Posted on 02/26/2015 6:18:05 AM PST by Red Badger
A surgeon says full-body transplants could become a reality in just two years.
Sergio Canavero, a doctor in Turin, Italy, has drawn up plans to graft a living person’s head on to a donor body and claims the procedures needed to carry out the operation are not far off.
Canavero hopes to assemble a team to explore the radical surgery in a project he is due to launch at a meeting for neurological surgeons in Maryland this June.
He has claimed for years that medical science has advanced to the point that a full body transplant is plausible, but the proposal has caused raised eyebrows, horror and profound disbelief in other surgeons.
The Italian doctor, who recently published a broad outline of how the surgery could be performed, told New Scientist magazine that he wanted to use body transplants to prolong the lives of people affected by terminal diseases.
“If society doesn’t want it, I won’t do it. But if people don’t want it, in the US or Europe, that doesn’t mean it won’t be done somewhere else,” he said. “I’m trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you.”
Putting aside the considerable technical issues involved in removing a living person’s head, grafting it to a dead body, reviving the reconstructed person and retraining their brain to use thousands of unfamiliar spinal cord nerves, the ethics are problematic.
The history of transplantation is full of cases where people hated their new appendages and had them removed. The psychological burden of emerging from anaesthetic with an entirely new body is firmly in uncharted territory. Another hitch is that medical ethics boards would almost certainly not approve experiments in primates to test whether the procedure works.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
George Soros, here for eternity.
Just think, won’t be long and we can all buy kits to put together our ideal mate. We could get them in every gender, race, size and shape we desire, and a whole lot better than a blow up doll.
well, maybe not HERE here, but definitely in a very warm place...............
Just think, won’t be long and we can all buy kits to put together our ideal mate. We could get them in every gender, race, size and shape we desire, and a whole lot better than a blow up doll. Life is good!
Just think, won’t be long and we can all buy kits to put together our ideal mate. We could get them in every gender, race, size and shape we desire, and a whole lot better than a blow up doll. Life is good!
I understand where they will get volunteers for the HEAD PART. But the BODY PART will require something more than just volunteers.
ISIS don't need no steenking volunteers!............
This is hogwash (IMO). I’m no nuerosurgeon (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night).
How does that complicated process of connecting all those nerves that make up the spinal cord work? I was once told by a spine surgeon that much of the nervouse system is unique as signals through the spinal cord can be mapped differently between the body and the brain.
First, making thousands of nerve connections so that a donor body would function takes a lot of time. How long will a brain survive on pumped oxygenated blood during this process? They might be able to connect the arteries and bones. But it would seem a complete robotic body would be a simpler task than trying to transplant a head. At least the technology is closer.
They should first master keeping the severed head alive (this has been done with dogs and other things, but it has not been done with humans).
Imagine al gore with a new body...
(Not directed at RedBadger): Please explain a ^Full Body Transplant^...ummm...in detail, please.
40+ years ago Larry Niven speculated that once the technology made it feasible for the general public to extend their life this way they would eventually get their donor bodies by employing capital punishment for things like jaywalking and not wearing a seat belt while driving.
Freegards
The Soviets grafted a severed dog’s head onto the body of another living dog (that retained its head). The test subjects survived a few weeks before infection set in.
A Cleveland scientist performed the some experiments with monkeys around 2000.
The Soviets allegedly stopped a dog’s vital signs and brought it back an hour later.
There are videos (including old film) on youtube with details.
beat me to it!
Something canine perhaps?
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