[BryanXavier]

IN short, they froze the head, reattached it to another body, brain worked fine apparently, no spinal cord connection, killed it after 20 hours.

According to Canavero, researchers led by Xiaoping Ren at Harbin Medical University, China, have carried out a head transplant on a monkey. They connected up the blood supply between the head and the new body, but did not attempt to connect the spinal cord. Canavero says the experiment, which repeats the work of Robert White in the US in 1970, demonstrates that if the head is cooled to -15 °C, a monkey can survive the procedure without suffering brain injury.

“The monkey fully survived the procedure without any neurological injury of whatever kind,” says Canavero, adding that it was kept alive for only 20 hours after the procedure for ethical reasons. New Scientist was, however, unable to obtain further details on this experiment.

“We’ve done a pilot study testing some ideas about how to prevent injury,” says Ren, whose work is sponsored by the Chinese government. He and his team have also performed experiments on human cadavers in preparation for carrying out the surgery, he says.

https://www.newscientist.com/article...erick-surgeon/

[Steve]

It seems a little Frankenstein's monster to me, poor monkey.

[Zambini]

That's pretty fucked up

[HouseAtreides]

That's just cruel.

[Pink.]

Originally Posted by Zambini ↗

That's pretty fucked up

so there was viability with adequate blood supply.

If the spinal cord was not connected, what exactly was the point? a brain functioning without any PHYSIOLOGICAL damage CONNECTED to NOTHING?...DOING NOTHING of any consequence for the body?

Youre right....it is fucked up and he and they are fucked up.

[CrunchyCripple]

"Now if they could only figure out how to reconnect that pesky spinal cord" says everyone who's ever had a spinal cord injury.

From what I've looked into, it's not an option. Too complicated.

So, what's the point? Proving reanimation?
How long can the head be cooled/preserved, before it's no longer viable?

I think they probably did the procedure a.s.a.p.

[lobo221]

Fuck the monkey - if they can save people lives becouse of it then it's fine by me.

[Desensitisation]

Originally Posted by Pink. ↗

so there was viability with adequate blood supply.

If the spinal cord was not connected, what exactly was the point? a brain functioning without any PHYSIOLOGICAL damage CONNECTED to NOTHING?...DOING NOTHING of any consequence for the body?

Youre right....it is fucked up and he and they are fucked up.

Baby steps.

I believe the next step is to use spinal cords of donor and recipient that have been transected with an extremely sharp, extremely fine blade that causes minimal trauma, and then effectively "gluing" the ends together of each and letting the ends anastamose. Will be interesting to see if that works.

[Illusion]

Italian surgeon seeks cash for human head transplant

By JAKE ELLISON, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF Updated 3:25 pm, Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The last time we heard from maverick Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero, a Russian suffering from Werdnig-Hoffman disorder had volunteered for and been accepted to have his head removed from his troubled body and patched onto a donor body.

Yes: In April, a person volunteered to have Canavero perform a radical and total head-transplant.

Canavero is now back in the news with claims that a Chinese doctor has removed the head from one monkey and sown it onto the body of another, and it lived for 20 hours until they euthanized it. Oh, and now he's come looking for money, too ... Canavero not the monkey.

"It's important that people stop thinking this is impossible. This is absolutely possible and we're working towards it," he told New Scientist. The magazine added that "Trinh Hong Son, director of the Vietnam-Germany Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam, offered to host the procedure."

"I'm asking today Russian billionaires and also foreign billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, who is already sponsoring much of this life extension research, and this is certainly about extending life, to finance, to bankroll the first head transplant in Russia on Valery Spiridonov," Canavero told RT news. "To save Valery Spiridonov we need Russia to help us."..............

MORE:

http://www.sfgate.com/local/science/...ss-6769595.php

[kellyhound]

In any transplant, the donor organ (the one that's been taken from a donor's body) has to be kept alive until it can be placed into the recipient's body.

As soon as an organ gets removed from a body, it begins to die.

For things like heart or kidney transplants, doctors cool the organ to keep it viable for as long as possible. Cooling the organ helps reduce the amount of energy its cells need to stay alive.

Doctors accomplish this by bathing the organ in a solution of cold salt water (saline). This process preserves kidneys for 48 hours, for example, livers for 24 hours, and hearts for about 5-10 hours.

But a head would be a far more difficult process.

A head isn't just an isolated organ. It's the heaviest and one of the most complex parts of the body. It houses not just your brain but your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, as well as two separate gland systems: the pituitary, which controls the hormones that circulate throughout the body, and the salivary, which are responsible for producing saliva.

More than a century of disturbing animal research has shown that at the moment of decapitation, blood pressure in the head drops dramatically. The resulting loss of fresh blood and oxygen pushes the brain into a coma, soon followed by death.

Which brings us to the next problem.

The immune system has to be coaxed into accepting a foreign head
As with any transplant, one of the main issues facing patients is that of their own body: If the immune system flags the foreign organ (or organs, in this case) as foreign, it can unleash a full-scale attack.

What happens is that the immune system of the person receiving the new organ detects immune-triggering substances, called antigens, on the cells of the new organ that don't match the substances that would be on a non-foreign organ. This is why almost all transplant patients take immune-suppressing drugs after their procedure.

Because the head is so complex and includes so many organs, the risk of rejection is much higher.

The surgery has to happen in under an hour
In a 1970s experiment that would never be allowed today, neurosurgeon Robert White transplanted the head of a monkey onto the body of a donor monkey. He maintained the monkey bodies by cooling them to about 59 degrees Fahrenheit for the duration of the procedure. The monkey with the transplanted head survived until the immune system rejected the head eight days after the surgery, and the monkey died.

One big catch, though: The whole thing has to be done in under an hour, according to White's experiments and Canavero's paper.

Canavero notes in his paper that both of the heads would have to be removed from their bodies at the same time. Working swiftly, the surgeons would have to reattach the head of the person they want to keep alive to the circulatory system of the donor's body while both bodies are under total cardiac arrest. All of this would happen in less than an hour.

Canavero has also come under some fire recently for allegations that his claims are linked with a marketing ploy for video game. Canavero told Business Insider last week that he has zero involvement with the game and has never heard of the game’s producer or his company.

Spinal cords are tricky to fuse — it's never been done before
In order for the preserved head to be able to communicate with and control its new body, the spinal cord and the brain must be seamlessly connected, or fused.

This didn't happen with the monkey transplant. While the monkey who's head was transplanted onto a donor body was able to see, move its eyes, and eat, it was paralyzed from the neck down.

"The greatest technical hurdle" to a head transplant, Canavero writes in his paper, "is of course the reconnection of the donor’s (D)’s and recipients (R)’s spinal cords. It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage."

Canevero's technology is "a special biological glue," he said in a recent TED talk, called polyethylene glycol. In the 1930s and 40s, some experimental surgeons have used this material, which is a type of plastic, to fuse the spinal cords of dogs, but these experiments typically involved attaching a foreign head to the complete body of a dog (artificially giving it two heads), not replacing one dog's head with that of another. These procedures were also done in less than an hour.

After the procedure, one of Canavero's patients would be placed in a coma for up to a month to allow the spinal cords to fuse. Otherwise, the "spaghetti" (as he calls it) that makes up the spinal cord could become gnarled or twisted.

But such a long coma is a potential problem as well, University of California, Davis professor of neurosurgery Harry Goldsmith told Popular Science, because medically induced comas often result in infection, blood clots, and reduced brain activity.