Transcript for 5/24/24: HEAD CASE – YOU WOULD FORGET YOUR HEAD IF IT WASN’T ATTACHED

It is not often you get traumatized while drinking your morning coffee-- traumatized may be an overstatement, but it certainly gave me a very chilling feeling to watch a video on a science network, where robots are severing heads of cadavers and humans in order to perform a head and face transplants.

Neuroscience and biomedical engineering startup BrainBridge has announced a mind-bending concept that would allow a head to be grafted onto a donor body. 

The futuristic system would offer new hope to patients suffering from untreatable conditions such as stage-4 cancer, paralysis, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. 

The whole-body procedure involves transplanting a patient's head onto a healthy, brain-dead donor body, ensuring the preservation of consciousness, memories, and cognitive abilities. 

BrainBridge says the process aims to be available within 8 years and would integrate advanced robotics and artificial intelligence to carry out the transplantation procedures. The company adds it will also be able to conduct face and scalp transplantation to restore functionality and aesthetic appearance. 

BrainBridge is recruiting and has listed roles for experts in several fields including brain-computer interfaces (BCI), as seen in Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip, robotic surgery and neuroscience. 

The company BrainBridge is not real -- but it is a concept that has been envisioned by a film director and biotechnologist. 

The concept is the brainchild of Dubai-based project lead Hashem Al-Ghaili, a biotechnologist and science communicator. He says: "Every step of the BrainBridge concept has been carefully thought out based on extensive scientific research that has been conducted and published by experts in various fields of science. "The goal of our technology is to push the boundaries of what is possible in medical science and provide innovative solutions for those battling life-threatening conditions.

They will use high-speed robotic systems to prevent brain cell degradation and ensure seamless compatibility. The entire procedure is guided by real-time molecular-level imaging and AI algorithms to facilitate precise reconnection of the spinal cord, nerves, and blood vessels.

The viral video of the procedures has people wondering just how close we are to the process of Head transplants.

The BrainBridge video is not merely a provocative work of art. This video is better understood as the first public billboard for a hugely controversial scheme to defeat death that’s recently been gaining attention among some life-extension proponents and entrepreneurs. 

What is certain is that head transplantation—or body transplant, as some prefer to call it—is a subject of growing, if speculative, interest in longevity circles, the kind inhabited by biohackers, techno-anarchists, and others on the fringes of biotechnology and the startup scene and who form the most dedicated cadre of extreme life-extensionists.

By comparison, putting your head on a young body looks comparatively easy—a way to bypass aging in a single stroke, at least as long as your brain holds out. The idea was strongly endorsed in a technical road map put forward this year by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, a group espousing radical life extension, which rated “body replacement” as the cheapest, fastest pathway to “solve aging.” 

In the 1950s, Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov transplanted the head of one dog onto the body of another, resulting in a two-headed dog. This was replicating an experiment conducted by C.C. Guthrie in 1908. In 1965, Dr. Robert White of Cleveland, Ohio, not to be outdone, transplanted the brain of one dog into another dog. But one brain wasn’t switched for the other; White inserted the donor dog’s brain into a space in the other dog’s neck, surgically giving it two brains. 

The second brain did not function as a brain, but it did survive—as did the host dog—for up to 5 days before it was removed. The purpose of the experiment was to learn about the brain’s functions once it’s removed from its natural physiological mechanisms.

But the idea of a human head transplant sounds macabre but then so did open heart surgery at one time. 

I must say that the BrainBridge video online looks like it is right out of a Philip K. Dick movie story or Mary Schelly's Frankenstein.

Scientists throughout history have been less than scrupulous in their efforts to restore life to dead bodies. For example, around 1800, the Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini performed a series of experiments in which he electrically “stimulated the heads and trunks of cows, horses, sheep, and dogs.”

It wasn’t much of a science at the time but a form of spectacle for the sideshow circuit.

They called it electric performance art.

The theatrical display of electrically manipulated human bodies.

A witness of Aldinis performances said in a book that The jaws open, the teeth chatter, the eyes roll in their sockets; and if reason did not stop the fired imagination, one would almost believe that the corpse is suffering and alive again,

Aldini did further experiments on decapitated arms and legs from a local hospital. He also “took his show on the road and gave very successful demonstrations in London with the body of a recently hanged criminal.

When Aldini directed current between the corpse’s mouth and ear, its mouth convulsed, and the left eye opened. When he applied electricity to the rectum, “such violent muscular contractions were excited, as almost to give the appearance of re-animation,” Aldini wrote.

This field, which involved electrically stimulating animals’ muscles, was called galvanism. It was so named after Aldini’s uncle, Luigi Galvani, who made frogs’ legs twitch by running electricity from the spinal cord to the muscle via metal rods.

It was a Young Mary Schelly the author of Frankenstein that learned of Aldini and his corpse freak show.

Shelly heard about Aldini’s work from her friend, the chemist Sir Humphry Davy. As Aldini’s deceased human bodies moved and decapitated kittens ‘bounded about, undefined” Davy wrote referring to an experiment in which a headless kitten’s spinal cord was replaced with a zinc-and-silver battery. 

It appeared in Shelley’s lifetime that reanimation would be a real possibility in the near future.” it was also rumored that Shelley’s husband Percy “. . . dabbled with galvanism; it has been said that he even tried to cure his sister’s sores with electricity. Although she survived, the family cat was not so lucky and was electrocuted.

Just take a moment in your mind's eye and think of the nightmare of flesh puppets being animated by electric arcs- that dead cats and dogs -and a dead human criminal can dance when an electric current is sent through their bodies.

Now think of how far we have come-- where hearts can be recharged with electricity to beat again-- and now the possibility that with meticulous surgery a robot with an A.I. can transplant a head to a brain-dead body donor.

Will head transplants work? Crudely, they already have. In the early 1970s, the American neurosurgeon Robert White performed a “cephalic exchange,” cutting off the head of a monkey, placing it on the body of another, and sewing together their circulatory systems. Reports suggest the head remained conscious, and able to see, for a few days before it died.

Most likely, a human head transplant would also be fatal. But even if you lived, you’d be a mind atop a paralyzed body, since exchanging heads means severing the spinal cord. 

Yet head-swapping proponents can point to plausible solutions for that, too—a number of which appear in the BrainBridge video. In Europe, for instance, some paralyzed people have walked again after doctors bridged their spinal injuries with electronics. Other scientists in China are studying growth factors to regrow nerves.

There also have been science fiction films that have also predicted that in the future face swaps and head swaps will be common -- but they make them look simple and easy but the BrainBridge video makes it clear that the procedure will include being forced into a coma, and physical therapy to restore movement. 

Coincidentally It was last weekend, when MGM+ was running their drive-in series featuring the movie Face Off with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage. 

FBI agent Sean Archer assumes the identity of the criminal Castor Troy to get information from his brother about a terrorist attack.

To do this, Archer must "borrow" Troy's face using a surgical procedure to go undercover as Troy, but things go wrong when Troy assumes the identity of Archer.

Now it appears that what I thought was outrageous Science fiction is now becoming a reality. 

I remember when Face Off was released it reminded me of an Old Boris Karloff /Bela Lugosi film called Black Friday where a doctor tries to save a colleague after he has been hit by a car. 

In order to save his friend's life, The doctor implants part of another man's brain into the professor's. Unfortunately, the other man was a gangster who was involved in the accident and was apparently heading for the electric chair, according to the police. The professor recovers but at times behaves like the gangster.

It is like a Frankenstein meets Jekyll and Hyde story as the man goes through a transformation when he hears a siren or is triggered.

BrainBridge is in some ways overly conventional in its thinking. If you want to keep your brain going, why must it be on a human body? 

You might instead keep the head alive on a heart-lung machine—with an Elon Musk neural implant to let it surf the internet, for as long as it lives. 

Or consider how doctors hoping to solve the organ shortage have started putting hearts and kidneys from genetically engineered pigs into patients. If you don’t mind having a tail and four legs, maybe your head could be placed onto a pig’s body.

It would be the technological version of casting demons into swine. 

And what about Cellular memory -- there are scientific theories that Memories are stored not only in the brain, but in a psychosomatic network extending into the body . . . all the way out along pathways to internal organs and the very surface of our skin. 

Through cellular receptors, thoughts or memories may remain unconscious or can become conscious-raising the possibility of physiological connections between memories, organs and the mind.

A 47-year-old Caucasian male received a heart from a 17-year-old African-American male. The recipient was surprised by his newfound love of classical music. What he discovered later was that the donor, who loved classical music and played the violin, had died in a drive-by shooting, clutching his violin case to his chest.

A 29-year-old lesbian and a fast food junkie received a heart from a 19-year-old woman vegetarian who was "man crazy." The recipient reported after her operation that meat made her sick and she was no longer attracted to women. In fact, she became engaged to marry a man.

A 47-year-old man received a heart from a 14-year-old girl gymnast who had problems with eating disorders. After the transplant, the recipient and his family reported his tendency to be nauseated after eating, a childlike exuberance and a little girl's giggle.

Aside from those included in the study, there are other transplant recipients whose stories are worth mentioning, such as Claire Sylvia, a woman who received a heart-lung transplant. In her book entitled, A Change of Heart: A Memoir, Ms. Sylvia describes her own journey from being a healthy, active dancer to becoming ill and eventually needing a heart transplant. After the operation, she reported peculiar changes like cravings for beer and chicken nuggets, neither of which she had a taste for prior to the transplant. She later discovered that these were favorites of her donor. She even learned that her donor had chicken nuggets in his jacket pocket when he died in a motorcycle accident.

Another possible incidence of memory transfer occurred when a young man came out of his transplant surgery and said to his mother, "Everything is copasetic." His mother said that he had never used that word before, but now used it all the time. It was later discovered that the word had been a signal, used by the donor and his wife, particularly after an argument, so that when they made up they knew everything was okay. The donor's wife reported that they had had an argument just before the donor's fatal accident and had never made up.

Do you think deep memories are not just in the brain but in the body as well? Would a head transplant recipent need psycho therapy to help with these new urges and feelings?

Let’s take it a step further. Why does the body “donor” have to be dead at all? Anatomically, it’s possible to have two heads.

Who can forget the sci fi film "The thing with Two heads." It had Rosie Greer and Ray Milland pretty much sewn together as the plot dealt with a racist man dying and plans an elaborate scheme for transplanting his head onto another man's body. His health deteriorates rapidly, and doctors are forced to transplant his head onto the only available candidate: a black man from death row.

If your spouse were diagnosed with a fatal cancer, you would surely welcome his or her head next to yours, if it allowed their mind to live on. After all, the concept of a "living donor" is widely accepted in transplant medicine already, and married couples are often said to be joined at the hip. Why not at the neck, too?

Needless to say the BrainBridge video and proposal has been met with a lot of negativity.

On Facebook, a pastor, Matthew. W. Tucker, called the concept “disgusting, immoral, unnecessary, pagan, demonic and outright idiotic,” adding that “they have no idea what they are doing.” A poster from the Middle East apologized for the video, joking that its creator “is one of our psychiatric patients who escaped last night.” “We urge the public to go about [their] business as everything is under control,” this person said.

Al-Ghaili is monitoring the feedback with interest and some concern. “The negativity is huge, to be honest,” he says. “But behind that are the ones who are sending emails. These are people who want to invest, or who are expressing their personal health challenges. These are the ones who matter."

Would you say it is a worthy investment? It seems that the video goes into deep detail on how it can be done, and there are many many scientists out there who tinker with mother nature all the time.

Think of the money that goes into a Gain of Function operation, and how about that brilliant idea of dimming the sun? Creating Net Zero would mean depopulation -- head transplants would maintain the population.

Theoretically speaking of course.

Though there has been no response about the work from the scientific community, BrainBridge is not the first company to be working in this field. Neurable, Emotiv, Kernel and NextMind are a few other names in the brain-computer interface space.

The most famous is Elon Musk's Neuralink which recently implanted a computer chip in the brain of a quadriplegic man.

Hashem Al-Ghaili, project lead at BrainBridge, said that they plan to employ high-speed robotic systems to prevent brain cell degradation and ensure seamless compatibility between the transplanted head and donor body. Al-Ghaili also said that advanced AI algorithms will guide the surgical robots in reconnection of the spinal cord precisely, along with the nerves and blood vessels.

The company's proprietary chemical adhesive and polyethylene glycol will aid in reconnecting severed neurons.

A-Ghali says that if all goes well, we could see a successful head transplant in 8 years. 

However, their short-term goal is to perfect spinal cord reconstruction. Of course, there is that “good and fuzzy” reason why this type of operation should occur.

If you remember Elon Musk gave a number of reasons why patients needed a chip the size of quarter planet into someone’s brain. It is to help patients with ALS or paralysis or dementia.

These experiments do not naturally assume the successful possibility of a human head transplant. At least not yet. 

For one thing, the host body has to survive without a head long enough for the new head to be attached, a feat yet to be accomplished. Medical ethicists have also raised concerns, citing the tricky ethics of organ donation and the high risk for the patients involved.

But when you read about the history of transplants, and spinal cord surgery, and experiments involving monkey heads, the more questions you have And you start to realize that it is not some sick joke. 

It is chillingly close to being done.