Growing older bypass
What is for certain is that head transplantation—or physique transplant, as some favor to name it—is a topic of rising, if speculative, curiosity in longevity circles, the sort inhabited by biohackers, techno-anarchists, and others on the fringes of biotechnology and the startup scene and who kind essentially the most devoted cadre of maximum life-extensionists.
Many proponents of longer life spans will admit issues don’t look good. Anti-aging drugs thus far hasn’t achieved any breakthroughs. Actually, as analysis advances into the molecular particulars, the issue of demise solely appears increasingly difficult. As we age, our billions of cells progressively succumb to the irreversible results of entropy. Fixing which will by no means be attainable.
By comparability, placing your head on a younger physique appears comparatively straightforward—a method to bypass ageing in a single stroke, at the very least so long as your mind holds out. The thought was strongly endorsed in a technical highway map put ahead this 12 months by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, a gaggle espousing radical life extension, which rated “physique alternative” as the most affordable, quickest pathway to “resolve ageing.”
Will head transplants work? In a crude manner, they have already got. Within the early Seventies, the American neurosurgeon Robert White carried out a “cephalic trade,” chopping off the top of a monkey, inserting it on the physique of one other, and stitching collectively their circulatory methods. Reviews counsel the top remained aware, and in a position to see, for just a few days earlier than it died.
Probably, a human head transplant would even be deadly. However even in case you lived, you’d be a thoughts atop a paralyzed physique, since exchanging heads means severing the spinal twine.
But head-swapping proponents can level to believable options for that, too—quite a few which seem within the BrainBridge video. In Europe, as an example, some paralyzed individuals have walked once more after medical doctors bridged their spinal accidents with electronics. Different scientists in China are learning progress components to regrow nerves.
Joined on the neck
As stunning because the video is, BrainBridge is in some methods overly typical in its considering. If you wish to preserve your mind going, why should or not it’s on a human physique? You would possibly as a substitute preserve the top alive on a heart-lung machine—with an Elon Musk neural implant to let it surf the web, for so long as it lives. Or take into account how medical doctors hoping to unravel the organ scarcity have began placing hearts and kidneys from genetically engineered pigs into sufferers. Should you don’t thoughts having a tail and 4 legs, perhaps your head may very well be positioned onto a pig’s physique.
Let’s take it a step additional. Why does the physique “donor” must be lifeless in any respect? Anatomically, it’s attainable to have two heads. There are conjoined twins who share one physique. In case your partner have been identified with a deadly most cancers, you’ll certainly welcome his or her head subsequent to yours, if it allowed their thoughts to reside on. In any case, the idea of a “residing donor” is broadly accepted in transplant drugs already, and married {couples} are sometimes mentioned to be joined on the hip. Why not on the neck, too?
