“Suppose the donor and recipient are lying with their necks across a rail-track, and a trolley problem comes along…”
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There’s an interesting recent book about the attempts in the 1960s to do this: Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul by Brandy Schillace. It actually treats the story seriously and isn’t as woo-woo as it sounds given the mention of the Pope and the soul in the subtitle.
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Is he the surgeon that did Zaphod Beeblebrox?
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IDK anything about horses’ brain pans (presumably no bigger than a tangerine), but it occurs to me that brains are pretty soft so you can probably squish ‘em into a wide variety of odd-shaped cavities with minimal loss of function
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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.”
Agreed, and obviously that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, but if we can get out of our own way enough (seeing as medical ethics boards tend to stand in the way of lots of things that are obviously extremely net positive value), we should be in a position to lab-grow all the non-brain replacement organs we need sometime in the next 10-20 years.
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That’s a very optimistic estimate; complex biological systems tend to be very interdependent so it’s easier to clone an entire organism than just grow (for example) a pair of lungs that aren’t connected to a living circulatory system.
Brains do not like this sort of thing. At all.
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Pretty sure I’ve heard that 30 years or so ago.
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I mean, if brains were just big rubbery masses that could squeeze into different kinds of containers like a curious octopus then why would so many people suffer serious brain injuries from blows to the head that don’t even rupture the skull?
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There are Neanderthal skulls with healed-over burr holes.
Also, according to The Matrix and the 2005 movie The Island, you don’t just need the whole organism, it needs to actually have fully developed conciousness and free will too, or else the body doesn’t work. That’s just basic science.
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That’s true, and has historically been a big challenge. Thankfully we’ve already successfully grown and transplanted lungs into pigs and gotten good vasculature growth. Multiple times across multiple research groups. Still difficult, but no longer the kind of thing I’d expect to hold back a field for decades.
There have been successful human transplants of lab-grown bladders and tracheas.
We’ve also done things like genetically modify a pig to grow a kidney that a human body wouldn’t reject, and successfully show that it will function when attached to a human circulatory system (though not implanted AFAIK).
Lab-grown kidney transplants are still at the rat stage in terms of successful transplants grown from the recipient’s own cells.
Hearts are still at the level of smaller pieces of muscle tissue, but even that could reduce the need for transplants in some cases.
Do I think we’re going to have this as a mature, in-common-use technology in 2040? Not really, no. Do I think that fact has anything whatsoever to do with our underlying ability to develop the technology in that time frame, including testing and iterating safely and ethically-according-to-almost-everyone-but-so-called-ethics-boards? Also no.
Brains are non-Newtonian fluids that solidify upon impact?
/s
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Nope.
The spinal column work on this transplant was botched.
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One of your links is to a transplant of a donor trachea, with no “lab-grown” element.
One is to Macchiarini’s murderous rampage, involving not a “lab-grown” trachea (despite the clickbait title), but a tube of sponge plastic.
Spoiler alert: the patient suffered the kind of unpleasant death you might expect when your windpipe is replaced with a festering sore.
Thanks for the corrections!
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