Hats and Heads... off!?

For as far as history goes, the idea of taking one head of one person and putting it on another has been ultimately in the realm of science fiction, or horror; Frankenstein grafting limbs together to assemble something 'other' – more or less of a man. Now, with a series of steps, the actualisation of such an act might not be too far off.

In 1908 Charles Claude Guthrie successfully grafted one dogs head onto another dogs neck. In the 1950's experiments were done to transplant one dog's heads completely; though typically the 'dog-patient' died due to immunity complications (a factoring which hadn't been considered till now). Dr. Vladimir Demikhov was the practitioner on this and whose work went on to develop immuno-suppressents for a legacy of standardised organ transplants. The first heart transplant operation occurring in 1967 in South Africa (where the patient didn't do very well due to the lack of immuno-supressents available at the time). In the 1970's a team lead by Robert J White (a neurosurgeon), inspired by Demikhov, went 'ahead' and performed a head transplant on a monkey. It was a reasonable success, and the monkey survived for some time after the operation; being able to use it's senses and faculties to continue to interpret the world, though not with the same motor system control.

Dr White said this after the operation:

“... What has been accomplished in the animal model – prolonged hypothermic preservation and cephalic transplantation, is fully accomplishable in the human sphere. Whether such dramatic procedures will ever be justified in the human area must wait not only upon the continued advance of medical science but more appropriately the moral and social justification of such procedural undertakings.”

So, Are we ready to hack off heads and put them back on bodies? The phenomenon of lucid decapitation has been fairly well documented; though the validity has largely been down to observations from a subjective viewpoint. The stories have spread since the guillotine was implemented around the period of the French Revolution (1789-1799). So we know there is some chance that a head, if properly fused and undamaged could be relocated. It seems that some of us think so anyway, for in 2017 there will likely be the first human head transplant operation. Sergio Canavero (Frankenstein) will announce a parable of Shakespeare's Henry VI: 'Off with his head!' with bone saw in hand and with the anaesthetised Valery Spirdonov will have no resistance. Spirdonov is a 30 Russian man who suffers from Werding-Hoffman disease (a disease which wastes away muscle), and is reduced to living in a wheelchair when his body falls apart around him. The operation is not cheap at 9.8 million dollars, but if successful could pave the way for a new wave of hospital operations. Even if it becomes less expensive, few would casually agree to it to begin with for the basic factoring of high risk, which it invariably is. However, I would concede to the possibility of it perhaps becoming an operation whose risks are of the level of a heart transplant.

Spirdonov:

"First of all, I am a scientist, I am an engineer, and I am keen to persuade people - medical professionals - that such operation is necessary.

I am not going crazy here and rushing to cut off my head, believe me.

The surgery will take place only when all believe that the success is 99 per cent possible."

But to know of the phenomenon of phantom limbs and a conscious body-state that our mind is linked to, surely it can't be as simple as a chop shop? Our mind has a kind of schematic, a blue print of the body – which accounts for weight gain/loss, height, metabolism, energy states etc... So, how would it work to transpose one building's plan into a completely different building. It would be like the brain trying to work out a route between Holborn to Hackney in London, using a map of Warsaw to navigate. Or is the conscious state more malleable than all of that? For instance, we are able to adjust our visual perception to make the world appear the 'right way up' over time, if we are given glasses which revert the image. Maybe it's more of a question of practice and conditioning which enables us the freedoms the body grants us, and not necessarily a singular pathway.

Canavero:

"You should understand that it's not simply a medical procedure. This surgery has a political meaning," the doctor said.

"The Soviet Union was the first one to send Yuri Gagarin to space, America was the first on the Moon. The country that hosts head transplant surgery for the first time will become a leader like this. I'll prove it is totally possible to all the sceptics there,' he said.

Explaining his planned technique in April, he said it would take him less than an hour to put Spiridonov's head on the body of a donor body, but the entire surgery could go on all day and night.

Anyway, I'm curious as to what will happen here. And, if it is a success, then what that will mean for body image and how we interpret the body entirely.

Lucid Decapitation:

http://www.damninteresting.com/lucid-decapitation/