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Audacious Plan to Save This Man’s Life by Transplanting His Head

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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch...ad/492755/

EXCERPT: [...] The operation would cost between $10 million and $100 million, depending on where it took place, and require 80 surgeons. Ren’s Italian partner has said it could happen as early as next year. Not surprisingly, many scientists and ethicists have slammed the project, accusing the surgeons involved of promoting junk science and raising false hopes. One critic even argued that the surgeons should be charged with murder if the patient dies—as he almost certainly would.

But other researchers acknowledge that the project has a foundation, however shaky, in science. The past few decades have been a golden age of transplant medicine. [...]

[...] Ren’s work on head transplants is part of a long, if fringe, tradition in his profession. A surgeon in St. Louis, Missouri, created the world’s first two-headed dog back in 1908, by grafting the head of one pooch onto the neck of another. Soviet and Chinese surgeons duplicated the feat in the 1950s; one Soviet dog lived for 29 days, and it could lap water with both of its heads. The Chinese surgery took place at Ren’s university, and a mural of the bicephalic beast graces a wall in the library. In the 1970s, a Cleveland, Ohio, surgeon named Robert White transplanted the heads of several rhesus monkeys onto others’ bodies; his staff reportedly cheered when the first one woke up and tried to bite someone’s finger. White didn’t attempt to reconnect the monkeys’ spinal cords (he focused on keeping their brains alive), so no one knows whether they could have walked or moved their arms. But they did eat and track objects with their eyes, and their brain waves appeared normal....
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