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 ...
Have organs ever been successfully transplanted from male to female?
I have never heard of blood being segregated by sex (and yet there would be hormones present).
The brain would have to “learn” the processing/processes perhaps. But the article says that communicating with the new body itself would require relearning (as stroke patients and limb transplant patients must do).
FRANKENSTEIN - Scientist Plans Head Transplant on HUMANS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F2grGuZ6_A
I think some organs have, but they need to be a match. I don’t think this would work for whole bodies. Hey, if they can give me an 18-year old body...
This is a common trope in science fiction, particularly the military sci-fi subgenre. Warriors have several cored bodies available, ready to be plugged in to their new controller-mind when his or her original body is destroyed. Some bodies may have been clones of the warrior, others provided by slaves or convicts. Periodic transference of memories are also a common plot element, so if the warrior is obliterated, a spare body complete with most of the warrior’s memories and capabilities can be readily activated to take up anew the battle with fearsome alien monsters. Serial immortality, as it were.
I seem to recall that they did the experiment several times.
The dogs shared lungs and heart.
With God as my witness, I've seen worse. Behold its predecessor and probable inspiration, The Incredible Two-headed Transplant:
You beat me by seconds!
This is a common trope in science fiction, particularly the military sci-fi subgenre.
You don't say.........................
“He vould have an enormous schwanzstucker.”
There are fictional tales and some accounts (at least the belief) of 'memories' in severed limbs that are grafted on.
I’d love to have my 22 year old Marine Corps body back!......................
Exactly! Much simpler than all that cutting and splicing. Commandeering all those acceptable bodies should be child’s play for some of the diabolical personalities that are around today.
It was all so easy back then. The ENERGY I had was amazing. Meh. Too much work now, LOL!
They made a movie in the 70s about that too.
My 4 almost 5 year old grandson wears me out in just a few minutes!...................
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