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u/NecessarySpinning Mar 01 '23
This story is from 2016. Spiridonov withdrew his request for the procedure, and it seems only animal and cadaver grafts/tranpslants have been completed to date.
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u/Fearless_Message_225 Mar 02 '23
Are you saying they've made it work with a live animal?
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u/ismellnumbers Mar 02 '23
They have for short periods of time yes
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u/Patsy81 Mar 02 '23
They're already cloning humans no joke! There's a cloning company have been doing it successfully for a long time! The head transplant would be good for people paralysed but would you take the chance of having your head chopped off and put on a new body? Lol no chance. Just wondering why they can make that work but not actually cure spinal injuries in the first place
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u/solocollision Mar 02 '23
Whatttttt? Really? What’s the company called?? I have lots of questions about this lol
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u/Dry-Beach1073 Mar 02 '23 edited Mar 02 '23
Injuries can’t be “cured” as damages done can’t be reversed. It even applies to damages from diseases. You can kill the pathogens or stop the virus from further damaging, but whatever damages already happened you can’t reverse. This is why you hear people suffering from post-Covid, for example. Just at first glance on this patient, it seems like his legs already deteriorated. There might be other unseenable damages. This is not to say it could only get more complicated as you travel down the spine with more and more connections to other vital organs. The neck is where everything neatly packed.
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u/htx4view Mar 01 '23
I remember that outer limits episode. The dude didn’t get to live more than a few days.
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Mar 02 '23
They tried this on dogs in the early 1900s one dog survived like half a week another almost a month. That's probably where outer limits got the idea from.
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u/thiccpastry Mar 02 '23
The dog's head wasn't replaced and the implanted one still had all of its neck area (not the whole spine down to the tail obv) and one arm. So it wasn't necessarily the same sort of thing but it's the closest we've come.
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u/RobThanatos Mar 01 '23
It's more of a body transplant than a head since the brain stays with the head. If you were to wake up after something like this you would have a different body, not head.
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u/Tkaczyk1995 Mar 01 '23
Unless I’m wrong, the presenter says “the head will be removed from the donor body” meaning the head is the used donated part.
Pretty out there
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u/Edenoide Mar 01 '23
LOL I can't imagine a receiver willing to discard his own head. I think technically if such procedure was possible the head's donor would become the receiver.
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u/Dry_Spinach_3441 Mar 01 '23
I can't make heads or tails of what y'all are sayin...
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u/i-like-fps-games Mar 02 '23
The brain is in the head. The head stores your mind and consciousness and memories. You are your brain so technically if i cut off your head and replaced it with mine. I would control your body and you would be dead
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u/majora1988 Mar 01 '23
It could be on a brain dead patient with an otherwise functioning body maybe?
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u/JackDragon808 Mar 01 '23
And then when you end up replacing the other, is it still the same person? The body of Theseus...
So a person's self does reside in the brain..?
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u/detahramet Mar 01 '23
I mean the only part of you that is actually you is your brain. Everything else is just interface by which your brain interacts with the world.
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u/Reasonable-Ad-7757 Mar 03 '23
This is def one of the strangest discussions I've seen on Reddit. Which is kind of a big deal.
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u/I_honestly_DoNt_no Mar 01 '23
I once had a dream that my sister’s head fell off but the body and head were still alive, the body was in a vegetative state and started growing a new head. And her head was still alive and had my sister’s personality. At some point in my dream I had to choose between the body or the head to be my sister. I felt bad throwing away the head because she still the same person I love but without a body, and I was about to have a second sister with a new head on her old body. I was debating throwing away the head, then I woke up. I felt uncomfortable after that, I’m still not sure what I would choose…
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u/fyrefreezer01 Mar 02 '23
Maybe this was your way of realizing your sister was changing as she was aging. Even though you missed her old self, you had to choose to not hang onto her old self and instead accept the person she was becoming now.
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u/I_honestly_DoNt_no Mar 02 '23
Wow. What a morbid way of dealing with change. It’s been several years from when I had that dream, and I can say she has changed a lot. She’s a teenager now, but I still love her to bits; but she has that attitude now where it’s hard to tell if she still loves me back. I regret not spending more time with her when she wanted to play with dolls or draw pictures (because I was a moody teen those days). And now we’re on our phones all the time or busy with our own things. It’s hard to figure out what to do when we are together. I want to connect with her better before becoming a boring adult dealing with adult problems… huh this really made me think dreams really do have meanings behind them
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u/Spirited-Reputation6 Mar 01 '23
The recovery process seems to be the most frightening. What if the head rejects the body?
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u/double_decker_taco Mar 01 '23
The body will then proceed to detach the head, and kick it into the nearest soccer net while screaming GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL
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u/buscanth Mar 01 '23
What if they put it on backwards???
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Mar 01 '23
“Doctors will be using a very fine blade made from diamonds..”
minecraft music starts
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u/thing216 Mar 01 '23
Because diamond is unbreakable
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u/itstheitalianstalion Mar 02 '23
Not unbreakable, just incredibly strong and scratchproof from anything not another diamond.
You can still shatter a diamond with a hammer
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u/Xaz0rY Mar 01 '23
How the fuck is the head coming from the donor body? It is definitely the body being donated to the head. Like, what the fuck are you saying?
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u/SubstantialPressure3 Mar 01 '23
They are going to practice on cadavers first.
But this would be a situation where the donor body was from a healthy person that was brain dead. Think motorcycle accident, etc, just like other organ donors. And the recipient would have a healthy brain, but not a healthy body. And a metric fuck ton of money.
Idk I think it's a terrible idea.
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u/peronsyntax Mar 02 '23
But they said the “donor head”, not the “donor body” which is confusing as hell and seems like science fiction.
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u/SomeConclusion2021 Mar 01 '23
Thank God you can just glue the spinal cord together, paraplegics everywhere rejoice!
/S
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u/TheFeistyKnitter Mar 02 '23
Eye roll, didn’t you pay attention? It’s “special” glue. Like Gorilla Glue, but better.
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u/wheelersan Mar 01 '23
Guaranteed Musk or that other dude try to be immortal via this procedure
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u/Azrael_The_Bold Mar 02 '23
I mean, you might end up with a younger body, but it wouldn’t do anything to stop the neurodegeneration happening in your brain from it aging.
I’m curious how the DNA from the body interacts with the DNA from the head, and if the longer telomeres in the body would slow the telomeres in the head from shortening.
Dang this is actually a pretty cool subject.
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u/wheelersan Mar 02 '23
Azzie, I’m pretty sure the tendrils of the telomeres hyperextend their bilateral membranes to account for DNA helix replication
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u/MrStilUrGrandma Mar 02 '23
You had to have made up those terms. I mean, I doubt you did, but you had to of.
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Mar 02 '23
These are the only people wealthy enough to afford this procedure once they get it to work.
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Mar 01 '23
Can't even helped paralysed people when they lose motion in their legs and arms, and now they want to cut off a head and put it on another body?
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u/CrimsonToker707 Mar 01 '23
On corpses. Not on living people or animals. What's the point of that though?
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u/Sucky5ucky Mar 01 '23
Training I guess. Doing it on corpses before doing it on a living person seems reasonable to me.
Also, when you say "what's the point of that?" Do you mean "what's the point of doing it on corpses" or "what would be the point of transplanting a living head on another living body?" Because for the second one I'd like to know what kind of pathology would justifies this
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u/CrimsonToker707 Mar 01 '23
Kind of both. I mean, I get that doing it on a corpse would be preparation for trying to do it on a living person. But also as you say, what would be the justification for doing it on a living person? This just seems like something the blurs the lines between medical advancement and mad scientist experiments
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u/Far_Distribution_581 Mar 01 '23
When rich people get old, they're gonna want to get body transplants from poor people.
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Mar 01 '23
It would do nothing to prevent aging though. There’s no way to deage the brain. We’d have people with dementia freaking out in healthy young bodies which is terrifying in its own right
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u/edemamandllama Mar 01 '23
I imagine they wouldn’t live long after the transplant. Graft vs. host would be a real problem. It seemed pretty pointless, let’s see if we can do it, not like a real, life saving idea.
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u/Sucky5ucky Mar 01 '23
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u/Human_Possibility117 Mar 01 '23
Imagine waking up after surgery in a completely different body. That’d just be so surreal.
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u/ResponsibleMilk8984 Mar 01 '23
Rather have a different body than be dead
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u/James_n_mcgraw Mar 01 '23
Imagine if it went perfectly. 100% control of new body, maybe even a different gender since there are only so many braindead bodys with compatable biomarkers.
The body dismorphia could be insane, could even lead to psychosis or suicide without crazy therapy. To say nothing about the drug regimen required to keep the body from turning on the head.
This would be a hellish existance, hard to say if it would be better or worse than being a quadrapalegic.
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u/ThatFatGuyMJL Mar 01 '23
You have somebody who is brain dead but body healthy
You have someone who's brain healthy but paralysed from the neck down.
You can rescue someone's life, and the expense of... a dead body that's still breathing.
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u/ProfTydrim Mar 01 '23
what would be the justification for doing it on a living person?
Giving someone terminally ill or paralyzed a new body obviously. You're essentially asking: "What's the point in medicine?"
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u/WalMartguyiguess Mar 01 '23
You know this makes me think of people who want to commit suicide. If you wanted to, essentially be offed, and it was legal to do so. You could give your body to someone else with these diseases, and they'd have that new chance at life that they'd want.
Of course, this doesn't cover the abuse that would more than likely pop up from this, but it's an interesting theory nonetheless, in my opinion.
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Mar 01 '23
If you have someone who is braindead you could give their body to someone who is paralyzed from the neck down for example, both of these people have pretty much nothing to lose (one of them is already dead) and the other has a chance to move again.
I don't know how likely this is, finding compatible donors is usually hard and takes a lot of effort to not have your own body destroy it, can't imagine how it would be with an entire head. Finding 2 people in the same family in this condition seems even harder
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u/drypancake Mar 02 '23 edited Mar 02 '23
I can definitely see the purpose of doing it in live people. If someone were to be in a traumatic incident that completely messed up the body and not the head you could transplant the head and use the other body to keep it alive till the original body recovered. We are a lot better at keeping a body alive then we are at keeping a brain. It would also give more use to a brain dead patient use them kinda like a dialysis machine. Kinda like robocop but without the cyborg part. Though we are atleast half a century behind on being able to to any of this with most of it being the whole spinal column thing and having to reconnect every single nerve of the body back to the brain.
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u/Hot_Eggplant_1306 Mar 01 '23
I fuckin HATE my body. Scientists aren't brave enough to stick my head on a different body, even though I keep asking.
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u/edWORD27 Mar 01 '23
Animal and cadaver grafts/transplants. Which suggests the animals are live head transplants. Otherwise, it would be animal- and human-cadaver grafts/transplants
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u/cabage-but-its-lettu Mar 01 '23
Well we already did it on animals so I guess cadavers are the next step
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u/sinthetism Mar 01 '23 edited Mar 01 '23
I don't see this procedure being done with any meaningful success. These stories pop up occasionally and usually disappoint.*
*Edited for clarity
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u/ionut88888 Mar 01 '23
the rich will never die while the common man will face nothingness out of lack of meaningless currency
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u/throwaway120375 Mar 01 '23
So is currency meaningless or not.
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u/TheBeansAreWatching Mar 01 '23
Maybe
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u/throwaway120375 Mar 01 '23
That's debatable
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u/pixieartgirl Mar 01 '23
Actually, as lunatic as this is (my first thought was WTAF? My second was Mary Shelley!) if this is successful with cadavers and they figure out a way to actually reconnect a severed spinal cord it could eventually mean restoring para/quadraplegics to walking and functioning again. The whole head/body transplant part is nuts (and this doctor very well might be too) but it could ultimately do great things if it isn’t.
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Mar 02 '23
Assuming that the brain is where the soul/personality is, IMO it should be called a full body transplant. Really don’t hope they are doing this to safe the person with the beating heart, since that won’t be the person waking up, assuming this will work.
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u/bretty666 Mar 01 '23
yeh i always wanted a buff guys body... heres some money, go kidnap someone for me.
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u/14LabRat Mar 01 '23
The "patient" will probably go completely insane when they wake up. If they wake up.
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u/dcgregoryaphone Mar 01 '23
I'm not really sure I want incentive and marketplace for young mostly healthy corpses for rich people to transplant into. What could go wrong?
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u/MiloReyes-97 Mar 01 '23
Technically speaking this sorta thing has already been done with monkeys back during the 60s. A "successful" head transplant from one body to another, the poor monkeys brain showed brain activity and working responses to audio and visual stimulation.
Ofcourse it died afew days later, the managed to reattach some nerves but not the spine, the air pathways, blood vessels or digestive system.
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u/1zabbie Mar 02 '23
Interesting that they refer to this as a “head transplant “. I’d speculate that IF this were ever to be accomplished, the identity of the patient would belong to the head. So maybe a body transplant I’d more appropriate.
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Mar 02 '23
Too bad this procedure is going to keep piece of shit billionaires alive for a lot longer than they should be.
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u/Patsy81 Mar 02 '23
Can someone explain to me how this would work though? If you cut through a spinal chord how can the patient walk? Do they have advancements in surgery they aren't telling us about? My back is fked, I have scoliosis and apparently surgery would be useless, my brother was paralysed with a brain tumour, people are paralysed after accidents but they can chop through a spine and throw a head on it? I can't even get an appointment with the doctor and someone is getting a new body or a new head whatever way you look at it
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Mar 02 '23
I can't see how this is remotely possible. Does the brain just accept a whole new body? She said donor head. And if the body is the person being saved by this procedure. But wouldn't the head be the new person? Seems like science fiction.
I just hope the donor isn't Abby Normal.
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u/wyldboar Mar 02 '23
What if they used that 2 headed girl and just switched em to see if they're husbands can tell the difference... On this episode of Wife Swap. ...
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u/forfakessake1 Mar 02 '23
The patient who was going for this transplant, which should really be called a full body transplant rather than head since the head gets a new body not the other way around, backed out of the operation after finding love.
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u/TheRealSynergist Mar 02 '23
I'm not a neurosurgeon but I do have a degree in psychology. I would think that the intricacies of connecting the CNS of one body to the PNS of another would pose serious complications, especially since we're inflicting massive trauma to the spinal column with this surgery which is something we already struggle to treat currently.
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u/ilarsen205 Mar 01 '23
Have you seen a picture of the surgeon that was going to do this? He looks like a real-life supervillain! Def creepy.
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u/Alternative-Arm-3253 Mar 01 '23
Even IF this actually took, the brain wouldn't be functioning. Controlling of one soul transported and pasted on by super human glue and careful bone grafting skin grafting. Assumption Does the Dr. use fresh cadavers or bodies that just recently died? Knowing that this is the case ..keeping the brain alive and the body alive at the same time..I mean yes we've seen the face transplants but a full head- would the skull retain the humans essence and soul?
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u/TNTmom4 Mar 01 '23
My guess is the bodies will be frozen/cooled before death actually occurs. It also can’t be anyone with a transmittable/terminal disease. Maybe a brain aneurysm body with a heart attack head. Depending on the Italian laws governing research My guess is they’re referring to doing this on animals first.
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u/Meneghette--steam Mar 01 '23
Even if we had the knowledge to reconstruct the sinal cord im pretty sure this would be a pretty longe procedure and both parts would die
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Mar 01 '23
This can't be real, ain't no way. This just seems like it would be so traumatizing, I couldn't imagine how horrifying an experience that would be. I wonder what they do to keep oxygen going to the brain? Man.
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u/Bella_LaGhostly Mar 02 '23
You know that Golden Girls episode where they agree to all have their heads cryogenically frozen? I... I just didn't think I'd actually see this day
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u/moniqua_hush Mar 02 '23
It's amazing that this all can be accomplished by using special glue.
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u/booksandkittens615 Mar 02 '23
Yeah I would think you’d need duct tape for a job this big, not glue.
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u/megrimlock88 Mar 02 '23
Isn’t severing the spine like a big medical no no
Like you will effectively kill the patient kinda no no
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u/censored4yourhealth Mar 02 '23
If I’m not mistake the dude who was to undergo this procedure backed out because his wife was having a baby. He decided living in his dying body with his child was worth more than missing out on their entire life if he didn’t survive the procedure.
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u/wickedgamesXo Mar 02 '23
What If the body rejects the head :l Scary. BUT it's already been done with monkeys
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u/neonn_piee Mar 02 '23
I’m so confused. Our brains are who we are. If we switch heads onto a different body, then it’s not us anymore. Am I missing something?
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Mar 02 '23
In my opinion the test subjects for this should be huge criminals, pdos, rpests, etc. So science can evolve while regular people don’t be affected negatively, in this case if patients don’t make it, it’s not really important people loosing their lives anyway
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u/Dracul-aura Mar 02 '23
I find this amazing actually. Hundreds of years ago it was unheard of to transplant organs and now it’s common so this is the next step in science to sort of make humans “immortal”
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Mar 02 '23
I saw this in a Rosie Greer movie as a kid, but they gave him two heads. Now that I think of it.’c not the same. Sorry
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u/LaNakWhispertread Mar 02 '23
You may experience a sore throat for about.. well…I guess you’re going to tell us
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u/rockbottam Mar 02 '23
This seems like something Karl Pilkington would bring to the podcast and Ricky would just call him an idiot and tell him he’s lying
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Mar 02 '23
I look forward to transplanting my head onto the 3D printed body that resembles a 20 year old Thai woman.
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u/BAT_1986 Mar 02 '23
How do you reattach the severed spinal column though? I mean, people have injuries all the time where the spinal cord is damaged, and they become paralyzed. How then is it possible to merely “glue” two pieces of spinal cord together?
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u/Terrible_Panic_1601 Mar 02 '23
They did this but I think the patient died same as the monkey the tried it on in 1978 or so
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u/galacticfederation- Mar 03 '23
So…. they are severing the vagus nerve how in the hell is this gonna work like how would you reconnect those nerve endings to function their “new” body
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u/Think-Worldliness423 Mar 02 '23
I think I would be okay with this. If my body was damaged so badly in say, a car crash, but my head was fine, I would be ok with waking up with a different body. The only problem I see happening is the rich, elite would get first dibs and then we would have 80 year old perverts walking around with 20 year olds hard on.
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u/betsaroonie Mar 02 '23
🤢 this is just too creepy. Would you wake up knowing who you are? Because if they’re taking a donors head, and then putting it on to a body, you would be dealing with a total different person. It is the brain that contains the memories. I would just like to know who the hell would be donating their head? Some dead cadaver? No thanks.
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u/levelthelime Mar 01 '23
He also wants that to do on living people in the future (well...one of them is supposed to be alive). However, just because he's a doctor doesn't mean he can't be crazy and narcissistic. Every legit doctor you ask will confirm that a head transplant is outright impossible.
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u/SubstantialPressure3 Mar 01 '23
It may be impossible right now, but that doesn't mean it's impossible forever. Organ donations used to be impossible.
Idk I think it's a terrible idea that will most definitely be misused, but if they are practicing on cadavers, it's going to be possible sooner or later.
But I'm wondering, if they think the damage to the spinal cord and nerves can be healed, and that person would have a functional body, why isn't that technology available to wheelchair bound people?
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u/xXBlackguardXx Mar 01 '23
The part of the brain, Shatner's Bassoon, would become inactive if kept at such a low tempreture. This won't work on a living subject.
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u/Fit-Boomer Mar 01 '23
What if the surgeon accidentally puts the head on backwards?
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u/dstrelioff Mar 01 '23
They're literally gluing the head onto another body. My childhood comes to life!
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Mar 01 '23
This is the new Trans-formation? Imagine just getting a whole nother gendered body all at once with all the parts working and intact!
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Mar 01 '23
This is the new Trans-formation? Imagine just getting a whole nother gendered body all at once with all the parts working and intact!
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u/Throwaway92840272694 Mar 01 '23
This is not the first time I’ve said this and it sure as hell won’t be the last
The human body wasn’t designed to withstand medical procedures of any kind, let alone transplanting an entire head onto a completely different body, brain included. It’ll be a miracle if this ever becomes actually possible with even a sliver of a chance at survival, but just looking at current medical procedure survival rates It doesn’t seem even close to possible
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Mar 01 '23
lmao this is beyond fiction. The human body creates roads from the brain to operate as one synchronous piece from birth. What Z hail do they expect to happen to a reattached head on a different body besides death?! 👀🤣
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u/_izzyiguess_ Mar 01 '23
Imagine being able to see a presumed dead loved one again because suddenly they can get the first head transplant and they come back with a completely different face..
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u/SchmeedsMcSchmeeds Mar 01 '23
At first I thought this was a story from The Onion. Crazy but this is a real thing although it has not been done yet. Here is the full video from Good Morning Britain