Originally published at: Here's how a human head transplant could work (video) | Boing Boing
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A body with a new head? The “person” is in the head. That would make it a head with a body transplant.
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I like a good … wait what? Oh, never mind, I thought we were talking about something else.
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I recently talked to my 5yo about brain transplants, as she was asking whether her brain could be transplanted into a pony’s body. We went back and forth as to whether we could expand the skull capacity of the pony with a glass enclosure or just do a full head transplant. In the end she wanted a pony-shaped head. This would be a fun way to turn that conversation into a little biology lesson!
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I came here to make this point. Thanks for beating me to it, my fellow pedant!
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Yes, but Canavero is a fantasist and a grifter.
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This seems like a really overly complicated way to obtain a doctor assisted suicide.
Edit: Partially blurred potentially triggering word.
I hear that the procedure is quick and barely agonizing at all.
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The fundamental reason no medical ethics board is likely to approve such a procedure on humans isn’t that it couldn’t be done, the reason is that it would be impossible to justify the use of a donor body for such little relative benefit.
A single body donor can save up to eight lives through organ transplants. That’s a potential of eight human beings living full, relatively complete and healthy lives who would otherwise be dead.
Weigh that against the benefit of a full-body transplant: at best you save the life of a single patient who will then spend the rest of their life paralyzed from the neck down and hooked up to life support equipment.
So from a medical ethicist’s point of view the choice of what to do with the donor’s body is a no-brainer (as it were).
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It is odd, as @west and @P_Lenhart noted; the consciousness is considered to be in the head; and yet Mombi remained Mombi, even with a head swap.
And what’s all the fuss about carrying out a head-swap? It is just about the simplest form of mini conversion. I’ve done loads, and my little guys all survive to live short and brutal, grim-dark lives.
Genestealer Cultist Head on Cawdor Ganger/Empire Archer Body.
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That’s clear, but I kind of appreciate this analysis looking at it seriously rather than just being dismissive. Ultimately, we probably will solve most of the technical problems that make this impossible and impractical today, so I think it’s worthwhile to consider the implications, as this video does. It’s a good video, especially the second half that looks at similar problems and issues that would arise with a cybernetic body.
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Life-support equipment for the cadaver body, which itself becomes life-support equipment for the recipient head.
Mind you, Canavero reckons that he can restore spinal function, by slicing the spinal cords of the recipient head and the donor body with such a Subtle Knife that the bisected nerve axons recognise their counterparts and merge with them.
Canavero works with a Korean veterinarian who claims to have performed proof-of-concept spinal-regeneration tests on animals, only the test subjects were all drowned when his laboratory flooded, before anyone else could examine them. This is why all the best laboratories are in castles on mountain-tops in the Carpathians.
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Came here for this; thanks!
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Exactly. The only scenario in which it makes ethical sense is to save the mind of someone who in the sole possession of knowledge that can save more than eight lives.
Or possibly “we couldn’t find anyone else on the waiting list who was a good match for this body donor, so it’s all yours.”
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Other than avoiding floods, the other reason for mountain-top laboratories is that lightning strikes are more accessible.
Yes, Canavero’s protocol involves electricity to encourage severed nerve axons to fuse (as well as special ‘fusogens’).
Canavero also has a unique and challenging perspective on spinal functioning, in which the white-matter part of the spine (the myelinated nerve axons running all the way down from the brain) isn’t really crucial, so it doesn’t really matter if they don’t fuse. All the real work, apparently, happens within the shorter connections of the spinal grey matter. The medical mainstream stubbornly rejects his paradigm-shifting genius because that’s what medical mainstreams do.
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