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Doctor Ready to Perform First Human Head Transplant (newsweek.com)
Ross Kenneth Urken, reporting for Newsweek (edited and condensed): Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero had his Dr. Strange moment when he announced he'd be able to do a human head transplant in a two-part procedure he dubs HEAVEN (paywalled, this alternate link could help) (head anastomosis venture) and Gemini (the subsequent spinal cord fusion). [...] Canavero has a plan: It's a 36-hour, $20 million procedure involving at least 150 people, including doctors, nurses, technicians, psychologists and virtual reality engineers. In a specially equipped hospital suite, two surgical teams will work simultaneously -- one focused on Valery Spiridonov (patient) and the other on the donor's body, selected from a brain-dead patient and matched with the Spiridonov for height, build and immunotype. Both patients -- anesthetized and outfitted with breathing tubes -- will have their heads locked using metal pins and clamps, and electrodes will be attached to their bodies to monitor brain and heart activity. Next, Spiridonov's head will be nearly frozen, ultimately reaching 12 to 15 degrees Celsius, which will make him temporarily brain-dead.Shouldn't it be called a body transplant? Since a person is often defined by the brain. You can read the complete procedure here.
But at $20 million dollars, it's definitely something you don't want to lose your head over. Too damn expensive!
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Nobody wants a head transplant.
Please stop posting paywalled articles.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
...I'll be able to use the Head of Vecna!
It has been a long, oft-tragic story.
http://www.blindpanic.com/humo...
-Styopa
Yep body transplant.
But can someone point to where he has done successful animal trials? Or even sliced and diced the same animal in order to reattach the spinal cord? Or Froze and un-froze an animal head?
Until the parts are tested, colour me skeptical
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Just pop your head on a braindead clone.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Hm?
Do you want supervillains? Because this is how you get supervillains.
(It's left as an exercise for the reader to determine if the villain is the transplanter or the transplantee.)
You mean, body transplant.
Body donor is brain-dead.
Cells in the body begin to decay as soon as blood flow ceases, so that's a problem.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
My Body is Ready.
Since when is 12-15 degrees Celsius "Nearly Frozen"?
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
You could save a lot of money by shooting the intended body-transplant recipient instead, but maybe we'll learn something from this bizarre experiment.
So many things could go wrong. The spinal cord is the most complex bus in the body. Connecting the correct nerve on both ends seems almost impossible. Will his brain adapt to any incorrectly placed nerves?
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
How do you spend 20 million on this? I'm skeptical. For 20 million I'd expect to get a head upgrade to go with the body upgrade.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We don't push back the bounds of what is impossible without trying.
Now, clearly, I'm not saying we should try _anything_ under the sun to see if it will work. We should have ethics in science and medicine.
But this is a case where the patient is, of his own free will, accepting the risks of this procedure. And the risks are considerable. It is quite likely that he will die from this. It is also quite likely that if he doesn't die, that he won't live very long afterwards, or that his quality of life will not be better than what he has now.
There is, frankly speaking, a very small chance that this will work with resounding success.
But even in failure, there is a chance that we could learn something from this that will make this procedure or other related medical procedures more likely to occur successfully.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Say Newsweek and nine other sites all noticed a sharp drop in advertisement revenue due to tracking blockers and responded by putting up a paywall. How many visitors would actually be willing to buy a whole month's subscription to all these sites for $40* just to read one article on each site? Or if you operated such a site, which micropayment method would you use instead to sell access to individual articles?
* Assuming each site offers the same price as WIRED ($4/mo)
Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, written in 1970, predicted a brain transplant for "early 21st century".
This — transplanting the entire head, rather than just the brain — is not quite it, but let's not quibble... Best of luck, pan Spiridonov.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Doctors claiming the ability have made headlines (even on /.) before.
The acid test is: has it been successfully tried on another mamal?
Um, no...
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
So a doctor is giving two people head at once!!!!
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
And then a body transplant?
Heinlein was prescient.
Next, Spiridonov’s head will be nearly frozen, ultimately reaching 12 to 15 degrees Celsius, which will make him temporarily brain-dead.
Which sounds pretty cold if you don't understand SI units or Metric system...
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
I'm not considering paying anything to anyone if that also includes my name, address, credit history, and a bunch of other things that, as it stands, I'm forced to give away with whichever payment method I'll be using. Come up with a truly anonymous way to pay and I might consider it. Might, because I have very little trust in the people running this "e-commerce" thing. That's not just because I don't trust them with my personal info, I also don't trust them to come up with something worth paying for.
In that sense the current derpage has pretty much poisoned the well. Also and besides, I'm not convinced that most of the websites available "for ads" or "for pay" are actually worth it and I would not at all mind if much of what's online just up and vanished. Certainly since much of what's online now is really just clickbait, thinning the slop for everyone else, too.
This guy is ahead of the curve
Table-ized A.I.
Those that feel they are in the wrong body will finally have the best of all worlds. Changing a mans body into that of a womans is too difficult but if one can just swap the body then it will be almost perfection. I wonder how much it will cost to buy a persons body out from under them.
put Trump's head on Hillary's body, and we got ourselves someone worth voting for! (this has been your non-partisan political nightmare for the day)
It seems like a better idea, that would have to work if the current plan will work, would be to graft the head onto a healthy fully functional human. That is you get a human with two heads. One head is already fully integrated to the body. That's important because your body depends on an autonomic nervous system to regulate it. Even if it is true that the new head could learn to control the body's mucles-- eventually-- its not going to work out of the gate. SO the body is going to die or be on life support while things rewire. And I would wonder how a body on life support even gets the feedback it needs to engage in some neural plasticity.
On the other hand if you just graft the head and don't bother with the whole spinal cord thing then you have a lot more possibilities. The new head gets fed by a healthy working body. You might need to step up glucose production to handle two heads but I think that's within our current dynamic range.
Thus you could carry your mom or dad's head around on your shoulder.
You could then try to connect their spine to some other neural interface, either indirectly through say some strips of chest muscle that then control some electrical interface or directly to an electrical interface. Either way, you have the means to control some mechanical arms so the head at least has something it can do besides go for a ride.
Things like speech might be a problem till you figure out how to get an airway, throat, and the anchor points for jaw and tongue working right, but in the mean time you could steven hawking it with some eyebrow muscles or eye twitches.
Sees a lot more plausible and they already have done this with dogs.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There should be a bain-dead Playboy playmate or swimsuit model somewhere?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
i am ashamed of you slashdotters for not taking advantage of the Head in a Jar thing on Futurama, to make wisecracks about the worlds first head transplant, i wonder who the lucky head is? and the unfortunate head is?
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
What the hell, the blood flow is still going. Brain dead typically means you're on life support.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
Great, now we'll never get rid of Hilary. She'll just keep buying bodies.
Slashdot is now Weekly World News.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
You certainly wouldn't want to drink beer that warm.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Perhaps it would be simpler to graft the head on some other mammal. You could genetically engineer a humanized immunosuppressed animal, say a horse or a sheep. Humanized mice have been created to grow human compatible tissue so this isnt far fetched. By using clones and carefully raising them under highly identical conditions in a artifiial womb you could create more reproducible neural patterns in the bodies making it easier to learn which neuron controls what activitiy. Perhaps you could even train those neurons ahead of time to be adapted to the neural spiking patterns of the human head.
Then you graft the human head onto it and poof you are a centaur with a horse sized dick.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
at least you won't have to update your passport and driver's license
Abby Normal?
Have gnu, will travel.
Who is "Doctor Ready" ?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
That would've made the story far more interesting, if a guy's head was attached to a woman's body.
This is a sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. Headline reads: Doctor gives patient head. At least the patient is gonna get ahead in life.
Really? I want to see this happen. Let's start with a hair / or brain replacement for Trump.
Time to uncheck the organ donor box?
Since I"m bald, nearsighted, and have a skin condition on my face, I'd just LOVE to be able to have a new head transplanted onto my body!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Huh? Brain dead has nothing to do with the heart not pumping or the lungs not working (perhaps with a respirator). That's what the whole "pulling the plug" is about. If the brain dead, but the rest of the body (perhaps with help) is continuing to function what should be done.
They're braindead, which means it's the same as donating individual organs like hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys.
*Patient wakes up after procedure*
"Hey, thanks for the new face!"
*World of medical science turns upside down*
I am wondering how long before we have access to full prosthetic bodies ... anyone who has seen Ghost in the Shell will know about this :)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
There was an article about how the similarities of one of the characters in the game to sergio canavero
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/surgeon-declares-human-head-transplant-isnt-a-metal-gear-solid-publicity-stunt
Didn't X-Files already do a movie about this?
I mean, politicians have been transplanting their heads up their own asses for decades.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
that's even possible. There is absolutely zero chance that the patient will ever be able to walk on his own, etc. That has never even been done with an animal.
Much more likely, he'll just die during the operation, or immediately after.
If he survives at all they'll probably call it a complete success.
If I wouldn't have thrown up so much, I could have done a head transplant for $1000. That is not the real story/question/requirement.
They can fuse a spinal cord? Color me confused, but then why are there still paraplegics?
What if Jack and Janet both want to change their genders and decide on head transplants? Will it be the body or the head that decides which legal person you are?
Shoulda quit while he was ahead...
Yes, I agree that "Body Transplant" technically makes more sense, however, as other people have noted, the head is part of the body. When you hear "Head Transplant" you know exactly what it means. If you hear "Body Transplant" it's not completely clear what that might mean without further clarification.
See Cybermen. I wouldn't recommend this procedure without an emotional inhibitor.
On the off chance this actually works, he will have the fingerprints and DNA of the donor. Will he be responsible for children fathered by the body donor prior to the surgery? What about afterwards? Just a few thoughts off the top of my head. But it would be interesting to see how it would play out.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
That would be true if and only if the "donor" is truly brain dead. There is growing evidence that the accuracy of that diagnosis is farther from 100% most would be comfortable with.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
And all I really want is a reasonably priced physical...
So if you are 70 and get grafted to the body of an 18 year old.. Assuming all goes well, what will happen? Will your head still die on schedule? Or does the younger body result in a rejuvenation of the head and brain?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Where do you think the brain — as opposed to the body — ends? Please note how the article speaks of a head transplant.
You CAN put an old head on young shoulders.
But probably in China where ethics are not an issue.
Arguably, at this point reality has jumped the shark.
Right now sex change / gender reassignment ops are a bit of a trick. Now... if one could swap heads between two people who identify as the opposite gender, imagine how transgender people in Alabama will be treated. The birth certificate is for the body (the genital area specifically), not the head. If it were for the head this debates would even exist in the first place.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
I always loved Robert Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil". Society going crazy, brain/head transplants. We're right on track.