Two surgeons in China developing a method to transplant a human head
24 replies, posted
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/15/two-surgeons-in-china-developing-a-method-to-transplant-a-human-head.html
Its an update on the crazy italian scientist
I thought this surgery was scheduled. What happened?
Pretty sure that was just a publicity stunt and was never actually supposed to be ever done for real.
Russian billionaire backed out
Why do we have this fascination with transplanting the whole head, wouldn't it be better to figure out how to transplant the brain itself.
Read "I Will Fear No Evil" by Robert Heinlein and you'll see why it might be handier to have your whole head/face, not just brain, in there.
From watching a video with this guy a long time ago: reattaching all the facial nerves and stuff is pretty much impossible. They claim to have figured out a way to rejoin a severed spinal cord, but this is a different issue to thousands of tiny nerves.
Transplanting the whole head is probably easier than removing a soft and squishy brain from its unique casing and putting it in another skull that may not fit. Either way, you have the incredibly difficult issue of reattaching the spinal cord. Removing a brain without killing the person would be almost impossible, because of the blood-brain barrier and how vulnerable to infection the brain is.
To give you an idea of how much easier it is to do whole head transplants vs brain transplants is to look at the history. AFAIK nobody has ever successfully transplanted just the brainof any animal, but in the 1950s the Soviets were partially successful in keeping severed dog heads alive and semi-conscious. Around the end of the 50s, they carried out a full transplant of two dog's heads although with total paralysis because they didn't have the tech or knowledge of how to reattach spinal cords.
Well, presumably people would want to retain their likeness. Also you'd have to reconnect both eyes/ears/olfactory stuff as well as the nervous supply to your entire face. If this wasn't already set up to fail (it is), you'd not be making it easier for yourself.
Kojima again?
why transplant the head to a human body when cyborgs though?
I'll believe it when I see it.
This has been all talk and no show for years now
Those aren't a thing
Yet. We've already established that we can read words from the brain stem through non intrusive means. The only hard part is keeping the brain alive but even so its better to create a body we have complete understanding of than continue to bash our head against the wall with human physiology.
Thing is, we can't just skip straight to Ghost in the Shell type shit from the get-go. First things first would be to figure out just how the actual hell a blob of flesh grants us our sapience, and how to preserve that while trying to find out how to scoop it out without destroying the millions of nerve connections we have that our Robobrain may or may not need.
There's also so much shit we don''t know about our brains that could bite you in the ass even IF we created a perfect body. What if you somehow couldn't sleep and that resulted in the person inside either dying or losing their shit? What if we miss just one thing while building the absurdly complex life-support systems needed and the brain croaks?
This is going to be stuff that actually paves the way assuming it works. First comes how to transplant a head to an organic body, then maybe twenty years later we figure out how to put the brain itself in another organic body, and then we can start branching out into brain life support bodies and all the other crazy shit we'll need to research before SOMA can finally become a reality.
oh I was thinking chop out the head and spine connect it to the robot face still intact but ok I'll go here:
"Thing is, we can't just skip straight to Ghost in the Shell type shit from the get-go. First things first would be to figure out just how the actual hell a blob of flesh grants us our sapience, and how to preserve that while trying to find out how to scoop it out without destroying the millions of nerve connections we have that our Robobrain may or may not need."
RE:
The brain is the sapience. You don't need to fully understand how the brain works because by design you can't. sure certain clusters specialize in certain things but It still is a fucking mess, so why bother. As for destroying nerve connections your brain is adaptable. People have had half their brain scooped out and still manage to be a day to day person with only the loss of the one arm and minor learning setbacks, and if the brain doesn't want to adapt as quickly as you like you can have the machine interpret the brains microvolt commands on a more fine tuned level to help with the transition from human to machine. Hell most people don't even know how to walk until they were 3 years old
"There's also so much shit we don''t know about our brains that could bite you in the ass even IF we created a perfect body. What if you somehow couldn't sleep and that resulted in the person inside either dying or losing their shit? What if we miss just one thing while building the absurdly complex life-support systems needed and the brain croaks?"
RE:
You got me there but neither of us will know until a test has been performed. I wouldn't go as far to say absurdly complex though and we always could just shove melatonin into the brain chamber to force it to sleep. Science can not progress if people won't let it.
"This is going to be stuff that actually paves the way assuming it works. First comes how to transplant a head to an organic body, then maybe twenty years later we figure out how to put the brain itself in another organic body, and then we can start branching out into brain life support bodies and all the other crazy shit we'll need to research before SOMA can finally become a reality."
RE:
err... Ok. as I've said a robotic system can be understood in much greater detail than your body because it is built from the ground up compared to built by itself and encrypted with Mother natures DRM and doesn't come with any buttons or dials to probe it as a machine can be built to do.
The only limitations right now as with so many other cool as fuck sci fi things are laws. If someone did make something like a robobrain out of a human they'd be condemned by the world while also having all their notes looked over and replicated. It's a similar story with cloning, flying cars, robot armies, laser guns, etc.
my face is already beautiful enough, I just need a better body
Why do the media keep giving attention to this hack fraud?
cause clickbait
Scientists already managed to keep pig brains alive out of body for 2 days
I say we are pretty close to doing it
Scientists 'keep pigs' brains alive without a body for up to 36 ..
Stop posting popsci fake garbage.
This guy's a fraud and he's been being decried as a fraud for years.
Theoretically you can fix that with copius amounts of plastic surgery, or just a face transplant.
I'll take just having my head stuck on my new body instead of the could-be horrors of trying to match my old face with plastic surgery, or worse, cutting my face off and sticking on my new body. Both would be absolutely horrible to look at :v
Or just clone your old body with a blank brain and swap it out with your original one.
now that's some real shit I can get into
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