“Everyone’s always in favour of saving Hitler’s brain. But when you put it in the body of a great white shark, ooh!! Suddenly you’ve gone too far.”
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This is the most obvious stumbling block; surely a prerequesite for a useful body transplant, particularly given it’s being planned for disability (weakening spinal muscles) would be use of the spinal cord attachment technique in quadriplegic and paraplegic patients with spinal cord transections?
I have the body of a twenty-year old. I’m not telling anyone where it is.
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Ah yes. An early example from Heinlein’s “unreadable” period.
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I’m still waiting for screw-top, zip-lock brain surgery.
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Wait! Medical procedures can be patented?
That strikes me as extraordinarily unethical.
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From a link from another forum…
Head of Vecna
That said, let’s have more such experiments. This is a bit premature and more animal experimentation is needed in advance, but overall it is a step in a good, interesting direction.
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I’ve wondered how long before they come up with a way to keep a human brain in a torturous, suspended state indefinitely. Looks like we’re getting terrifyingly closer to that reality.
Eventually, technology can be utilized as a horrific alternative to the death penalty where one is kept conscious and in agonizing pain – without a body.
We could perhaps do this today to some extent and, frankly, I think elements within the United States and elsewhere are draconian enough to utilize it.
Eventually, they could contain brains in a liquid that preserves them, then hook the apparatus up to solar panels for energy or whatever and jettison the still conscious brains into space where no one will ever reach them again. They are not allowed to die. They’re just stuck in a conscious state in perpetual darkness and silence for millions upon millions of years.
To make it especially egregious add torturous sounds and feelings of pain to the process.
Create a real-life, perpetual hell.
I can imagine you could control a lot of people with that kind of technology.
New president in Oval Office: “What are you doing in here? Who let you in here?”
Agents: “We have access everywhere. Now then, here’s how we can torture you and your family after you die. We can arrange perpetual “hell” for you and your family. Or… here is what you can do to avoid that from happening…”
The old D and D joke goes something like this:
To achieve the powers of the Head of Vecna you must cut off your own and replace it with said head.
Saving throw?
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He’s just trying to get a head in the world.
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Oddly enough I started thinking about this subject yesterday whilst listening to this tune … https://youtu.be/gDkLSjsiqlM
Now, you do have some imagination and are brave enough to tell 
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I believe that design was fully realized in Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. 
Iain M. Banks’ picks up this idea in a couple of novels but separates the physical head parts from the consciousness parts. In ‘Surface Detail’ there are artificial hells where consciousness can be uploaded to suffer in eternity, while in 'The Algebraist" one of the characters (a wonderful 'Ming the Merciless" type) has the head of an erstwhile enemy kept alive but hanging upside down from the ceiling to be used as a punching bag.
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When I was a kid, I read about this in some ancient Russian scifi.
…aaaaand, drumrolls please, I found what was it!
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More filmography:
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