We have seen everything in humanity’s desperate race for live longer. From spending your life searching for the supposed source of eternal youth to giving blood from young people to old people. Today, the science of aging is developing slowly, focusing on the role telomeres and telomerase. Meanwhile, other scientists want to find a shortcut using such futuristic measures as head transplant.
This is something that has been the goal of many researchers for decades, but has never been achieved. The last to propose this were scientists from Brain Bridgea company that promises to be able to perform head transplants in the future thanks to new technologies in robotics and artificial intelligence.
The purpose of these transplants is to transfer the head of a sick or elderly person onto the body of a younger person. This way he will retain his memories and the essence of who he is, but thanks to this he will be able to live longer. young and healthy body. This seems like science fiction, but the truth is that it is true today. No matter how much they claim that it is possible, no one has managed to do it. Even if this were possible, there are many ethical issues that must be taken into account. Still, let’s leave ethics aside for now and focus on the science part. Is it possible to have a head transplant?
History of head transplant: from monkey to robot
It is known that the first person to perform a head transplant was a neurosurgeon. Robert J. White. He is a prestigious specialist who has performed more than 10,000 operations in his life. However, in the 1970s, he began to become very interested in the idea of head transplants.
After learning how to do it, he managed to do it using two rhesus monkeys. The deceased person donated the body, on which the head of the one who was still alive was placed. The transplant was initially successful as the monkey survived. However, he died 8 days later, during which time he could not even walk. White didn’t have the tools or knowledge to bandage severed nervesso that his spinal cord does not come into contact with his head.
The idea stayed there. He never tried to do the same with people, since experiments with monkeys did not give the expected result, although he always believed that one day it would be possible. This was done by an Italian neurosurgeon. Sergio Canavero. In 2017, this scientist assured that he was able to implement head transplant between people. Faced with persistent demands from the scientific community to provide evidence that this was true, he finally demonstrated his results, which were in fact much less promising than he had claimed. Essentially, both the donor and recipient were dead before the intervention took place.
He assured that this is only the first step, but he will be able to perform head transplants on living people. To date, he has not achieved this, but promises that very soon he will have the necessary tools to do this. In fact, he and the BrainBridge scientists have something in common: the idea of reconnecting severed nerves. via polyethylene glycol (PEG).
Is what BrainBridge promises viable?
BrainBridge scientists believe head transplants are a good idea because the human brain can live for hundreds of years while it has a young body. That’s what they say. It’s another matter to prove it scientifically. It is known that the human brain loses 0.2% of its volume from age 35, and that this percentage increases until 0.5% from 60 years old. This doesn’t seem very favorable to the fact that the brain can live for hundreds of years.
For genetic reasons this is also unlikely. In fact, geneticists set an approximate limit 115 years in human life expectancy. Some scientists believe that by making a few changes to our DNA, we can live for thousands of years. But we encountered the same thing that happens with BrainBridge. It is one thing to provide this, but quite another to prove it.
Now, even if we assume that a head transplant will actually help us live longer, we will have to test whether it is viable. He polyethylene glycol This substance has already been shown to cause serious allergic reactions in other less sensitive procedures. For example, this is the reason why a clinical trial of an HIV vaccine that used it as a supplement recently had to be stopped.
On the other hand, BrainBridge suggests using robotics and artificial intelligence to make it easier for the body and brain to maintain connected. It will no longer be just a matter of brain transplantation. We would talk about creating something similar to cyborgs.
To do this, they use two robots that work simultaneously with the donor and recipient, so that the brain is not away from one of them for a long time. two bodies. Everything is very futuristic, but difficult to imagine.
Ethical issues of head transplantation
It is said that White himself, fearing the religious implications that a head transplant might have, consulted two Popes before undergoing the procedure. After all, a person’s soul must be in the brain, so it will carry within itself soul from one body to another.
Currently, only a few sectors are concerned about religious implications, but they There is a lot of debate on an ethical level.. First and foremost, it is currently unknown whether a head transplant will actually work. Will the owner of the brain be able to wake up in his new body without any problems? Would everything be the same, just in a different body? This is a hypothesis, but no one has been able to test or demonstrate it.
This was one of the arguments used by bioethicists of the time. Emory University in 2017, when Sergio Canavero insisted that a head transplant was possible. They also explained that this would be a very complex operation for which not enough preliminary research had been done. This would put patients at risk, leading to questionable results. Is the person still the same? Film and literature are full of references to this type of procedure, from the creation of Frankenstein to Bella Baxter in Poor creatures. Will the result be similar to these cases?
There are many questions that scientists will have to stop and answer before starting any procedure. But even if they find the answers satisfactory enough to move on, a head transplant is no small feat. With current technology, this will be difficult to achieve.
Source: Hiper Textual
