Body Transplants Possible - Dr. Frankestein.

[pErvinalia]

A surgeon says full-body transplants could become a reality in just two years.

Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off.

Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June.

He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.

The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.

“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”

Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.

The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed. The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in primates to test whether the procedure works.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015 ... MP=soc_567

[Hermit]

"told New Scientist magazine"

[Xamonas Chegwé]

[Warren Dew]

Doesn't seem like it would be fundamentally more difficult than doing it with dogs.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/soviet ... headed-dog

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Doesn't seem like it would be fundamentally more difficult than doing it with dogs.

Can we move this to NSFW, please, so that I can post an informative picture of "doing it with dogs"?

[JimC]

There must be lighting bolts delivered to the cadaver, and the nurses must all have hunch-backs and answer to the name "Igor"

[tattuchu]

This has already been done with monkeys. The monkeys lived, but not for very long. Also, they didn't like it very much, having their heads cut off and put on another body, and bit the doctor/mad scientist. Also, they were paralyzed from the neck down. I thought that was the only thing holding this back, in theory, the paralysis thing. How can you regain function after the spinal cord is severed? If that were possible, then why do we still have paralyzed people?

Anyway, how long do you reckon it'll be before a brain can be placed in a robot body? I mean, why keep the whole head? The only thing you really need is the brain. The rest is just a fleshy covering.

[mistermack]

You can't join up the spinal cords at the moment. But it's not far off.

A recent advance using nerve cells from the nasal passage got nerve cells to re-grow.
Nasal nerve cells are the only ones that have this ability. But it's on the cards that they will be able to re-connect spinal cord using that technique pretty soon.

So a head transplant would be feasible, if you could keep the brain and body alive long enough for the repair to happen. It would probably take years to get everything working though.
But so long as the breathing and heartbeat and vital organs could be connected up, you could take the patient off life support, and given time, maybe have fairly full mobility etc.