There is a story going back to the french revolution that suggests the head can survive briefly (very briefly)
Iâm totally with you on this. I think it will not work.
First!
There was a guy at my college who had the most beautiful body - and was just - he was a very weird dude. I knew him quite well - we had the same major (and his beautiful body got me through some very long philosophy classes) and he was also in my circle of friends, though not really one of my friends. My roomie and I used to joke that he was âfirst in line for the brain transplant.â So, if he is still alive and kickin and smoking hot, I vote him for the body part of this procedure. This guy in the wheelchair has a cute head, so it could totally work. This is an unexplored area in plastic surgery. We could create a super race this way.
On a more serious note - I agree, this person is performing suicide by surgeon. I hope they at least record the surgery and science wins a lot of knowledge from his sacrifice.
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That ânot even hoursâ thing is a jokerâs FUD; perfusion alone gets you through a day. Itâs probably getting the guy on a veg. diet so IgE isnât a PITA thatâs putting the date out to 2017. Reattaching limbs (not ones that were just removed; hand surgery) is being done more. Just a matter of time before people with serious carpal tunnel gripes switch to proper guro studio prop claws (rather than their own immobilized ones) for a week before switching back. Miracle of time management that the doctor has a block of time to tear down and reassemble a neck in 2017.
spinal nerves do not regenerate
Do not simply regenerate. Location also not Mordor. i mean, they could take a conservative approach by operating in some failed stateâs field hospitals instead of a 1952-72 movie set OR, maybe transport to a BBC studio and back halfway through, whatevs.
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âŚthis isnât the thread with comix fans, is it? Itâs barely a legend story anymore without a near-beheading (please donât be in Dungeon ni DeaiâŚ) No Togo Heisei stories? Court records of 10,000 cut sentences? Buddhist apocrypha? Tropical reanimation bits and pieces? ER confidentials? Suspira to-do? Contingency BMEzines?
The biggest ethical issue isnât what may or may not happen to the patient; he seems to have a decent understanding of the potential risks and benefits involved. Itâs his life to gamble.
The biggest ethical issue is procuring a donor body for such a procedure. A single body donor can save up to eight lives through conventional organ transplants. So if a medical ethics board approved this experimental procedure theyâd be throwing away an opportunity to give up to eight people a good shot at leading long, relatively healthy lives for the mere POSSIBILITY of giving one person a shot at extending his life as a quadriplegic. If it was your job to weigh one choice against the other, youâd be hard pressed to find a good justification for the latter option.
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Iâd love to hear an explanation of why heâs wrong.
The same could go for assigning other kind of scarce resources to speculative endeavors. Space exploration comes to mind - how many poor could be fed for the price of the Hubble Telescope, some would say.
You have to sacrifice a fraction of the resources to try new things. Otherwise you get stuck. Progress death by good intentions, essentially.
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Experimental medical procedures are conducted at the cost of some human lives because they have the potential to save more lives than they cost. But in this case we know that the payoff CANâT yield a better result than current use of body donors. Even if the surgery was such a resounding success that the body recipient went on to become an Olympian athlete, youâd still be saving one life instead of eight. Convincing a medical ethics committee to let you use a donor body that way would be a hard sell.
Such narrow-perspective view. What about the generic knowledge, reusable in other medical contexts, gained from the experiment, thatâs worth nothing?
You can save way way more lives by turning organ donor status from opt-in to opt-out. Same degree of freedom of choice for the donors or non-donors, more organs for the needy.
And then there are the stem cells issues.
The ethics commissions are bunches of old geezers with love for their overpaid posts and warm cozy chairs.
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âBrain and brain! What is brain?!â
But seriously, good luck. I suspect youâll need lots of it.
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When I read that sentence I couldnât help but hear it in Gene Wilderâs voice.
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How can there be any meaningful estimate of the chances of success for a procedure thatâs never been attempted before?
One ethical problem I see here is that it seems to be an effort to dramatically lower the bar for medical experimentation on humans.
OMG, I miss that show.
If that were possible wouldnât they do the same thing for spinal cords severed in accidents?
If it doesnât work there what possible chance would it have here?
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All of the individual surgical bits of the procedure are more or less routine. The head transfer is a guaranteed surgical success. 
The âinterestingâ 
bit is the extra-corporeal circulation(s) and shunting that would need to be done to keep the brain perfused and the donor body from exsanguinating as itâs original head is removed and the new is gradually plumbed in.
But just because itâs potentially interesting doesnât mean I think itâs a good idea, far from it âŚ
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That itâs not a good idea doesnât mean it shouldnât be done. It will go wrong. How it will go wrong is the interesting part, quite a lot to learn from there.
Saying something should not be done is easy. Doing it, not so.
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I think the good doctor has been reading boing boing
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Itâs not that I donât think itâs worth doing ever. But currently it fails the non-maleficence test because even the best outcome is awful. In my view this is just showboating and the poor bastard on the receiving end is going to suffer because of it. 
When spinal cords can be repaired with a degree of success itâll be well worth doing. Until then most things that could be learnt from doing a human can be learnt quietly in a lab with animal models and the team will be better for the practise. But then cue Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Morreau themed outrage if PETA et al find out ⌠
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