"And the world will never be the same again"
Italian neurosurgeon is optimistic about controversial ‘body-swap’ procedure which involves transplanting a patient’s head unto a donor body. While uproars from scientists and philosophers mix with scattered cautious enthusiasm, principal questions about the essence of life arise.
Head transplants on the horizon?
In recent years, many developments in medicine, stem-cell research and neurosurgery have been pushing and exceeding the boundaries of what most people is willing to accept as natural. For instance, progress in fertility treatments has made three-parent babies possible, and allowed same sex partners to conceive children without donors. Now, however, a new and even more radical idea may be on the verge of realization.
During the last few years, Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has become well-known for his claims that the technology and resources required to perform what is essentially a ‘head transplant’ is at hand, no less so after a Russian Werdnig-Hoffman patient recently volunteered to be the first human subject to undergo the procedure. Canavero has been publicly confident about the scientific merits of the technique known as the “head anastomosis venture” (HEAVEN), which involves a series of groundbreaking and so far untested surgical methods, since he first proposed and illustrated it in a journal 2013. In essence, it involves severing the heads and spinal cords of the patient and the donor just below the neck, and then reattaching the patient’s head on the donor body’s shoulders. This requires, among other things, cooling both bodies significantly to reduce brain and nerve damage and then cutting the spine with an extremely fine nano-sharpened blade, recently shown to be effective in avoiding the formation of glial scars, and then, while the patient is put into a chemically induced coma, reconnecting the nerves and blood vessels using polyethylene glycol.
It sounds menacingly simple but, as members of the medical and neurological community has pointed out, the procedure has yet to overcome a number of serious hurdles, not least the fact that it has not yet been successfully performed in live animal experiments. Segments of the procedure has been tested individually in laboratory conditions, showing some potential, but the application on live, much less human, subjects has yet to be accomplished, leading the majority of the medical community to express major skepticism.
The Frankenstein rhetoric
More interesting, however, is how the public has responded to news of the procedure. Throughout printed and online news media, Canavero’s ideas are likened to Dr. Frankenstein and his foray into the mechanics of life, no doubt due, in part, to an abundance of mechanistic metaphors of ‘cutting’, ‘gluing’ and ‘taping’, which presuppose a simplistic understanding of the chemical and organic complexities of the brain and spine. The ‘mad scientist’ rhetoric is, of course, an understandable reaction to a claim that so exceeds the known and acknowledged boundaries of medical possibilities, but, to be sure, one which has been heard and discarded countless times before, as science has pushed into the unknown. However, the idea of connecting a person’s head to an unknown body does indeed sit uneasily with the humanistic idea of a human subject as an indivisible unity between body, mind, and soul; and even in the dawning era of ‘the posthuman’, a ‘head-swap’ is an unfamiliar idea. Even so, the paradox remains, can one really make an ethically convincing case against a removal of a sick body from a healthy head? If a deceased donor has willingly donated his body for the procedure, is it not within the rights of the patient to choose it as his own? In its most basic form, ethically speaking, the procedure differs only in magnitude from ‘lesser’ and more accepted transplant-procedures, and it may simply be a case of getting used to the idea.
Ethics, phenomenology and art
Perhaps the most upsetting part of the procedure to any observer is that, if successful, the patient will experience reality through a fundamentally alien organism. The phenomenological experience this condition entails is uncharted philosophical territory, and poses difficult questions about consciousness, which the modern scientific paradigm usually understands as something fundamentally embodied. If it proves scientifically and surgically viable, it will require a significant rethink of a whole range of strong philosophical, psychological, ethical, and even political ideas of what constitutes a human subject. For instance, new studies have shown that disruptions of intestinal flora have a significant influence on the psyche, and have been identified as a potential cause for depression. This suggests that the psychology and personality of an individual is not exclusively located in the brain, and a head transplant is sure to disrupt the delicate neural and hormonal connections between head and body. Also, the delicate and carefully trained connections between hand, body and brain may prove to be a hard sacrifice for, say, an athlete or a pianist. Again, the patient would have to get used to a wholly new way of functioning as a body.
Furthermore, for the procedure to be successful, the patient’s head and brain will have to be kept marginally ‘alive’ without a body for at least 36 hours, posing awkward ethical questions as to what sort of political agency and legitimacy a vegetative head, temporarily disconnected from bodily animation, may hold. From an ethical standpoint, worries are also being voiced that, in the long run, if the technique proves feasible, it may lead to a very slippery slope, potentially allowing for head-swaps motivated by cosmetic or athletic reasons.
While the potential advantages of such a procedure for countless individuals suffering from previously irreversible spinal cord defects or injuries are many and considerable, many scientists contest that it simply is not possible, likening the procedure to "bad science" and "utter fantasy". Others applaud the ambition of its champion, comparing it to previous major breakthroughs in technology originally thought dangerous and impossible, such as heart transplants or indeed computers.
The comparison to the mad scientists of literature may be unfair, but it is worth noticing because the literary and artistic visions of the future often involve radical and rebellious new ideas of the human, and which boundaries this idea can or cannot, should or should not, exceed. Indeed, as interdisciplinary research into the posthuman condition is showing, the boundaries of ‘the human’ seems to admit of far more flexible boundaries than those advocated for centuries by the paradigm of humanism. If we are to truly investigate and challenge these boundaries, the realm of aesthetics, art and literature holds great potential, not least because ‘head swaps’ and similar radical alterations of the human body is a well-studied subject within it.
Canavero is often quoted for saying that, if he is successful, “the world will never be the same again”. But maybe the entire concept of ‘the same’, which implies a linear historical continuity in human nature, is itself what must be overcome, if the Head Anastomosis Venture is to be realized and embraced as ‘humane’ or indeed ‘natural’.
Sources:
New Scientist, February 25th, 2015
The Independent, August 14th, 2015