Robert White

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“The Real Stumbling Block Is The Ethics”

February 25, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The head transplant has long been a goal of some on the outer edges of scientific research. (Oriana Fallaci profiled the main such controversial pioneer, Dr. Robert White, for Look in 1967.) Now a divisive surgeon, Dr. Sergio Canavero, believes that within two years he’ll be able to successfully transfer a human head from a shattered or dying body and graft it onto a donor body. Sure, if there was some safe way for Stephen Hawking or anyone similarly afflicted with a degenerative disease to have a new lease on life, that would be great, but it almost definitely won’t happen within Canavero’s timeframe and really shouldn’t happen anytime soon. We’re nowhere near close to being able to deal with such an operation, medically or ethically. From Ian Sample at the Guardian:

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.

But Canavero wants to provoke a debate around these issues. “The real stumbling block is the ethics,” he told New Scientist. “Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it.”•

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“The Undertaking Still Bordered On Science Fiction”

November 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

So, this is an interesting find, to say the least. I was looking for something completely different and stumbled across “The Dead Body and the Living Brain,” a 1967 Look magazine article by Oriana Fallaci about pioneering head-transplant experimentation. In the piece, Fallaci reports on the sci-fi-ish experiments that Dr. Robert White was doing with rhesus monkeys at a time when consciousness about animal rights was on the rise. White’s unusual work continued until his death in 2010. The opening:

Libby had eaten her last meal the night before: orange, banana, monkey chow. While eating she had observed us with curiosity. Her hands resembled the hands of a newly born child, her face seemed almost human. Perhaps because of her eyes. They were so sad, so defenseless. We had called her Libby because Dr. Maurice Albin, the anesthetist, had told us she had no name, we could give her the name we liked best, and because she accepted it immediately. You said “Libby!” and she jumped, then she leaned her head on her shoulder. Dr. Albin had also told us that Libby had been born in India and was almost three years, an age comparable to that of a seven-year-old girl. The rhesuses live 30 years and she was a rhesus. Prof. Robert White uses the rhesus because they are not expensive; they cost between $80 and $100. Chimpanzees, larger and easier to experiment with, cost up to $2,000 each. After the meal, a veterinarian had come, and with as much ceremony as they use for the condemned, he had checked to be sure Libby was in good health. It would be a difficult operation and her body should function as perfectly as a rocket going to the moon. A hundred times before, the experiment had ended in failure, and though Professor White became the first man in the entire history of medicine to succeed, the undertaking still bordered on science fiction. Libby was about to die in order to demonstrate that her brain could live isolated from her body and that, so isolated, it could still think.•

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