It bit people with its eyes?
The surgeon who wants to perform a head transplant by 2017
Matthew Davis
Juan Mitchell
Yea, its the 'magic ingredient' this guy is proposing
I really dont think it would be possible just cause you have a special glue..
Maybe if you were glueing it back to the same brainstem, maaaybe
But he's not. He will be glueing it to a different brainstem.
With the millions of dentrites and axons running through it, not matching up with the ones from the head.
Some special glue isnt going to make all of the grafts nerves find the corrosponding donor ones
Charles Garcia
almost forgot about it, really looking forward to it..
Isaac Cox
The thing is, if the corticospinal axons don't match up properly (which they will, there is), the precentral gyrus can to some extent alter its somatotopic mapping over time to compensate. This has been shown in TMS studies, a given spot will have different roles in the same subject, for instance after learning a musical instrument.
Keep in mind that the objective here is not the patient restoring normal functional ability, but having enough voluntary control over the non-myopathic muscles of the donor body that he can keep some degree of autonomy in daily life activities.
From what he is describing, he will cut much lower than the brainstem, around the cervical enlargement (it was done at the C5-6 level on a monkey), which makes sense because he can't afford to cut through the nuclei of the medulla, but it will ruin the CPG for the brachial plexus, and with it most of the motricity of the upper limbs.
It also bothers me that he assumes the phrenic and pneumogastric nerves will survive the procedure. Even with extremely good suture, these have a high probability of necrotizing and are of extreme importance.
That is the problem with this whole project. Every step is theoretically possible (the data is lacking on the whole spinal cord situation but it is not necessary for survival), and much of what he describes corresponds to common procedures in orthopaedic surgery and neurosurgery, but the probability of every step going well and there not being at least one major fuckup is abysmal.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
He remains very vague about how he plans to reconstruct both carotids, both vertebral arteries, ensure the continuity of the brachial plexus and all the tiny delicate neurovascular elements in so little time, and he really has barely any evidence for "spinal cord fusion".
Ian Thompson
>the corticospinal axons don't match up properly (which they will)
they won't*
Easton Jackson
No, with its jaw.
Leo Green
He's right though. We could understand so much more about the brain and the human body if ethics didn't get in the way.
Austin Parker
You aren't gonna be able to hook up the nerves, senpai