The surgeon who wants to perform a head transplant by 2017

some vegetable who signed his life away volunteered to do it since hes dead anyways in 2-3 years.

why would he need a lawyer? who would sue him?

>Is this bullshit?
Insane? Definitely.

People don't understand limits or how to stop once they've set upon a certain path. Incapable of constant re-evaluation.

But who would give a body?

I think the psychological effects would not be as bad with a human who is more aware of his condition an did it voluntarily. I'm more interested in whether the body would reject the new head in a freaky way.

They have family, they always do.
>Robocop 2

>successfully
>alive for 20 hours

I wouldn't call that a success user. All the head did was look around and bite anything it could. It had no control over its new body because the spinal cord couldn't be attached. If it could there would be no paraplegics.

some braindead coma patient

It would be freaky for the significant other of the body, to see something so familiar but strange with the new head and brain. Uncanny valley territory. Also how would muscle memory work attached to a different brain?

I believe the difference with this is that the surgeon will be making precise cuts through the spinal cord, rather than an injury that does much more damage.

I don't necessarily believe it's possible, I'm just saying I think that's the idea behind how it might be possible.

That is better than heads do normally, when they are detached from a body.

WHAT? YOURE TELLING ME WE HAVE THE FUCKING TECHNOLOGY TO EXCHANGE LITERAL FUCKING heads WITH PEOPLE??

But you can accomplish the same thing without the need for the second body just by pumping blood and oxygen through it.

>how would muscle memory work attached to a different brain?
I love the idea of taking someone else's good habits, I'd pay top dollar.

Nah, it's not gonna be done in America.

They're transplanting heads. You wouldn't have muscle memory in someone else's body, because that is stored in your brain.

Put in the work if you want to do that 1080 noscope, you lazy bum.

>tfw I remember this guy going to press with this story around 2014 or so
>/v/ thought it was an ARG to advertise MGSV

motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/surgeon-declares-human-head-transplant-isnt-a-metal-gear-solid-publicity-stunt

When you consider that partial brain transplants have been successful in mice and people have had large sections of their brains removed and still been pretty functional and even regained memories thought lost forever.

What if you took a healthy person and removed half of the part of the brain that controlled thoughts/emotions and attached it to a fully functional lower brain and brain stem in a donor body that had its higher brain sections removed.

If both bodies survived and retained decent cognitive functionality you could essentially split a persons consciousness in two.

Just imagine how interesting it'd be to observe them interacting with each other.

Isn't this story a lie? I've heard that won't be any transplant.

Using a body as a 'head life-support' for supplying oxygen and scrubbing waste, I think it miiiight be possible

Cutting the one persons spinal cord, however carefully, and functionally attaching it to a different one..
I'd say no, we're not even close to that technology yet

if anything we'll loearn from this

thats all that matters

I remember seeing that on TV then having a nightmare about it that night.

>All the head did was look around
So it had control of the neck muscles?

So? That's all my head does

What would happen if you replaced an old persons failing body with a fresh young body then? How long could the brain stay alive, given a fresh new body every now and again? Would it inevitably just succumb to alzheimers?

this guy needs to be put behind bars immediately

basically i don't think the brain would be immune to dementia and so on that happens to every old person

sounds like a waste of time and money

Remember reading something about the surgeon planning on using polyethylene glycol to adhere the donor spinal cord with the recipient's. Any surgical scientists/researchers wanna chime in on if or how this will work?

I can't fucking wait

Wew lad this is some Frankenstein type shit

I am excited

No, only the eyes

It bit people with its eyes?

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

almost forgot about it, really looking forward to it..

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/pmc/articles/PMC3821155/
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27180142
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025958/

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".

>the corticospinal axons don't match up properly (which they will)
they won't*

No, with its jaw.

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.

You aren't gonna be able to hook up the nerves, senpai