Friday, Jul 25, 2008
The prospect of "full-body transplants" offers some weird new twists on the old mind-body problem.
Jun 29, 1998 | After the surgery, the rhesus monkeys became "pugnacious," recalls Dr. Robert J. White, professor of neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.
Well, who could blame them? The animals had gone to sleep as complete beings and had woken up paralyzed and insensate from the neck down. Their heads were attached by clamps and sutures to new bodies over which they had no control. They could only see, hear, smell, taste -- and bite. According to White, if your finger came anywhere close to their mouths, you could easily lose it. The monkeys survived in this disembodied state for up to two weeks. And Frankenstein's monster thought he had it bad!
Although the experiments were done in the '60s and '70s, White says that the time is now right to offer what he calls a "full-body transplant" to humans. He has been featured on ABC News and in the New York Times discussing the possibility. With present technology, nerves could not be reconnected, so a new body wouldn't offer feeling or movement; but it could prolong the lives of quadriplegics, most of whom presently die of organ rather than brain failure.
White is not just some mad scientist with crazy ideas. The monkey research was originally published in the prestigious journals Science and Nature. In addition to his post at Case Western, he is director of neurosurgery and the Brain Research Laboratory at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland.
"Christopher Reeve, Steven Hawking, these people are sustained by their hearts and other organs, but they can't move, they can't feel," he says. "Right now, they are the equivalent of a head. And Mr. Hawking's body might fail, it might become susceptible to infections, which could kill him. The issue comes up, is he entitled to a transplant? We say it's OK for a liver, why not a whole body?"
Like many medical techniques that start being used for the sickest and most desperate patients, this one has frightening implications. For example, eventually some scientists believe they will be able to reconnect the nerves and offer feeling and motion.
Could full-body transplants become a macabre fountain of youth, offering people a chance at near immortality as they continually replace old bodies with new, younger ones? Will headless bodies be cloned as replacements, or would people need other sources of donors? Could this offer a bizarre new way to get a sex change? And what does it say about identity, humanity and the soul?
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