Post # 75
Today's story is the stuff that really creepy bad dreams are made out of - that and really awful B- and C+ Sci-Fi movies. What I'm talking about is head transplants. I'm probably going to have nightmares just for reporting/writing this story. I actually wish I hadn't read the report on this, but you can't unread something, just like you can't unsee, or unhear something. So why not share my misery with you, so we can all have bad dreams together.
Just a few days ago in a post I said that there are so many research labs out there researching so many things, that if there's something you can imagine - even really weird things - then there is probably a research lab somewhere already working on it. That statement was made more true again today - unfortunately.
Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group recently published a paper outlining how to successfully accomplish this macabre feat (if you can call making a whole generation of society have nightmares that you can't wake up from a success). Dr. Canavero is calling the procedure a "head transplant," but since the consciousness of a person resides in their head, it is really a body transplant. The multitude of ethical questions concerning all this are flooding through my head like the images from a bad New Wave video from the mid 80's.
Many years ago someone successfully transplanted a monkey's head (or rather a monkey's body, but it wasn't a complete success. In fact I don't see it as a success at all. They couldn't connect the spinal cords, leaving the poor monkey a quadriplegic that needed to be on a life support machine in order to breathe or even pump blood. Dr. Canavero says that he has figured out how to make those connections.
Dr. Sergio Canavero
In his report he said the key is first of all to make a very clean cut through the spinal cords. The name of Canavero's project is called Project Gemini. Specific goals Canavero and his research team have are treating things like muscular dystrophy and quadriplegia with massive organ failure, among other things. Besides being sure to make a clean cut through the two spinal cords, the team at Turin say that they will use polyethylene glycol as an adhesive to attach the base of the skull to the donor body.
Dr. Canavero and his team are being called everything from geniuses to mad scientists (gee, I wonder why). Dr. Jerry Silver, neurologist from Case Western Reserve University said, "This is bad science. This should never happen."
Dr. Canavero, the part time mad scientist and evil genius in his lab
The whole idea just creeps me out beyond my ability to really even express it. If I was faced with a choice between dying and having my head put on a body that's not my own, I would gladly choose death. It would be a nightmare that I would be unable to awake from. I wouldn't care that I would be able to control all actions of this foreign body, or be able to feel all things through it. I would feel no better than a Goa'uld, possessing and controlling a body against its will. I know; the body wouldn't have a will, because its (his - it better be a his. If they put my head on a her, I'd be peed off besides being totally freaked out) head will have been removed.
Then comes some of the ethical questions. Whose body would they "donate?" Would it be someone who died in a construction accident by getting an I-beam through the head without any damage to the rest of the body? Or, would they use the body of some criminal who is no longer on death row, because he left death row the hard way? Or would it just be someone who they decided had a life that wasn't worth living, so his body would be donated to someone who they felt would make "better" use of it? Maybe they could get someone deeply in debt to donate his body in return for his debts and his family being taken care of for life.
According to Dr. Canavero the procedure would cost (today) about $13 million US. Given that I could see that only the very privileged one percenters would ever get the privilege to experience this nightmare. In fact, some of this group of people probably wouldn't be bothered by possessing someone else's body anyway. Those people among them whom they feel are better than everyone else would receive new bodies again and again, as often as the bodies wore out. Lorenzo Magrassi of the University of Pavia and his research team in an unrelated series of studies have just proven that brain cells can outlive the rest of the body by a long shot. Magrassi and his colleagues recently published the results of this study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
I have posted a few things on here that are quite unbelievable, but this one you are probably thinking, "No way whatsoever. This has to be the biggest load of BS you ever wrote. When looking for a picture of Dr. Sergio Canavero, I found the internet filled to the full with stories about this. If you think this is baloney, then just do a quick google search under his name.
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