billion heartbeats, while other animals last about 1 billion. His figures were somewhat off, counting the oldest human ever (114 years) but not doing that for other animals. My cursory research indicated that he was underestimating maximum non-human ages by about a factor of 2, still leaving a big gap between humans and other animals.

Asimov's columns were not research efforts, but things he'd been thinking about, sometimes explaining science and sometimes speculating. Fascinating, but not actually reliable.

Bogus: Proof by Wikipedia / autonomous vs. higher

[Anonymous Coward]

brain functions.

Look at the wiki page about mice brain,

in the spine is a part of the brain, .. that is responsible for breathing.

(compare to headless chicken)

For people that say I should not call bogus bogus ..
I have some spare units of my Fusor "lying" around here .. want one ?

Great.

[jpellino]

Now we know which nightmare many people will share tonight.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah this is nothing more than a kid ripping wings off flies. I say just let computer models simulate it. There are far more non-gruesome ways of doing this.

Vladimir Demikhov

[Anonymous Coward]

So he's transplanted a bunch of heads. Do they have control of the body, or is this functionally the same as what Vladimir Demikhov did ages ago?

(also, this)

A day?

[penguinoid]

Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates.

Maybe he should try to have his patients survive more than one day, before moving up to primates.

Re:A day?

[azcoyote]

Maybe if he just keeps stapling the monkey head onto a new body once a day, the head will be able to live a long and horrifying life.

Re:A day?

[drinkypoo]

Don't worry, by the time the study actually gets approved, they will have given monkeys human rights and they'll have to use tax evaders or Christians.

Re:A day?

[CODiNE]

It's possible that larger bodies can handle the strain better and heal from the surgery with greater survival times. More and larger blood vessels to work with as well as larger nerve clusters to try and connect would be easier to work with.

Re:A day?

[WorldWarPi]

The Martians in Mars Attack! were able to do a reasonably good job.

Re:A day?

[Opportunist]

Why wait? Won't anyone please think of the monkeys?

Re:A day?

[mikael]

Connecting bone together is relative easy using Titanium implants and scaffolding. Skin and muscle tissue will eventually mesh together using just stitches. Blood vessels can be reconnected using microsurgery. The really hard part is reconnecting spinal cord nerves. When any critter is born, the first thing that is formed is a neural tube which is the basis of the brain and spinal cord. Then every block of tissue then specializes into what part of the body there is. With the spinal cord there is something that blocks regeneration - perhaps it is spinal fluid or just the way the cells are programmed.

Re:A day?

[Anonymous Coward]

they will have given monkeys human rights

This is China we are talking about, they don't even have human human rights let alone monkey human rights :P

Finally!

[pushing-robot]

We'll be able to give our decrepit MPs and congressmen new, healthy brains!

Re:Finally!

[ColdWetDog]

I should think working with worms would be easier. IIRC all you have to do is cut them in half and they regenerate.

Think about that next time you take the time out of your busy day to vote.

Re: Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than the brains they have now I hope.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, their old heads would be transplanted onto jackass bodies.

Re:Finally!

[geekmux]

We'll be able to give our decrepit MPs and congressmen new, healthy brains!

That's a mighty strong assumption you got there...assuming they had brains to begin with.

Re:Finally!

[drinkypoo]

That's a mighty strong assumption you got there...assuming they had brains to begin with.

Not really, it's only assuming there's room.

Re:Finally!

[KGIII]

Some might go on elephants, no?

Re:Finally!

[NicBenjamin]

Worms are actually complex little beasties. If you cut it in two "behind the clitellum" the head half will regrow a tail, but the tail half dies. If you cut in front of the clitellum both halves die.

One day?

[Culture20]

How about switching to another species after you get the lifetime close to half of normal. These aren't fruit flies.

Re:One day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are my sympathies with this project as well.

But I originally read your comment after some human->human head swap comments and thought: yeah, lets do that: I don't need no young buff human body, I want to be attached to a grizzly bear!

Mice's first words after waking up:

[davidwr]

"Kill me now, please kill me now."

I hope Ren understands just who it is he is experimenting on.

Re:Mice's first words after waking up:

[Culture20]

As higher dimensional beings, it might be like the "floating thumb" or "got your nose" trick for mice.

Re:Mice's first words after waking up:

[tompaulco]

As higher dimensional beings, it might be like the "floating thumb" or "got your nose" trick for mice.

If they only lived a day, they probably didn't even wake up from the anesthesia before dying.

HEAD transplant?

[Deadstick]

Sounds more like a BODY transplant to me...

Re:HEAD transplant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely nervous about the use of terminology.

Re:HEAD transplant?

[NotInHere]

And comatose patients who have been pronounced brain dead but whose bodies are unimpaired could wake up and walk again if they received a functioning new head.

Rather not. Its a body transplant, not a head transplant. Yes, the bodie's immune system will (or will not) attack the head, not the head's system the bodie's, but the head has the brain, and that's where most of the thinking is.

I guess in some years we'll figure out how to transplant heads, and perhaps one day we will have the possibility to grow brainless clones that have a computer controlling all the low level functions, to grow into an age they can recieve their new head. I guess this will rule out lots of ageing illnesses, but will open up serious ethical questions.

Headless chicken lived 18 mo.

[BobK65]

Meh. I'll be impressed when he gets a mouse to live as long as this chicken which lived 18 months without any head at all. Then he can work on demonstrating the creature is as sentient as it was before the operation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Head Spliced Mice

[Anonymous Coward]

A Chinese delicacy ...

Why even bother?

[Nyder]

I can't understand how head transplants are even helpful in the real world. I can understand limb transplants, livers, kidneys, but heads? How often does someone lose their head and there is another head ready to take it's place? Seems to me like this is one thing that will almost never have use for anything practical if it's even possible.

Re:Why even bother?

[drinkypoo]

How often does someone lose their head and there is another head ready to take it's place?

If only there were some sort of search engine which, if you inserted the phrase "yearly deaths by head injury" you might found out that "Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of death and disability in the United States, contributing to about 30% of all injury deaths.1 Every day, 138 people in the United States die from injuries that include TBI. [...] TBI contributed to the deaths of more than 50,000 people [in 2010]." And that's just the USA; sadly, most of the world's humans have pretty crap health care, so extrapolate those numbers out...

Re:Why even bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't transplant someone else's head onto your body to replace your damaged one. You'd transport your head onto someone else's body when your body is destroyed and they've bashed their head in. However you've got to keep both the heads and bodies alive until there's a match. The legal implications of keep a head alive and functional then turning off the life support switch when you can't afford the medical payments because a body wasn't found fast enough is going to make a lot of lawyers rich.

Re:Why even bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If only there were some sort of search engine which, if you inserted the phrase "yearly deaths by head injury" you might found out that "Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of death and disability in the United States [cdc.gov], contributing to about 30% of all injury deaths."

Thank God for bikers, without them, organ donation wouldn't happen quite as much.

Re:Why even bother?

[Salgat]

I imagine solving the problem of transplanting a head would unlock other huge discoveries in the field of medical science.

Re:Why even bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember this is China we are talking about. They have a surplus of undesirables, criminals and political dissidents in their prisons waiting to donate whatever organ is needed to the rich/ruling class in China. If they can transplant the head, it is a more efficient use of their "prison resource"...

This guy has unrealistic expectations

[meerling]

"Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates."
Really? He'd better get survival rates down to something close to normal lifespans before he moves up to primates or he's an idiot.
I wonder if he's even bothered to look at the old Soviet attempts at this. With that short "survival" duration, I highly doubt it.

"a day"

[Anonymous Coward]

What a HUGE success!
Before moving to chimps... How about figuring how to make them last more than a day...

Just like the Great Roe

[hey!]

Which according to Woody Allen's book "Without Feathers" is "a mythological beast with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, though not the same lion."

Re:Just like the Great Roe

[Applehu Akbar]

I thought it was "...the body of a spider and the head of a social worker."

I call shenanigans

[pesho]

How is this physically possible? 1000 transplants in under three years! This is more than one serious microsurgery per day. An article in WSJ says he leaves the brain stem of the acceptor along with the so that it can control breading and hearth beat. This would mean that he is just connecting the blood vessels of the donor head to the circulatory system on the acceptor, without connecting the nerves. This seems more feasible to me, but hardly warrants the bombastic headlines. Does anybody have a link to an original research paper?

Re:I call shenanigans

[Hadlock]

If you can dump your 80 year old brain in a healthy 18 year old body, I would imagine a good number of people would take that option over death, at least until they sort out the whole "connecting the brain to the central nervous system" problem.

Re:I call shenanigans

[Opportunist]

Well, the first couple of them will probably have been quite short, so he could well have done a few dozen a day the first couple months.

Re:I call shenanigans

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you want to be in a completely immobile 18 year old body with no ability to move, touch, etc?

Re:I call shenanigans

[KGIII]

I can dump something into a healthy 18 year old body but it is not my brain. Hyuk Hyuk...

Re:I call shenanigans

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this physically possible? 1000 transplants in under three years!

Graduate students.

That's because it's fiction.

[denzacar]

and they were certainly sentient beings being sacrificed.

They were "sentient" cause the story demanded it.
There is no reason why a jar-grown clone would need to be anything other than completely brain dead.
Hell... If they can be grown to a full healthy adult in an artificial womb - make the clones anencephalic.

And then there's that whole bit where people don't give a flying fuck about what happens to their clone's ass when their own ass is on the line.
I for one wouldn't care. Hell... I'd club my own clone-self to death with a garden dwarf if necessary.
Though it would probably just be much simpler to just check the "yes - I would like to have a clone(s) for all my future transplant needs" box.

And besides that... It is not sentient if it is never allowed to be sentient.
Keep it in a box - both physical and mental.
All that needs to be done is just get in there while it is still just an abortion in a jar, and never allow it to form sentience.
There. "Morality" problem solved.

And for anyone out there who's getting their panties all bunched up while getting their favorite appeal to emotion argument ready - THINK OF THE CHILDREN YOU HEARTLESS CUNTS!
You know how hard it is to get child-sized organs for transplantation?
You wanna go and tell those dying children they have to die cause your "morality" won't allow them to have clones?
Boy are you people fucking heartless.

But in all seriousness now - that's what all "morality" arguments about cloning boil down to.
Appeal to this or that emotion.
Whether it is fear or guilt-shaming or simply "my god is against that".

A clone raised in a jar is no different from a stillborn baby, resuscitated into a coma and kept alive by machines.
Except there are no parents to fool themselves that their little Braindead Billy will get better and grow up to be a politician or a model.

Oh... And to any of those Fuckers for Ethical Treatment of Clones out there...
My clones come with a contract on their ass.
Clone leaves the storage without my consent - its head explodes.
It leaves the storage WITH my consent but without my immediate medical need - there's money in an account out there for anyone who blows its head off.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do all that now without the clones. Make some kids and keep them locked away until you need their parts. Kill any that wouldn't be a good match and make some more. I'm not sure if you can keep them brain dead because the human body needs to move around, get exercise, and bumps help keep your bones strong. You wouldn't want a heart that is only strong enough to keep you alive when you're asleep.

Luckily that's illegal in most of the world. But free free to move to where it isn't and start your own organ harvesting business. Good luck not getting murdered or kidnapped in your sleep for your organs. Societies where humans are consumables tend to fail in brutal ways. There's more to morality than only emotion. If it was only emotion than rage murders, rape, and public sex would be commonly acceptable because it feels good (at least for one of the party).

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, then I for one am happy to know that a thing like you will get the end it deserves, being that you can't do this currently.

Also your argument falls short, it was NOT sentient at first and then you went and made it sentient just so you could make a comment about shooting it. BTW that comment about requesting it to leave with your consent, just so you can have a manhunt, does not make you look like a stable person.

As for the child organ donation, I guess you are confusing organ cloning with cloning an entire person. The only organ with sentience is the brain. Unless the kid is getting a brain transplant, morality does not play into it. Plus as you said, if it could be made not to produce sentience to begin with at the genetic level, there would still not be a morality issue. So no, the kids would be OK, quit trying to twist people's morals to justify your own cruelty. /rant

Seriously, every time I hear someone bring up the idea of "fixing the aging problem", a thiH^H^H "person" like the above poster getting to be immortal, and wondering WTF good for society that would do, is the first idea that springs into my mind. The idea that not even his own genetics are safe from his cruelty, (and bound by a heavily one-sided contract no less. WTF?), is unhuman, and definitely NOT something we should preserve for the ages.

File this one under: "Good idea, let's get back to it once humanity matures some more...."

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[KGIII]

I am reminded of a horrible joke. It is not my own and it is horrible.

Nine out of ten people enjoy gang-rape.

See? Horrible.

Anyhow, no. Just no. We can not go around harvesting heads - unless the person is dead or something and we treat it like current practices for organ donating. I am pretty sure we *should not* just go around growing clones for this either. I am not sure where the line is drawn but I suspect it will be drawn before that.

Also, keep in mind that this is some guy in China. This may not even be real. I trust no science (including medicine) coming out of China until after it has been well verified. It is not that I do not like them, it is that there is a history of fake results being disseminated.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[blind biker]

Oh... And to any of those Fuckers for Ethical Treatment of Clones out there...
My clones come with a contract on their ass.
Clone leaves the storage without my consent - its head explodes.
It leaves the storage WITH my consent but without my immediate medical need - there's money in an account out there for anyone who blows its head off.

I do think it would be unethical to use perfectly good organs to save the life of people like you. You are nothing but a parasite, and society is better off without you.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

And then there's that whole bit where people don't give a flying fuck about what happens to their clone's ass when their own ass is on the line.
I for one wouldn't care.

Unless you get born as a someone's clone, presumably.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[NicBenjamin]

Moreover there's a huge language and cultural issue.

It's really hard for an English-speaking American to know when the Chinese are joking, exaggerating to make a point, or just trolling us. A major reason I refuse to pay attention to any English-language-media outlet on foreign affairs (except the BBC) is that they're all so easy for a foreign prankster to fool. CNN doesn't have a guy on the ground in Zambia, so they have literally nobody who can tell you whether the Zambian sense of humor is significantly different from the Zimbabwean, and if some Zambian plays a joke on CNN odds are they won't figure it out until after the stories aired. You see this the other way pretty frequently -- it's not unusual for non-Americans to not realize the Onion is a pack of lies.

This particular Doctor apparently worked in the US, which means he probably means what we think he means when he says "I transplanted a mouse's head," but how the fuck would a bunch of business journalists know they were being pranked by him? How would they know that he left the US due to major mental stability issues and his new Chinese employer is just catching on?

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Oligonicella]

My clones come with a contract on their ass. Clone leaves the storage without my consent - its head explodes.

So you admit you would murder a sentient being.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Antique Geekmeister]

> There is no reason why a jar-grown clone would need to be anything other than completely brain dead.

There's not currently any technology, or hope of technology, that can produce muscle tone and muscular reflexes to stand, walk, speak, or handle tools without actually doing the activities. So there are many reasons to give the clones basic human activity. A sodden mas of undeveloped muscle tissue, wrapped around inexperienced or developed organs and undeveloped bone, would require ongoing medical issues as extensive as being extremely old and infirm. "Jar-grown" does not mean mature, viable organ systems.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

and they were certainly sentient beings being sacrificed.

They were "sentient" cause the story demanded it.
There is no reason why a jar-grown clone would need to be anything other than completely brain dead.
Hell... If they can be grown to a full healthy adult in an artificial womb - make the clones anencephalic.

And then there's that whole bit where people don't give a flying fuck about what happens to their clone's ass when their own ass is on the line.
I for one wouldn't care. Hell... I'd club my own clone-self to death with a garden dwarf if necessary.
Though it would probably just be much simpler to just check the "yes - I would like to have a clone(s) for all my future transplant needs" box.

And besides that... It is not sentient if it is never allowed to be sentient.
Keep it in a box - both physical and mental.
All that needs to be done is just get in there while it is still just an abortion in a jar, and never allow it to form sentience.
There. "Morality" problem solved.

And for anyone out there who's getting their panties all bunched up while getting their favorite appeal to emotion argument ready - THINK OF THE CHILDREN YOU HEARTLESS CUNTS!
You know how hard it is to get child-sized organs for transplantation?
You wanna go and tell those dying children they have to die cause your "morality" won't allow them to have clones?
Boy are you people fucking heartless.

But in all seriousness now - that's what all "morality" arguments about cloning boil down to.
Appeal to this or that emotion.
Whether it is fear or guilt-shaming or simply "my god is against that".

A clone raised in a jar is no different from a stillborn baby, resuscitated into a coma and kept alive by machines.
Except there are no parents to fool themselves that their little Braindead Billy will get better and grow up to be a politician or a model.

Oh... And to any of those Fuckers for Ethical Treatment of Clones out there...
My clones come with a contract on their ass.
Clone leaves the storage without my consent - its head explodes.
It leaves the storage WITH my consent but without my immediate medical need - there's money in an account out there for anyone who blows its head off.

That's Garden Gnomes, not garden dwarves.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably you don't speak 180 languages, so in this curious decision you simply chose to remain ignorant of foreign affairs because you are afraid of being "pranked?" you are a moron. It's a good thing the BBC put on its anti-prank spray each morning. WTF.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[denzacar]

Which part of "I'd club my own clone-self to death with a garden dwarf" did you miss?

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

>There is no reason why a jar-grown clone would need to be anything other than completely brain dead.
Hell... If they can be grown to a full healthy adult in an artificial womb - make the clones anencephalic.

You seem to be assuming that the only control the brain has over a growing body is in the domain of executive nervous control. You have forgotten, or didn't know in the first place, about the many glands such as the hypothalamus, pineal, and pituitary, that are engaged in tight feedback loops of chemical signalling which direct the growth and development of the body.

In short, you're completely wrong. Maybe take an intro to biology course or A+P some day.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. Anyone would murder a sentient being in the right circumstances. Like protecting yourself, your children, etc. Dogs are sentient, rats are sentient. Would you kill a rabid rat to prevent it from biting your baby? I bet you would, as any parent would.

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I note you raise some interesting questions, I also want to point out it definitely is a moral issue as well, whether you like it or not. And morals and ethics are not just a bunch of 'loose emotions'; it's a way for a society to be able to exist as well. In that regard, since you are part of a society (and this holds true for where-ever you would go or live) you will aslo have morals and ethics, to which you'll need to abide. True, this does not mean that you, as an individual would or should like it - you can even find yourself restricted by it - but then again, it would be rather strange if one would allow any individual follow his own mores, because that would entail no morals or ethics at all, and as a consequence no laws or rules to govern human behaviour. So, naturally, some behaviour (and the individuals acting on it) will (and have) to be restrained - whether they like it or not.

In this context, you're no exception. I like to point out that the vast majority of people anywhere will not agree with you - certainly not to the extend you just described - and will put restraints on practises as you just described. You may not like this, but on itself, as explained, this is to be expected. Thus, I can't follow you completely in your indignation that other people /a society would be an obstruction to your - let's face it - rather self-serving practises. Many behaviour is regulated by it, and I assume you would not agree that anyone - including murderers and rapists or whatever - claiming the same indignation would therefore be cut loose from any societal restraints.

I know you can and probably will reply that you are not 'murdering' people, and thus the analogy doesn't hold, but do note that societal behaviour goes further then just the 'do not kill another human'. For instance, if you would walk around naked in the city and jerk of in front of a schoolbus full of children, I'm pretty sure you'll be restraint. Why? You aren't killing anyone. If you publicly 'slander and libel' another person, you'll have to put up with the consequences, even though you did not kill anyone. If I recruit for ISIS, I'm not (directly) killing anyone, yet still it is a moral and ethical (and legal) issue.

So you're dishing the topic of morality a bit too quick, imho. It's not, or at least not always or merely, a question of self-appointed moral vigilantes that are overwhelmed by their own emotions. It also governs the conduit of people, where the majority of those people feel comfortable with. I think you're above suggestion of how to deal with this, doesn't subscribe to that criteria, hence, it is - nor should it - be exempt of a moral and ethical evaluation by that society. And if that doesn't pan oput for your ideas, I'm sorry, but it's hubris to expect anything else than being limited in your behaviour. Otherwise, only self-serving arguments and - the bottomline - the power of the strongest (in the broad sense) will matter.

I do agree it difficult to find a particular 'border' which is or isn't to cross. After all, who would venture it's unethical if they manage to grow an arm of a length of your own cells, and thereby replacing an heavily injured limb, for instance? Or a hart? Or a liver? Or longs? Or, indeed, a whole body?

However, one can not deny one is at that border once you actually do something to the brain, or actively do something to inhibit brainfunctions, for that matter. And this is where, I think, the moral dilemma comes into play with your suggestion. "Make the clones anencephalic" you say, but that's a deliberate act of *making them anencephalic*, and that alone is already something that can be considered to be in the moral realm. And this is also where it differs with growing legs or arms or livers. Granted, one can argue that it doesn't matter and that clones without brains aren't human, and thus there is no issue in using them as products. However, as said, that argument is rather self-serving, and is one is consistent in it, it leads to rather dubious mor

Re:That's because it's fiction.

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you regard it as perfectly normal and morally right if you turned out to be the clone, and the 'original' started clubbing you to death instead?

I somehow doubt it. Which also makes me doubt the correctness of your claim there is no moral issue here, CERTAINLY if the clones are sentient enough to understand a contract and a will to escape.

Better check your own ass! ;-)

No way

[93 Escort Wagon]

We all know Ron Popeil is the inventor of the technology that lets heads survive separate from their bodies...

"Head" Transplant?

[Weirsbaski]

The mind makes us who we are, so wouldn't this be a body transplant?

Re:"Head" Transplant?

[PopeRatzo]

The mind makes us who we are, so wouldn't this be a body transplant?

[citation needed]

Plus, who's to say the "mind" is exclusively in the head?

Wait a minute...

[no-body]

"Despite the mind-blowing possibilities", "ground breaking" - ????

1000 Mice killed with a 0 success rate and primates next.
1.6 Million funding so far - more to come, as it seems.
What is the actual benefit, how many humans would be able to take advantage of such a procedure at what success rate and which result?

Just for reference, the much hailed CPR has a success rate of - depending where one looks - 6 or 10 % and of those, half have maybe a halfway liveable life, the other half will be tied to an artificial reparator working against their native breath rythm for the rest of their remaining life, not considering remaining mental capacities.

If it really happens that someone gets injured to bad that a new head would be adequate - or, the other way around, the body is wasted and a replacement could be helpful (?)... is this worth it?

All sounds pretty much sick to me. Some ego trip of doing something somebody has never done and wasting living creatures en mass for this.
Maybe a mandatory mental health check should be done on a couple of individuals running those projects before start. Seems basic respect for life in general is missing here.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Megol]

"Despite the mind-blowing possibilities", "ground breaking" - ????

1000 Mice killed with a 0 success rate and primates next.

I get the feeling you'd call those mice living 1 week, 1 month or one year would count as failures to you. But we still do medical procedures to improve life quality even if it only get a human say one month extra time and consider that a success.

It is possible that doing the operation on primates may have better results as many of the critical blood vessels etc. are larger and thus easier to attach. But this is obviously still something deeply experimental.

1.6 Million funding so far - more to come, as it seems.
What is the actual benefit, how many humans would be able to take advantage of such a procedure at what success rate and which result?

Just for reference, the much hailed CPR has a success rate of - depending where one looks - 6 or 10 % and of those, half have maybe a halfway liveable life, the other half will be tied to an artificial reparator working against their native breath rythm for the rest of their remaining life, not considering remaining mental capacities.

So you know shit about CPR, the results of it and the working of respirators. Why should we listen to you?

Respirators can be set to help someone breathe in many ways including not doing anything unless the patient can't do it themselves, it can be set to increase the inhalation pressure to help fill the lungs better and many more patterns targeted at a certain patient.
However the use of respirators are more common for other cases like stroke victims, lung diseases (including COLD), spine injuries etc.

If it really happens that someone gets injured to bad that a new head would be adequate - or, the other way around, the body is wasted and a replacement could be helpful (?)... is this worth it?

All sounds pretty much sick to me. Some ego trip of doing something somebody has never done and wasting living creatures en mass for this.
Maybe a mandatory mental health check should be done on a couple of individuals running those projects before start. Seems basic respect for life in general is missing here.

Yes I agree - you seem to have no respect for human life.
As a comparison point let's just look at the amount of mice killed "for fun" by tame cats without any purpose at all - they don't need to hunt.

Re:Wait a minute...

[no-body]

So you know shit about CPR, the results of it and the working of respirators. Why should we listen to you?

Sure - a "We" person, how cute - here you go, Mr. or Ms. "We":

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
in there:

A chart of doctor responses from the Precursors Study:
http://www.wnyc.org/i/raw/1/Ga...

and from there:

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20...
Now we see a huge Japanese study of more than 400,000 people who experienced out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, published in the JAMA on March 21, 2012. Approximately 18% of those who were administered CPR and epinephrine did achieve spontaneous circulation but fewer than 5% survived 1 month and fewer than 2% survived 1 month with good or moderate cerebral performance.

Maybe you are watching too much TV?

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/...

keep trying...

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

THANKS FOR SHEDDING SOME SANITY HERE.

Yes I respect science a lot and I know sometimes we have to walk new territory to make some progress but here this is really a lack of respect for life and makes me think of the experiments of Dr Mengele in Auschwitz. Agree, it's mice not humans and I agree to think that humans are kinda superior to animals in that it is not always criminal to make some experiments on animals for genuine life-saving research to be applied on humans, but what I'm seeing here is really Frankenstein/Mengele work, not science, much less science that is dedicated to improve human life.

Re:Wait a minute...

[drew870mitchell]

> ... CPR has a success rate of ... 6%

For what it's worth, CPR is a last ditch procedure, only recommended when the patient is otherwise effectively dead. You're improving a 0% survival to a 6% one.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

1000 Mice killed with a 0 success rate and primates next. 1.6 Million funding so far - more to come, as it seems. What is the actual benefit, how many humans would be able to take advantage of such a procedure at what success rate and which result?

Your questions are valid but please consider the following.
1) Despite the fact that Time reported this and Americans would assume them to be a reliable source, nobody does fact checking any more. So I can't discount the possibility that this is a bunch of lies. I've dated a couple of born and raised in China ladies in recent years and unlike Russians, neither of them believed stuff just because the media or government said it.
2) There may be some big money backing of this where basically whoever wants it done is paying off anybody who might object to it within China.
3) Senior Communist Party officials may be backing this knowing that it's not likely to ever work, but figuring if the guy can pull it off, it might be their ticket to immortality.

Just for reference, the much hailed CPR has a success rate of - depending where one looks - 6 or 10 % and of those, half have maybe a halfway liveable life, the other half will be tied to an artificial reparator working against their native breath rythm for the rest of their remaining life, not considering remaining mental capacities.

Keep in mind that 100% of those people would be dead without CPR and even a 3-5% success rate would look better than 0% if you need it done on you. I have no idea how accurate your numbers are or the source you got them from, but you sure seem to be downplaying this, acting almost nobody anywhere has ever lived a normal life after CPR and I can't accept that.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

and furthermore: WHAT IS THE GAIN OF SWAPPING HEADS?!? if you swap heads, the body is still useless because WE STILL CAN'T REPAIR SPINAL CHORDS! "Good news, jimmy! Your old body is basically hamburger, but there's a footballer down the hall with massive head trauma. you're going to have his body. you'll never feed yourself, you won't really be able to do much of anything without a sip-and-puff machine, but you will have a body." why? really why?

Re:Wait a minute...

[no-body]

> ... CPR has a success rate of ... 6%

For what it's worth, CPR is a last ditch procedure, only recommended when the patient is otherwise effectively dead. You're improving a 0% survival to a 6% one.

Upon "survival", with a 50 % chance being a veggie. Have you ever seen a brain dead human on live support, maybe a loved one?
The convulsions, twitching, empty eyes, nobody home?
By my papers, very bad odds ending up like that and doctors being in the business opt out to almost 100 %:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
http://www.wnyc.org/i/raw/1/Ga...
Give me pain relieve, all else sucks!
http://www.cepamerica.com/news...

By default in US, CPR will happen unless you have two documents on your body, preferable on your chest:
- Advanced Directive for Surgical/Medical Treatment (Living Will)
- Patient's or Authorized Agent's Directive to Withhold CPR
(may differ from state to state)

If you have to take off, and you will - at least, do it in dignity and at your own terms!

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean 1000? Unless he's performing surgeries in tandem the heads have to come from somewhere.

Futurama Jars

[Anonymous Coward]

They are almost here.

Head transplant or body transplant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely the aim would be for a full body transplant rather than a head transplant.

Although I have had colleagues who I would recommend for a head transplant...

Oh Ren...

[TeknoHog]

I think I'll get a second opinion from Dr. Stimpson J. Cat.

Animal cruelty

[Anonymous Coward]

What a horrible horrible man.

Poor Pinky and the Brain!

[PDX]

Gotta love the cruel nature of the scientific method.
  We've always been better at taking things apart than puting them back together.
Megalomaniacs Anon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Hmmmm ... I got chucked in the loony bin for this!

[MarkTina]

You dismantle the neighbourhood cats and dogs to make yourself a Labrapussy and they chuck you in the nut house .. but if I was a "Doctor" I'd be praised for my work!

Unfair!!!

Strange But True?

[Sevalecan]

Or something like that. There was one of those creepy "you won't believe dis shizit" shows on history channel or Discovery or one of those others a few years ago that I downloaded... It had a warning about disturbing content before each episode. In one of the episodes, it talked about a doctor several decades ago who tried head transplants on monkeys. Of course, they died a day later at the most as well, and the situation was described as being terrifying for the apes or monkeys because they'd be paralyzed and whatnot.

It's been done. The question is, is the technology we have now enough to provide a full or nearly full recovery afterwards?

Re:Strange But True?

[Sevalecan]

Found it. It was a show called "Dark Matters: Twisted But True", the neurosurgeon's name who performed these operations was apparently Robert Joseph White.

Up to 1 day survical on mice is meaningless

[gweihir]

Translates roughly to "we have no clue how to do this right".

Re:Up to 1 day survical on mice is meaningless

[rseuhs]

Exactly.

And in the article, the (supposedly best) tale he told about the "surviving mouse" is that it "opened it's eyes". That's it. It seems as if that mouse cannot control the body and is only able to open it's eyes before it dies.

Re:Up to 1 day survical on mice is meaningless

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe true. But given one doctor in China who's doing the experiments, and hundreds of thousands more elsewhere who aren't - all other things being equal, who do you think is going to be the first one to get a clue about that?

Made in China

[penguinoid]

I dunno, these made in China head transplant mice only come with a one day warranty.

Re:Made in China

[azav]

Hecho en China

obligitory

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr: Ladies and gentlemen, I can envision a day when the brains of brilliant men can be kept alive in the bodies of dumb people.

Already been done

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Robert White has already done a monkey head transplant. He did an interview for Motherboard a while back.

Reference --> Dr. White

Whoohoo

[Anonymous Coward]

One fucking day. Anybody can do that just by reattaching the blood vessels. What is so special about that?

Re:Whoohoo

[azav]

Tiny, tiny blood vessles.

That Hideous Strength

[d'baba]

Well Stimpy, is the head dead yet? (with apologies to Don Henley)

Re: Dances With Cloned Mice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd suggest reading some David Lewis and Saul Kripke. This topic of who is the real "you" has been elaborated upon in fantastic detail :)

It has also been laid out in dramatic and exciting detail by John Varley in The Phantom of Kansas [Galaxy Feb 1976].

Finally!

[azav]

We can have mice with attractive heads!

Sick and tired of catching unattractive mice in my traps.

Understatement of the year

[sirwired]

"Currently, I am not confident to say that I can do a human transplant."

He considers it a success when the mice live for "as long as" a single day? He's really going to blow his budget in a hurry on primates if he can't even get his mice to live very long.

Why not transfer consciousness vice the head?

[fygment]

A person with such an attitude towards animals, sees humans the same way. He would have to.

Unfortunately, a head needs a donor body, right?
And you're not going to take a body banged up in a car accident, disabled, or available due to some disease, right?
So, reasonably, a donor would be ... whom?
A person with a mental disability?
A person having suffered severe head trauma?
A person with an expected lower standard of living than the recipient head?

Or maybe a clone of the person? Except that, that would require some advance planning, a clone willing to sacrifice, and of course an answer to the question: why not just transfer the consciousness instead of the whole head.

It just seems that such an act of experimental barbarism should have the whole thing clearly thought out.

Burned any witches or crucified anyone lately?

[denzacar]

Praise the penis that we have such paragons of morality like you - ready to sentence random strangers to death based on their own antiquated moral and other beliefs.
Including scientific beliefs. As opposed to scientific reality.

Cause believing that a clone which was never allowed to grow into a person (cause it was built that way) is anything more than an overgrown collection of cells - is no different than the beliefs of those religious nuts who claim every fertilized and unfertilized egg and every sperm are a potential human being.

You make clones. Design them.
Fully healthy human clones means that you could have a blonde Asian female clone of yourself as well as a redhead black male clone of yourself. If you wanted to.
They are not persons any more than a collection of human organs kept alive by a machine is a person.
Or a braindead body with no cerebral activity. Just organs. No person inside.

Nope.

[denzacar]

For starters...
While there is currently no technology to produce healthy human clones technology for growing muscles is readily available and has been for centuries.
It is only that now it can all be replaced with exoskeletons.

As for reflexes... you have no idea what you are talking about don't you? Reflexes are built into the nervous system.
As in - it's biology. Like heart pumping blood. You don't "learn" that.
That's why when checking the nervous system for damage one of the main indicators that are checked are reflexes.

And standing, walking, talking etc. are NOT reflexes. Hint: Humans have to learn to do those things.
And relearn to do them in the case of an injury, through physical therapy.
Injury like breaking both legs in a skiing accident, a car crash - or a full body transplant.
What's the use of a clone knowing how to walk or dance? That's gonna get overwritten anyway.

You don't pick up a taste for cigarettes with a smoker's kidney or hearts, nor do you get artistic with painter's cornea.
There is no soul, spirit, sentience or skill in a bunch of CELLS.
Same way, there are no transferable reflexes from a body to a mind - cause body don't know jack shit.

Sure... stuff will taste, smell and look kinda different for a while and you'll have to get your liver used to alcohol and fatty food again... but that's just the part of necessary physical therapy.

Re:Nope.

[Antique Geekmeister]

Technology for culturing muscle _cells_ is available and has been for some time. Growing enervated, intact muscle with working neural structures, reflexes, and viable attachments to tendon requires far, far more complex support and has never been achieved without a living host, at least not in any reliable literature that I can find.

I'm afraid I didn't say "standing, walking and talking are reflexes", and I'm sorry if I gave that impression. But all of them rely on extensive muscular reflexes, such as the plantar and babinski reflexes in the feet, the patellar reflex in the knee, numerous tongue and throat reflexes for speech, the "arthrokinetic" reflexes for hip movement, etc.

I' urge you to meet people who grew up physically disabled and had some function restored medically later in life. There's a great deal of development of limbs and physiology, of capability, that depends on ongoing stimulation, and which is profoundly distorted by the lack of normal stimulation or activity. And there are profound reasons that dancers and gymnasts start training _early_. The strength and flexibility they require cannot simple be overlaid later. Now take that to an extreme, with a body that hasn't engaged in regular exercise _at all_, until adulthood and understand the useless morass of a functional body that would arise.

Unless there is something like an auto-exercise machine that can provide a full range of human activity to a brainless corpse, the process would be pointless. It seems much safer and potentially more effective to simply raise a clone child and simply confiscate the body when the transplantee is ready.

The Martians have been doing this for years!

[ai4px]

The martians seem to transplant heads from one body to another just for amusement... for example, a woman's head on chihulula's body. One could only expect the chinese would simply copy this procedure rather than innovate. ;-)

lego head swapping

[Torvac]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... great book about brain transplant, thats the future

Wut?

[StikyPad]

"Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates."

Or, put another way, 100% of the mice died within a day.

Probably work on extending that before moving to primates.

You have a "NO!" idea that's preventing you...

[denzacar]

...from accepting a "Yes", even in your own words.

Unless there is something like an auto-exercise machine that can provide a full range of human activity to a brainless corpse, the process would be pointless.

It is only that now it can all be replaced with exoskeletons.

As for...
       

It seems much safer and potentially more effective to simply raise a clone child and simply confiscate the body when the transplantee is ready.

Besides those rather retarded morality issues that have caused my post above to fluctuate from 1 to 5 and down back to 2... Which is hilarious, watching supposedly above average intelligent and educated people (i.e. Nerds.) getting so emotional about SciFi beliefs.
Anyway, besides that... A "free range" clone would be susceptible to damage and destruction from diseases and injuries, thus increasing the number of clones needed (probably to hundreds) in order to have a single healthy clone readily available when necessary.

"Clone in a jar" can be kept safe from nearly anything, up to nuclear strikes.
All "raising clone" does is make for a Michael Bay movie.

grew up physically disabled and had some function restored medically later in life.

Unless the person being cloned grew up physically disabled, that is of no relevance.
The transplanted nervous system already knows how to use the body.
We're not talking about someone growing up with physical issues preventing them from developing a healthy body - we're talking about someone with no issues getting a new body due to catastrophic wear and tear of the original body.

Again, reflexes are neurological and thus biological - and thus built-in in a healthy new body.