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Controversial and pioneering surgery...fantasy?


aujeff11

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Is Medicine and advanced surgery techniques headed this way? Do you think the scientist will be successful? Lastly, who here thinks he is "trying to play God?"

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Head transplant: Russian man to become first to undergo pioneering and controversial surgery:

Valery Spiridinov is set to be the first person to undergo the operation. It will be carried out by controversial Italian doctor Sergio Canavero, whose optimistic plans have mostly been met with scepticism.

But Spiridonov — who has the rare genetic Werdnig-Hoffman disease, which gradually wastes away muscles — says that he is willing to undergo the risky procedure to give himself a chance at living in a healthy body.

“Am I afraid? Yes, of course I am. But it is not just very scary, but also very interesting,” Spiridonov, speaking from his house in the Russian town of Vladimir about 120 miles from Moscow, told MailOnline.

“But you have to understand that I don't really have many choices,” he said. “If I don't try this chance my fate will be very sad. With every year my state is getting worse.”

Spiridinov said that he has spoken with Dr Canavaro over Skype but they are yet to meet. The Russian man was chosen from a number of people that emailed and wrote to Canavaro to ask to undergo the procedure, he said.

Canavaro raised scepticism earlier this year when he said that he would be able to carry out the procedure within two years. Other medical experts called the procedure unlikely, and rare, as well as highlighting the fact that it would never be used for those that simply want to replace an ailing body. Some have even compared Canavaro to Frankenstein.

The head transplant is set to work by taking the head off a person suffering from a wasting or degenerative disease, and transplanting it onto the body of someone who is braindead but still has a functioning body. It would be akin to the process of moving organs into a body — but would rely on the donor’s family giving away the entire body, rather than just parts of it.

The procedure was carried out on a monkey in 1970. But surgeons didn’t transplant the spinal cord, so the monkey could not move, and it lived for only nine days and died when the head was rejected by the body’s immune system.

It has never been done on a human, but Canavaro claims that all the necessary science and technology is now in place. “I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible,” Canavaro has said.

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I seriously doubt this poor fellow would survive long after the operation. We're just not there yet.

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Speaking purely scientifically, transplanting heads to either organic bodies or prosthetic/robotic bodies will certainly be possible at some point and technology gets nearer to that ability every day. I don't know enough about the current state of medicine to say when or if that time is near or far. For that matter, from the purely physical standpoint, it's entirely likely that one day we'll be able to upload the entire content of our physical mind into an electronic/virtual form.

The rub comes if we believe that there is a spiritual component to our "selves". And if so, is that "soul" attached to our brain or somehow incorporated into the greater portion of our body? Could/would a "soul" follow our mind to a purely electronic/virtual presence? ...Much deeper questions that I would attempt to answer! But I suspect one day when such surgery is possible it will be attempted, and we may get some answers regarding the abode of "self", "conscience", or "soul" post-surgery.

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Speaking purely scientifically, transplanting heads to either organic bodies or prosthetic/robotic bodies will certainly be possible at some point and technology gets nearer to that ability every day. I don't know enough about the current state of medicine to say when or if that time is near or far. For that matter, from the purely physical standpoint, it's entirely likely that one day we'll be able to upload the entire content of our physical mind into an electronic/virtual form.

The rub comes if we believe that there is a spiritual component to our "selves". And if so, is that "soul" attached to our brain or somehow incorporated into the greater portion of our body? Could/would a "soul" follow our mind to a purely electronic/virtual presence? ...Much deeper questions that I would attempt to answer! But I suspect one day when such surgery is possible it will be attempted, and we may get some answers regarding the abode of "self", "conscience", or "soul" post-surgery.

There are some interesting paradoxes concerning the concept of "self" on the matter of brain uploading/copying. Have you ever dwelled on the transporter technology from Star Trek?

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Speaking purely scientifically, transplanting heads to either organic bodies or prosthetic/robotic bodies will certainly be possible at some point and technology gets nearer to that ability every day. I don't know enough about the current state of medicine to say when or if that time is near or far. For that matter, from the purely physical standpoint, it's entirely likely that one day we'll be able to upload the entire content of our physical mind into an electronic/virtual form.

The rub comes if we believe that there is a spiritual component to our "selves". And if so, is that "soul" attached to our brain or somehow incorporated into the greater portion of our body? Could/would a "soul" follow our mind to a purely electronic/virtual presence? ...Much deeper questions that I would attempt to answer! But I suspect one day when such surgery is possible it will be attempted, and we may get some answers regarding the abode of "self", "conscience", or "soul" post-surgery.

There are some interesting paradoxes concerning the concept of "self" on the matter of brain uploading/copying. Have you ever dwelled on the transporter technology from Star Trek?

Yeah, that is something I've always thought about with the Star Trek transporter technology: Reproducing the atoms of a body at another location is one thing, but is there a soul/spirit to be transferred? Of course, Gene Roddenbury was just writing science fiction. He didn't have to concern himself with esoteric theology, just making a good show that people would watch with a reasonable suspension of disbelief. And a strictly materialistic atheist watching the show would have no concerns about souls/spirits.

However, the franchise does try to be scientific when possible: They did 'invent' "Heisenberg Compensators" as a key component of the transporter, supposedly to compensate for the inherent uncertain in position vs. velocity of particles described by Heisenberg's Uncertain Principle.

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PZ Myers weighs in:

Dangerous and Unethical

Sergio Canavero wants to transplant a head, and he has a volunteer. Canavero thinks he can carry out this operation, although he has no successes in preliminary animal testing, and just wants to jump right in with a human with a debilitating disease.

Do not trust this guy. He makes a number of claims here that are transparently false, and glibly glides past major problems.


  • I am not at all fond of people who misrepresent the field. He claims that the common dogma is that motor activity is driven entirely by the brain, and that the spinal cord is a ‘slave’ to higher levels…and that this is false, enabling his operation. Neuroscientists have used the decerebrate cat model since the 1950s; this is not novel. It is misleading to suggest that cutting the spinal cord is OK because spinal motoneurons can take over the job.

  • The secret to his success, he claims, is that he will cut the spinal cord with a very sharp knife, which is less damaging than traumatic spinal cord injury. There is a grain of truth to that, but he is minimizing the damage that will be done. Slice through long fibers, and you’ve still destroyed long distance connections. He doesn’t say anything about scarring; apparently, polyethylene glycol is magic and will allow the cut ends to fuse neatly.

  • He harps on the fact that you can get some restoration of function if you can only get “10 to 20 percent” of the fibers in the motor pathway restored. Can he even do that? Evidence not shown. Is that really adequate? You could easily argue that it’s better than 0%…but your patient won’t be dancing afterwards.

  • While pretending that getting a small percentage of the motor fibers reconnected is sufficient (while not showing that he can even do that), he completely ignores the importance of sensory reconnection. Even in his best fantasy, you end up with a head grafted onto a numb body with no proprioception, controlled by a few restored connections that activate motor programs in the spinal cord. Now that’s a creepy nightmare.

  • What about the autonomic nervous system? Does that even count to this guy with a knife and a mad glitter in his eye?

His prospective patient is a doomed young man with Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a terrible heritable degenerative disease that causes progressive cell death in populations of motoneurons in the spinal cord and brainstem (exactly how high up is Canavero planning to cut?). It’s a generally terrible disease, with its victims having normal intelligence and awareness, but losing control of their body starting at a very young age — I cannot fault the volunteer for hoping for rescue from his condition.

But I can fault Canavero for exploiting him and lying to him. This procedure will not work. If it was a good procedure, show me a dog that has undergone it, walking across the stage with a transplanted body. Try it with monkeys first. But he can’t: the result would be, at best, a shambling horror, an animal driven mad with pain and terror, crippled and whimpering, and a poor advertisement for his experiment. And most likely what he’d have is a collection of corpses that suffered briefly before expiring.

I can also fault the media for promoting this charlatan. TEDx should be ashamed. At least most of the print media are treating this as a circus freakshow.

I don’t think this operation will occur, fortunately. Canavero claims to need over $7 million to cover the costs, and a team of 150 doctors and nurses to carry out an intricate surgery that will take 36 hours to execute. He’s going to have to find 150 medical professionals with no sense of ethics at all, who are willing to risk their careers carrying out an elaborate act of slow torture and murder.

I find it hard to believe that anyone is taking Canavero at all seriously.

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Yeah, that is something I've always thought about with the Star Trek transporter technology: Reproducing the atoms of a body at another location is one thing, but is there a soul/spirit to be transferred? Of course, Gene Roddenbury was just writing science fiction. He didn't have to concern himself with esoteric theology, just making a good show that people would watch with a reasonable suspension of disbelief. And a strictly materialistic atheist watching the show would have no concerns about souls/spirits.

However, the franchise does try to be scientific when possible: They did 'invent' "Heisenberg Compensators" as a key component of the transporter, supposedly to compensate for the inherent uncertain in position vs. velocity of particles described by Heisenberg's Uncertain Principle.

I love the paradox. How do we know the transporter isn't simply a murder machine? How do we know you aren't committing suicide unawares everytime you need to beam somewhere? Remember the episode when Riker was cloned? If one Riker stepped in, but two step out, which is the original? Both or neither?

Likewise, with the example you presented. If we are going to "upload" our brains to an advanced computer or copy it to another "blank" brain, unless the process is destructive to the brain being uploaded, you are going to end up with a copy. Which one is the real you?

Deep stuff. Wish I had paid more attention in Philosophy 101. :laugh:

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Yeah, that is something I've always thought about with the Star Trek transporter technology: Reproducing the atoms of a body at another location is one thing, but is there a soul/spirit to be transferred? Of course, Gene Roddenbury was just writing science fiction. He didn't have to concern himself with esoteric theology, just making a good show that people would watch with a reasonable suspension of disbelief. And a strictly materialistic atheist watching the show would have no concerns about souls/spirits.

However, the franchise does try to be scientific when possible: They did 'invent' "Heisenberg Compensators" as a key component of the transporter, supposedly to compensate for the inherent uncertain in position vs. velocity of particles described by Heisenberg's Uncertain Principle.

I love the paradox. How do we know the transporter isn't simply a murder machine? How do we know you aren't committing suicide unawares everytime you need to beam somewhere? Remember the episode when Riker was cloned? If one Riker stepped in, but two step out, and one of them dies, which is the original? Both or neither?

Likewise, with the example you presented. If we are going to "upload" our brains to an advanced computer or copy it to another "blank" brain, unless the process is destructive to the brain being uploaded, you are going to end up with a copy. Which one is the real you?

Deep stuff. Wish I had paid more attention in Philosophy 101. :laugh:

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Transplanting a head or just the brain to donor body might be a medical technology challenge, but the ethics are the same with any organ tramsplant. 60 years go transplanting a kidney between identical twins was all that was possible. now it is not uncommon to transplant a heart and set of lungs. transplanting a head or brain requires attachment of nerves for the transplant body to function. that is the technical challenge.

what would be a true ethical issue is copying a person's memories to a machine. does the soul move too? is the machine now a person?

it's a twist on the teleport situation. convert matter and chemical memory patterns of a person to digital signals, store and or transport them to another place and time and reconstruct a copy of the person. did the soul move too?

just make sure there are no flys near you.....

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Transplanting a head or just the brain to donor body might be a medical technology challenge, but the ethics are the same with any organ tramsplant. 60 years go transplanting a kidney between identical twins was all that was possible. now it is not uncommon to transplant a heart and set of lungs. transplanting a head or brain requires attachment of nerves for the transplant body to function. that is the technical challenge.

what would be a true ethical issue is copying a person's memories to a machine. does the soul move too? is the machine now a person?

it's a twist on the teleport situation. convert matter and chemical memory patterns of a person to digital signals, store and or transport them to another place and time and reconstruct a copy of the person. did the soul move too?

just make sure there are no flys near you.....

Just to be extra pedantic, that was something that always bothered me about The Fly. So because a fly is trapped in the teleporter with him, he merges with it on a genetic level. What about the untold multitudes of microorganisms that would have also been in the pod with him?

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Transplanting a head or just the brain to donor body might be a medical technology challenge, but the ethics are the same with any organ tramsplant. 60 years go transplanting a kidney between identical twins was all that was possible. now it is not uncommon to transplant a heart and set of lungs. transplanting a head or brain requires attachment of nerves for the transplant body to function. that is the technical challenge.

what would be a true ethical issue is copying a person's memories to a machine. does the soul move too? is the machine now a person?

it's a twist on the teleport situation. convert matter and chemical memory patterns of a person to digital signals, store and or transport them to another place and time and reconstruct a copy of the person. did the soul move too?

just make sure there are no flys near you.....

Just to be extra pedantic, that was some thing that always bothered me about The Fly. So because a fly is trapped in the teleporter with him, he merges with it on a genetic level. What about the untold multitudes of microorganisms that would have also been in the pod with him?

Well, you just need untold multitudes of microscopic shotguns for when the germs beg "kill me"... :rolleyes:
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Transplanting a head or just the brain to donor body might be a medical technology challenge, but the ethics are the same with any organ tramsplant. 60 years go transplanting a kidney between identical twins was all that was possible. now it is not uncommon to transplant a heart and set of lungs. transplanting a head or brain requires attachment of nerves for the transplant body to function. that is the technical challenge.

what would be a true ethical issue is copying a person's memories to a machine. does the soul move too? is the machine now a person?

it's a twist on the teleport situation. convert matter and chemical memory patterns of a person to digital signals, store and or transport them to another place and time and reconstruct a copy of the person. did the soul move too?

just make sure there are no flys near you.....

Just to be extra pedantic, that was some thing that always bothered me about The Fly. So because a fly is trapped in the teleporter with him, he merges with it on a genetic level. What about the untold multitudes of microorganisms that would have also been in the pod with him?

Well, you just need untold multitudes of microscopic shotguns for when the germs beg "kill me"... :rolleyes:

Just being pedantic. Probably wouldn't have been as good a movie if he was morphing into E. Coli or something.

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Transplanting a head or just the brain to donor body might be a medical technology challenge, but the ethics are the same with any organ tramsplant. 60 years go transplanting a kidney between identical twins was all that was possible. now it is not uncommon to transplant a heart and set of lungs. transplanting a head or brain requires attachment of nerves for the transplant body to function. that is the technical challenge.

what would be a true ethical issue is copying a person's memories to a machine. does the soul move too? is the machine now a person?

it's a twist on the teleport situation. convert matter and chemical memory patterns of a person to digital signals, store and or transport them to another place and time and reconstruct a copy of the person. did the soul move too?

just make sure there are no flys near you.....

Just to be extra pedantic, that was some thing that always bothered me about The Fly. So because a fly is trapped in the teleporter with him, he merges with it on a genetic level. What about the untold multitudes of microorganisms that would have also been in the pod with him?

Well, you just need untold multitudes of microscopic shotguns for when the germs beg "kill me"... :rolleyes:

Just being pedantic. Probably wouldn't have been as good a movie if he was morphing into E. Coli or something.

Yeah, a movie in which he morphed into E. Coli would be a lot "crappier". :rolleyes:
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