Posted on 08/18/2014 3:25:03 PM PDT by NYer
They’ve been possible for decades.
Russians in the 50s performed live head transplants on dogs (they lived until infection set in, things are better these days).
An American scientist repeated the tests with monkeys around 2000.
Both were filmed and viewable on youtube.
The content is somewhat extreme (you see a dog’s severed head connected to lungs and a heart all working to take in oxygen and feed it to the brain. The dog is responsive to sight (light), sound, touch, and smell. I don’t recall if taste was examined.
The doctor with the monkey did the same thing.
Seems to me that the ethics are all about the acquisition of the parts, not the operation itself. Whether a single organ or all of them at once, the ethical issues are pretty much the same.
If this capability really existed (which I doubt) it seems too that the larger promise would be in the case of spinal cord injuries. If you can graft one spinal cord to another, a repair of a damaged one would be small potatoes.
Yep, everyone thought Roky Erickson was crazy for singing about “two headed dogs” being concocted by agents of the Kremlin. Turns out he was right.
“Yep, everyone thought Roky Erickson was crazy for singing about “two headed dogs” being concocted by agents of the Kremlin.”
They might have been on to something. Just not about that.
A Lou Reed cover, maybe best version apart from Rock n Roll Animal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxqh62tYWOg
Freegards
I think they only played that once and there was no rehearsal, Roky told the band backstage before they went on.
The “ethics” are that they have to engage in rehearsal surgeries on live animals before moving to humans.
They’ve done this in the past. All of the surgeries.
Oh, great. Not content with wrecking economies and undermining sovereignty worldwide, we’ll now have amoral transnational billionaires window-shopping for bodies amongst the hoi polloi.
Definite Whoppie Goldberg vibe going on there.
Then why aren’t spinal cord injuries a thing of the past?
The damage is not at all like a very precise, surgical cut. Trauma and severe inflammation.
I don’t know.
They nailed it, I do wish there was a slow part that could feature the howling voice a little more.
Freegards
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