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

Anyone else get the feeling

[John Jorsett]

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

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.

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.

One day?

[Culture20]

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

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.

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.

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?

Up to 1 day survical on mice is meaningless

[gweihir]

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