Brain Transplant

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by billg

There is no way the technology currently exists to peform successful brain OR head/body transplantations (whatever you want to call it). Currently we cannot even heal damaged spinal cords. Even if nervous tissue can be made to grow, we are only able to control our body by a particular setup of neural links between the brain and spinal cord. Getting the nervous tissue to grow is actually the easy part - getting it to grow in the right way in the right places is currently impossible. You can't just put the brain or head in place and hook it up to the blood and expect it to work. Even assuming you can attach the spinal cord and cranial nerves, it may well be that one brain outputs and inputs CANNOT match a bodies outputs and inputs. You could end up being hooked up in ways that will never actually allow you to perform any useful action.

Billg summarises the gap between current medical technology and the requirements of a fully effective brain or head/body transplant well. It’s informative to note that current technology can sometimes, but not always, restore partial use of a reattached finger, let alone an entire body.

Note, however, that much of the interest in head transplants is on the part of victims of high (cervical) spinal cord severing injuries who already have no control over the voluntary muscles of their bodies. Such people typically die due to widespread organ failure within a decade or two of their injuries. For these people, a “body transplant” offers additional years or decades of life, in the form of a “full set of organs transplant”.

People who are about to die are eager for technologies that can postpone death, even if the technologies are immature.

Also as far as transferring memories from one brain to another, it's again much more complex than what's being proposed in this thread.

Again, I think, right on. I’d summaries the state of the art necessary for “brain recording”, which spans the disciplines of Neurology, for an understanding of brain function, and Physics, for the next-generation imaging (enhanced MRI, positron beam, etc) likely to be required, to be in the “can’t even accurately predict when or if” stage.

And finally, whoever this scientist is who did the Rhesus monkey experiment should be imprisoned….

I must strongly disagree and condemn, both as a point of US (where the experiment was performed) law, and scientific advocacy, suggestions that scientists should be imprisoned for experiments performed with the proper approval and oversight of available government and academic institutions. From a cultural perspective, such suggestion are calls to a “witch hunt”, and are historically associated with some of the darkest and most appalling failures of law and social order every recorded. From a legal perspective, one simply cannot be imprisoned because some people feel one is unethical or “insane”. None of Robert White’s experiments were, in the opinion of any recognized jurist, violations of US law.

[Deepak Modak]

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[Deepak Modak]

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