Whole-Body Transplants

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Yesterday I read a book about whole-body transplants (brain transplants), and I think the concept is really interesting, so I thought I'd start a thread about it.

Could it be scientifically viable in the near future? Would it even be ethical to use such technology if it became available?

In the near future? No. I've no idea where science will develop in a few centuries, so I won't comment on that, but we definitely don't know enough about the workings of the human nervous system to attempt this any time soon. As far as it being ethical, I would say that it probably would not be.

I had a whole body transplant once. Body, brain the lot. I feel like a new person

You'd have to remove the brain from the body it's in, keep it alive while hooking it up to the circulatory system of the new body, then connect all the nerves. Look only at the spinal cord. Reconnecting the spinal cord is what you need to do to fix paraplegia. At present, treatments are experimental, and the best I've seen published is that something partly works in rats. Now remember that the brain sends out a lot of information to tell the body how to keep going. You can't just take your own sweet time to connect up, unless you have a way to keep the body alive until the brain can take over.

Whether this could be viable in the near future depends on whether you assume linear or exponential growth of capabilities. If linear, count on centuries. If exponential, with a fast enough growth rate, I would expect within 50 to 100 years. That's what's known as a WAG (wild-assed guess).


One major question would be where you get the body from. If you cloned yourself, how could the body grow up without a brain to steer it? If you let the body develop with a brain, you'll have to kill someone to get a new body. To avoid that, you could try to build a body of the desired age from scratch, instead of letting it grow. If it will become possible to make replacement organs from stem cells and biodegradable scaffolds, then that might be possible. But then the brain transplant would be unnecessary, because you could just replace the body one part at a time, instead of doing it all at once.

In the book I read, two people died at pretty much the same place and the same time. One was crushed by a projector screen, destroying the body but not the brain. The other died of an aneurysm, leaving the body unharmed. So the first person's brain was transplanted into the second person's body. However, the way they were both killed at the same time just metres away from each other was a chance in a million, and would be unlikely to ever happen in real life.

It's already been done, actually. Well, almost.
Researchers swapped the heads of two chimps - all vitals were fully functioning, the chimps survived, and almost everything worked as it did before - except, they were now quadraplegics. But, with the increasing advances of microsurgery, artificial biological materials, nanosciences and laser surgery, I give it less than nine years to go.

If they were quadrapeligics... how do they know everything worked? Brain scans can only tell us so much, seeing as how science has yet to understand how the brain works in a true sense.

Now, I love the idea, but 9 years may be a bit soon.

you mean switching your brain, for one that works?

They could tell by examining the organs, bloodstream and body as a whole.
Nine years may seem farfetched, but that's really only because the concept seems too "sci-fi".
Nine years is actually the most realistic assessment! Unless, of course, religious politicians try to ban the research, as they have with stem-cell research in many countries.

Wait...really? Can you fetch me a link?

Sorry, iPhones can't post links! I'm sure that something can be found through google - though, the information I have is from a few years ago. It might be harder to find, now!
Science, sadly, isn't as "important" as what-celebrity-is-doing-who.

if you can provide the ISBN or reference number, or any science journal that it is published in that would help.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdJGlYOL0r4

Are you talking about this? Has the experiment been repeated and peer reviewed?

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 19 Jan 2009, 7:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ok I have read about it a bit it. This is about connecting the blood supply of one body to another head. Only some senses on the head remain. The severed nerves cannot be reconnected. So it is more brain sustaining rather then a full body transplant.

I think it would be such a huge change you'd go mad - everything you'd ever learned about your own body and how it looked and felt would be different. People would no treat you the same, you'd look like someone completely different.

It wouldn't bother me in the slightest, actually.

0_equals_true, I can't view the YouTube link you posted, so I'm not sure if you are referring to the same thing, but, yes - it is essentially just keeping the brain alive. That said, still a significant first step.