Research on human heads declined during the twentieth century, but some scientists directed their attention, instead, to the heads of animals. Charles Guthrie was an American physiologist and pioneer in vascular surgery who died in 1963. His work with Alexis Carrel transplanting and suturing veins in the early 1900s paved the way for successful organ transplant operations after the Second World War. Guthrie tried transplanting parts of limbs, he stitched kidneys into groins, and he also experimented with transplanting heads.
In May 1908, in St Louis, Missouri, Guthrie successfully transplanted a dog’s head onto the underside of another dog’s throat. He grafted the arteries together so that the blood from one dog flowed through the head of the other. The transplanted head displayed basic reflexes: the pupils contracted, the nostrils twitched, the tongue moved. Seven hours after the operation complications set in and Guthrie euthanized the dogs.
Vladimir Demikhov undertook similar procedures on numerous unfortunate dogs in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Demikhov was, perhaps not surprisingly, ‘a vigorously decisive man with a frank, open manner’. In the mid-twentieth century transplanting anything other than bone, blood vessels or corneas still proved to be a hopeless venture, and Demikhov set out to prove that soft tissues, even the delicate tissues of the brain, could survive transplantation. In each case, Demikhov’s team attached the head, shoulders, heart, lungs and forelimbs of one dog onto the neck of another dog. Although most of the two-headed dogs died after a few days, some lived for a few weeks and the experiments were deemed to have been a success. The donor dogs not only remained conscious, they drank water and bit people’s fingers.
As organ transplant surgery became more widespread in the later twentieth century, the motivations for transplanting heads shifted. It was no longer necessary to prove that donated organs could survive in a recipient’s body, but one doctor still wanted to prove that the human head – as a conscious, sentient container of personhood – could survive transplantation in its own right. Demikhov had proved that transplanted dogs’ heads retained cerebral function. In the 1970s, Robert White, an American surgeon working in Cleveland, Ohio, set out to prove that a head transplant was possible in primates, and therefore, theoretically, in humans too. As a neurosurgeon, White researched the brain’s chemistry and physiology, and the effects on the brain of deep hypothermia, a protective technique which is used in surgery when the blood circulation is interrupted. He believed his experiments might pave the way for quadriplegics, whose organs are more likely to fail due to their paralysis, to be given a new body by a donor.
White’s early experiments involved removing an animal’s brain while maintaining its own blood supply; then he began to work on attaching isolated brains to a different animal’s blood supply. Then, in 1971, after more than a dozen failed attempts, White and his team successfully transplanted the head of one rhesus monkey onto the decapitated body of another. The operation took eight hours. When the monkey(s) regained consciousness, White described his patient(s) as ‘dangerous, pugnacious, and very unhappy’. The transplanted monkey’s head, which was anaesthetized so that it felt no pain, remained conscious and alert. It tracked the movement of people and objects around the room, it bit people’s fingers, it chewed and tried to swallow food.
White repeated the operation a number of times, with monkeys and dogs. Each time ‘the preparation’, as the team referred to their hybrid creation, survived for between six hours and three days before dying from blood loss or immune response rejections. By the 1980s White’s team had managed to refine the procedure so that ‘the preparation’ could breathe unaided. White also began to work on cadavers, noting down the stages necessary, in theory, to perform his transplant operation on a human patient. He developed a kind of mechanical heart that could oxygenate and regulate the flow of blood into the neck in anticipation of successful human head transplants.
White died in 2010. He regularly showed journalists around his laboratory, which became a kind of museum to his research work, and he always believed that a human head transplant was possible, although he acknowledged that the practical and ethical obstacles were probably too great. Apart from anything else, the cost of such an operation, both financially and in terms of using up scarce donor organs, would be prohibitive, but objections like these seem trivial compared with the philosophical implications of the procedure.
White brushed aside any broader ethical issues. He firmly believed that personhood is located exclusively in the human head. He explained in interviews that ‘not only does the mind contain all those elements that make us human and individualistic, but it also represents a physical sense of human spirit or soul’. He argued that a donor body, which would have no neurological function, would be comparable to the body of a quadriplegic, and, according to White, quadriplegics would make suitable patients for this procedure since their life expectancy is often shortened and their new, donated body would function in much the same way as their old one. ‘I have always come back to the same basic concept, that you are preserving the brain and the mind and the soul. In spite of the physical limitations, there seems to be no limit if you’re functioning via the cranial nerves.’
White had fewer answers when it came to questions about matching the skin tone and sex of donors and recipients. ‘I really haven’t thought those out, but they could be very serious problems.’ The implications of creating this extreme form of hybrid person are even more acute in light of the fact that White saw no reason why advances in neurosurgery should not allow attachment of donor and recipient nerves one day, paving the way for some level of bodily movement and sensory perception after a transplant.
For Robert White, the body was little more than an organic life support machine that functioned solely to sustain a human life limited to its head. White’s work is shocking because it negates something that we feel to be inherent to our identity: that our heads belong to our bodies and vice versa. Decapitation has always drawn its power from its finality. Decapitation is death. And yet, White is the latest in a long line of scientists, philosophers and ordinary people who have been unable to accept its finality. White saw decapitation as a potential stage in human life – as an event that a person could endure. And if you could survive your own beheading, how much better it would be to be reunited with your own body – younger, healthier and revitalized – than with a previously dead body that used to belong to somebody else.
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Cryonics institutes really do look after ‘brains in jars’, except that they are actually severed heads in large metal vacuum Thermos flasks, called Dewars, filled with liquid nitrogen. One of the largest cryonics institutes is Alcor, in Arizona, where more than 120 ‘patients’ are stored, around two-thirds of whom are ‘neurosuspended’ (also known as decapitated), while the rest are ‘whole-body patients’. Cryonics is based on the fact that there is a ‘grace period’ after the heart stops beating during which the body’s cells remain undamaged, which lasts about eight minutes. When living cells are frozen to below minus 79 degrees Celsius, all biochemical changes are slowed to a virtual standstill, or halted altogether, so live cells can be kept indefinitely in a frozen state. Cryonicists believe that if the body can be cooled down and preserved quickly enough, future technologies, like cloning and nanotechnology, can be used to repair the brain and the body, and the ‘patient’ will wake to find him or herself young and healthy again, hundreds of years in the future. For cryonicists, death is just a stage which must be managed before you can restore a person to life.
Neuro-patient operating apparatus and neuro-patient storage at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
Neurosuspension, or decapitation, is based on the premise that the brain is the only part of the body that it is absolutely necessary to preserve. One past president of Alcor, Steve Bridge, has written, ‘There is no such thing as a “brain transplant”; a brain transferred into a new body would be a “body transplant”. We are our brains.’ They argue that other
organs are replaceable and can be transplanted without threat to a person’s identity, but if there is brain damage, the person’s identity may be irretrievably lost. Without keeping the brain, future cryonicists would have to create a new person; but without keeping the body, they would just have to create a new body. Techniques like cloning suggest that scientists will one day be able to grow new, healthy tissue – and even new limbs or new bodies – in the laboratory. Cryonicists argue that since we all grew a body from a single cell once, when we were conceived, we will be able to do it again when the conditions are right.
If you are considering cryopreservation, there are numerous advantages to being decapitated after your death, and the first is financial. It is much cheaper to keep a person’s head rather than their whole body, because it requires less nitrogen, smaller storage containers and less space. When cryonics emerged in the 1960s, it quickly became clear that the high overheads and start-up costs and the complicated logistics were going to make whole-body preservation challenging. They had to ‘cut to the core of what cryonics was really all about – personal survival. And the bare essential for personal survival is the brain.’ At the time, the economics of cryopreservation had the extraordinary effect of making decapitation a moral duty. As Mike Darwin, one of the founders of the movement, remembered:
Alcor and I started down the neurosuspension road because it was the rational and moral thing to do. It offered us an opportunity to save the lives of those we loved when we would otherwise have been unable to do so. If history later demonstrates that it was the wrong thing to do from a ‘political’ or ‘greater good’ standpoint I hope we are not judged too harshly. For the fact is, it was really the only thing we could have done and still remained human. It’s strange how things work out. Who would have ever dreamed that cutting off your mother’s head could be the ultimate act of caring love and the best chance of saving her life?
Neurosuspension remains popular because it is easier on the patient’s pocket: whole-body preservation costs a minimum of $120,000, but just keeping your head costs only $50,000. Neurosuspension also means that the ‘cryonic suspension team’ can focus their attention on your brain alone, rather than trying to preserve all your organs, in those vital moments after your heart stops beating. This means the preservation chemicals can perfuse through your brain faster, and it can be cooled more rapidly, which may stand you – or at least, your brain – in good stead for the future, as will the fact that you can be more easily transported in an emergency if you are kept in a smaller container.
Committed cryonicists agree that the biggest challenge facing neurosuspension is social, or ‘aesthetic’. Severed heads are simply too gory, and people find it hard to believe that beheading their dad or their wife is a way of offering them a new and better life. Some cryonics institutes refuse to offer neurosuspension because it is bad for public relations. To those patients considering it, one past president of Alcor suggests that you ‘[s]tart talking with your family and friends about cryonics and cell repair right away so they get used to the basic concept. Then when you spring frozen heads on them later, they may not see it as such a strange idea.’ To cryonicists, neurosuspension is simple: it may be the best option you have, given that the alternative is death; and anyway, by the time you re-emerge from your vacuum Thermos cocoon, all the hard work will have been done for you and growing a new body will be standard procedure.
No doubt the old-fashioned connotations of words like ‘decapitation’ and ‘beheading’ explain why cryonicists prefer talk about neurosuspension and ‘cephalic isolation’, which have a reassuringly scientific ring to them, but the realities of cryonics are not for the faint-hearted. Alcor promises to dispatch a cryo-transport team to a patient’s bedside at news of his or her impending death, where they will wait on 24-hour standby. As soon as the patient is pronounced legally dead, their body is placed in an ice-water bath and attached to a mechanical CPR machine, not to try and resuscitate it, but to maintain its blood circulation. Meanwhile, the team will administer a range of drugs intravenously to maintain the patient’s blood pressure and reduce brain oxygen consumption. The CPR machine is replaced by a portable heart-lung machine, accessed via the femoral arteries, which quickly reduces the core temperature of the body, which is transported, still packed in ice, for surgery at Alcor’s facility.
At Alcor, the patient’s blood is gradually replaced by a ‘cryoprotective perfusion’ to optimize preservation. Whole-body patients must have their chests opened up to access the blood vessels of the heart, but for neurosuspension patients Alcor uses arteries within the spinal column instead. Two small holes are bored in the patient’s (freshly shaven) head so that the brain can be visually monitored during the perfusion. Once the brain is fully perfused, the surgical team performs a ‘cephalic isolation’, or decapitation, with a sterilized panel saw, and places the patient’s head in its Dewar storage container. Then the head is gradually cooled, over a period of two weeks, to temperatures below minus 196 degrees Celsius.
With neurosuspension patients, cryonicists cut off the entire head simply because it would cause too much damage, and take too much time, to remove a person’s brain. It is easier and safer to store brains inside their original protective containers. Nonetheless, the damage the patient’s brain endures during this entire procedure is considerable, and cryogenically frozen brains will remain insurmountably damaged for many decades – if not centuries – to come, because scientists have no way to fix them. Cryonicists believe that their greatest challenge is not going to be growing new bodies for people, but finding a way to repair their damaged brains, because putting brains in the deep freeze takes its toll.
When human cells are frozen, water seeps out of them, forming tiny ice crystals that rip up neighbouring cells. Some nanotechnologists talk of bacteria-sized machines that will one day move through the body and repair its ten trillion or so fractured cells, but such devices still belong firmly in the land of fantasy. Science is nowhere near the point of being able to mend cellular damage this profound. As if finding a way to reconstruct cracked cells was not enough, there is also the small question of reversing the ageing process, and curing dementia, or cancer, or any of the other degenerative diseases that may have killed you in the first place. Even if all these medical requirements are met, the thought of being reborn as a wholly engineered artefact, ‘a patchwork of grafts, implants and tiny motors’, grown in the laboratory outside the laws of nature, is enough to dissuade the vast majority of people from placing their bets on cryonic reincarnation. Surely your brain without your body – and by that I mean the body you were originally born with – is not your brain in any recognizable sense? And surely your mind – your personality, your identity – is more than a pattern of firing synapses in your brain, and more, for that matter, than the contents of your head?
We do not understand the infinite complexities of how the human personality interacts with the human body, but there are various reasons to believe that we should be wary of giving our brains all the credit and underestimating the role our bodies play in shaping our ideas. For a start, our brains are formed by the things we do. Research has shown that lifelong regular exercise improves a person’s memory, attention span and ability to learn in later life, so that when we give our bodies a workout we are also exercising our brains.
Not only is our mental life shaped by our physical well-being, the physical size of our brains can also grow in response to mental training. A long-running study by cognitive scientists at University College London has shown that London cab drivers have an enlarged hippocampus thanks to ‘The Knowledge’, their legendary ability to navigate through the streets of London. The hippocampus governs memory and spatial awareness, but grows larger during particularly intense training. Similar effects are seen in piano tuners, who learn to navigate a complex auditory landscape. And the size of the hippocampus correlates with the extent of its use: it shrinks back down again when people retire. These findings have led rese
archers to describe the brain as a muscle that responds to exercise.
Navigation is as much a physical ability as a mental one: people often find it hard to conceptualize or describe a route verbally, but they can follow it physically without any conscious effort at all. The line between knowing what to do mentally and knowing what to do physically is difficult to draw. The same is true of sportsmen and women and musicians. Concert pianists can remember tens of thousands of notes and complex fingerings without giving it any conscious attention, and footballers’ bodies judge complicated angles, the speed and weight of a ball, the weather conditions, the actions of opposing players, all while in motion, in a situation where rational reasoning would be pathetically inadequate. These physical skills are beyond linguistic or mental reasoning: professional sportsmen and women would probably find it hard to explain exactly how they execute their intended actions during a game, because their bodies just do it for them.
These are just some of the more obvious ways in which the human body shapes the mind and the brain – who knows what the more subtle implications of separating the two might be. People who have suffered a stroke sometimes reject the limb that has been paralysed. This condition, known as anosognosia, means that patients are either unable to acknowledge their disability or else deny having anything to do with the damaged part of their body. Their left side, for example, simply does not belong to them. One anosognosiac ‘became so incensed that somebody else’s leg was cluttering up his hospital bed that he heaved the thing out and was subsequently amazed to find himself on the floor’. A woman who had lost the use of her left arm denied owning the rings on her left hand, but when the rings were transferred to her right hand, she happily recounted various stories about them. It is unclear whether the condition results from damage to the brain or to the body, or whether it is a psychological coping strategy, or a combination of all three. Anosognosia usually subsides within two or three weeks, but it indicates the complexity of our embodied mind: if I do not sense my body in the same way, then maybe I have become somebody else.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 25