My brain is abuzz with what it would be like to awaken in someone else' body...looking into a mirror would cause such mental dissonance.
not to mention what it might be like for someone to see a loved one whom died walking around with someone else inside!
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The plan to ‘reawaken’ cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else’s skull
Sergio Canavero, the Italian surgeon who audaciously plans to perform the world’s first human head transplant within the next 10 months (pending the availability of a donor body) is now preparing to reawaken cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else’s skull.
In an interview with a German-language magazine, Canavero says he will attempt to bring the first brains frozen in liquid nitrogen at an Arizona-based cryogenics bank back to life “not in 100 years,” but three years at the latest.
Transplanting a brain only — and not an entire head — gets around formidable rejection issues, Canavero said, since there will be no need to reconnect and stitch up severed vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles as there is when a new head is fused onto a brain-dead donor body.
Canavero allows that one “problematic” issue with brain transplants, however, would be that “no aspect of your original external body remains the same.”
“Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull,” he told OOOM magazine, published by the same company that handles the Italian brain surgeon’s public relations.
The flamboyant neuroscientist who some ethicists have decried as “nuts” rattled the transplant world when he first outlined his plans for a human head transplant two years ago in the journal, Surgical Neurology International.
The greatest technical hurdle to a head transplant is fusing the donor and recipient’s severed spinal cords, something never before achieved in humans, and restoring function, without causing massive, irreversible brain damage or death.
In an exclusive interview with the National Post last year, Canavero said what makes his brazen, and critics say ethically reckless, protocol possible is a special “fusogen,” a waxy, glue-like substance developed by a young B.C.-born chemist that will be used to reconnect the severed spinal cord stumps and coax axons and neurons to regrow across the gap.
Canavero said the first head transplant will be performed in Harbin, China, and the surgical team led by Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese orthopedic surgeon who participated in the first hand transplant in the U.S. in 1999. Ren has been performing hundreds of head transplants in mice in preparation.
The first patient will be an unidentified Chinese citizen, and not, as originally planned, Valery Spirdonov, a 31-year-old Russian man who suffers from a rare and devastating form of spinal muscular dystrophy.
Canavero called Ren “a close friend of mine and an extraordinarily capable surgeon.”
“At the moment, I can only disclose that there has been massive progress in medical experiments that would have seemed impossible even as recently as a few months ago,” Canavero told OOOM. “The milestones that have been reached will undoubtedly revolutionize medicine.”
He declined to offer up exactly what those milestones are, saying that results of the most recent animal experiments have been submitted for publication in “renowned scientific medical journals.”
Last September, the team reported they had succeeded in restoring functionality and mobility in mice with severed spinal cords using the special fusogen, dubbed Texas-PEG. Canavero claims the mice were able to run again.
He said numerous experiments have been conducted since then on an array of different animals in South Korea and China “and the results are unambiguous: the spinal cord — and with it the ability to move — can be entirely restored,” he told OOOM.
Canavero envisions the head (or, perhaps more accurately, body) grafting venture as a cure for people living with horrible medical conditions. The plan is to cut off the head of two people — one, the recipient, the other, the donor whose brain is dead but whose body is otherwise healthy, an accident victim for example. Surgeons will then shift the recipient’s head onto the donor body using a custom-made swivel crane. They will have less than an hour to re-establish blood supply before risking irreversible brain damage.
“In a few months we will sever a body from a head in an unprecedented medical procedure,” Canavero said. At the moment of decapitation, the patient will be clinically dead. “If we bring this person back to life, we will receive the first real account of what actually happens after death,” he told the magazine, meaning, he said, “whether there is an afterlife, a heaven, a hereafter or whatever you may want to call it or whether death is simply a flicking off of the light switch and that’s it.”
Canavero said a brain transplant has several advantages over a head-swap, including that there is “barely any immune reaction, which means the problem of rejection does not exist. The brain is, in a manner of speaking, a neutral organ,” he said.
Others are hugely skeptical of the prospect of reawakening brains, or bodies, frozen after death. In an interview with the Post’s Joe O’Connor two years ago, Eike-Henner Kluge, a bio-ethicist at the University of Victoria, refers to cryonics patients as “corpsesicles.”
“Unless it is technically possible, and it is not, to replace all the water left in a body’s cells with glycol, unfreezing a frozen corpse will rupture the cell walls ensuring that you are mush — a corpsesicle.”
However, two years ago researchers with 21st Century Medicine, a California cryobiology research company, reported they had succeeded in freezing a rabbit’s brain using a flash-freezing technique to protect and stabilize the tissue. After the vitrified brains were rewarmed, electron microscope imaging from across the rabbit brains showed neurons and synapses were crisp and intact.
Canavero hopes to get his first brains from Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz. Alcor’s most famous “patient” is Red Sox baseball legend Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball history, whose head was detached from his body and cryopreserved after his death at 83 in 2002.
The plan to
not to mention what it might be like for someone to see a loved one whom died walking around with someone else inside!
__________________
The plan to ‘reawaken’ cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else’s skull
Sergio Canavero, the Italian surgeon who audaciously plans to perform the world’s first human head transplant within the next 10 months (pending the availability of a donor body) is now preparing to reawaken cryogenically frozen brains and transplant them into someone else’s skull.
In an interview with a German-language magazine, Canavero says he will attempt to bring the first brains frozen in liquid nitrogen at an Arizona-based cryogenics bank back to life “not in 100 years,” but three years at the latest.
Transplanting a brain only — and not an entire head — gets around formidable rejection issues, Canavero said, since there will be no need to reconnect and stitch up severed vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles as there is when a new head is fused onto a brain-dead donor body.
Canavero allows that one “problematic” issue with brain transplants, however, would be that “no aspect of your original external body remains the same.”
“Your head is no longer there, your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull,” he told OOOM magazine, published by the same company that handles the Italian brain surgeon’s public relations.
The flamboyant neuroscientist who some ethicists have decried as “nuts” rattled the transplant world when he first outlined his plans for a human head transplant two years ago in the journal, Surgical Neurology International.
The greatest technical hurdle to a head transplant is fusing the donor and recipient’s severed spinal cords, something never before achieved in humans, and restoring function, without causing massive, irreversible brain damage or death.
In an exclusive interview with the National Post last year, Canavero said what makes his brazen, and critics say ethically reckless, protocol possible is a special “fusogen,” a waxy, glue-like substance developed by a young B.C.-born chemist that will be used to reconnect the severed spinal cord stumps and coax axons and neurons to regrow across the gap.
Canavero said the first head transplant will be performed in Harbin, China, and the surgical team led by Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese orthopedic surgeon who participated in the first hand transplant in the U.S. in 1999. Ren has been performing hundreds of head transplants in mice in preparation.
The first patient will be an unidentified Chinese citizen, and not, as originally planned, Valery Spirdonov, a 31-year-old Russian man who suffers from a rare and devastating form of spinal muscular dystrophy.
Canavero called Ren “a close friend of mine and an extraordinarily capable surgeon.”
“At the moment, I can only disclose that there has been massive progress in medical experiments that would have seemed impossible even as recently as a few months ago,” Canavero told OOOM. “The milestones that have been reached will undoubtedly revolutionize medicine.”
He declined to offer up exactly what those milestones are, saying that results of the most recent animal experiments have been submitted for publication in “renowned scientific medical journals.”
Last September, the team reported they had succeeded in restoring functionality and mobility in mice with severed spinal cords using the special fusogen, dubbed Texas-PEG. Canavero claims the mice were able to run again.
He said numerous experiments have been conducted since then on an array of different animals in South Korea and China “and the results are unambiguous: the spinal cord — and with it the ability to move — can be entirely restored,” he told OOOM.
Canavero envisions the head (or, perhaps more accurately, body) grafting venture as a cure for people living with horrible medical conditions. The plan is to cut off the head of two people — one, the recipient, the other, the donor whose brain is dead but whose body is otherwise healthy, an accident victim for example. Surgeons will then shift the recipient’s head onto the donor body using a custom-made swivel crane. They will have less than an hour to re-establish blood supply before risking irreversible brain damage.
“In a few months we will sever a body from a head in an unprecedented medical procedure,” Canavero said. At the moment of decapitation, the patient will be clinically dead. “If we bring this person back to life, we will receive the first real account of what actually happens after death,” he told the magazine, meaning, he said, “whether there is an afterlife, a heaven, a hereafter or whatever you may want to call it or whether death is simply a flicking off of the light switch and that’s it.”
Canavero said a brain transplant has several advantages over a head-swap, including that there is “barely any immune reaction, which means the problem of rejection does not exist. The brain is, in a manner of speaking, a neutral organ,” he said.
Others are hugely skeptical of the prospect of reawakening brains, or bodies, frozen after death. In an interview with the Post’s Joe O’Connor two years ago, Eike-Henner Kluge, a bio-ethicist at the University of Victoria, refers to cryonics patients as “corpsesicles.”
“Unless it is technically possible, and it is not, to replace all the water left in a body’s cells with glycol, unfreezing a frozen corpse will rupture the cell walls ensuring that you are mush — a corpsesicle.”
However, two years ago researchers with 21st Century Medicine, a California cryobiology research company, reported they had succeeded in freezing a rabbit’s brain using a flash-freezing technique to protect and stabilize the tissue. After the vitrified brains were rewarmed, electron microscope imaging from across the rabbit brains showed neurons and synapses were crisp and intact.
Canavero hopes to get his first brains from Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz. Alcor’s most famous “patient” is Red Sox baseball legend Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball history, whose head was detached from his body and cryopreserved after his death at 83 in 2002.
The plan to