Can you transplant a head to another body? - Max G. Levy
On March 14th, 1970, Robert White
and his team carted two small monkeys
into an operating room.
The neurosurgeon lay on the verge
of an ambitious experiment,
decades in the making,
which was bizarre,
if not pulled straight
from his own fever dream.
White’s objective?
Connect the head of Monkey A
to the body of Monkey B,
in what he considered
a whole-body transplant.
White’s ultimate goal was to one day
perform this surgery on humans.
While disturbing,
the idea of a body transplant
raises ethical, biological,
and philosophical questions—
on the nature of life
and the limits of science—
that are still discussed today.
But first, is it even medically possible?
White's surgery faced several
technical hurdles.
For one thing, it guaranteed paralysis
as no doctor then— or now—
could reconnect a severed spinal cord.
But White,
a practicing neurosurgeon,
thought the surgery could be life-saving
for his patients with spinal cord injuries
or progressive mobility diseases like ALS.
These patients often face
multi-organ failures and paralysis,
so with a body transplant,
he hoped to save their lives by replacing
all of their organs at once.
But paralysis wasn't the only challenge.
Due to their high energy demands,
brain cells require a constant supply
of oxygenated blood to survive.
Yet the transplant surgery would likely
interrupt the brain’s oxygen flow
for hours.
But White had an idea.
When the brain is cold,
its metabolism slows down
and it relies less on oxygen.
Experimenting on dogs and monkeys,
White optimized a brain-cooling technique
where the brain’s blood flow was
selectively chilled and halted,
while the rest of the body’s blood
remained warm and circulated.
Then, in 1964, White successfully cooled
the brain of a human patient
with a life-threatening brain tumor
into “suspended animation” at 11°C.
Whereas normally the surgical team
would have just 3 to 5 minutes
to remove the tumor,
with this new technique,
they operated for over an hour
without causing damage.
Brain cooling revolutionized
the field of neurosurgery
and put White one step closer
to his body transplant goal.
But this vision was fraught
with serious ethical concerns.
What conditions would justify
such an experimental surgery,
that could result in debilitating pain
and neurological damage?
And how many animals would have to die
to prove it was possible?
At the time, bioethics
was still an emerging field.
Nevertheless, numerous critics, including
many in the scientific community,
recognized the cruelty of White's research
and strongly opposed it.
Yet White continued to gain approval
from agencies like the NIH.
And by 1970, he was ready to attempt
a monkey body transplant.
First Monkey A was installed
with temporary blood vessels—
coils of plastic tubes that tethered
the head to the body.
Plastic tube by plastic tube,
the team connected Body B to Head A,
and then waited for the subject
to awake from anesthesia.
The monkey did— alive, paralyzed,
and extremely distressed.
According to the team, the monkey
could see, smell, hear,
and even tried to bite off
one of the doctors’ fingers.
White felt this proved that the operation
could work.
The brain appeared to survive
a head transplant
and, with high doses of drugs,
could live without immune rejection.
But had White performed
a body transplant on Monkey A?
Or was it a head transplant on Monkey B?
The surgery raises questions
about the mind-body divide
that have been debated for millennia.
While modern neuroscience supports
the central role of the brain
in building out our consciousness,
discoveries about gut neurons
and the microbiome
suggest that the answer
may be more complicated.
Does part of the “self” reside
outside of the mind?
The body and brain are interconnected
by circuits and signaling systems;
so, what is lost by separating the two?
As a neurosurgeon, White performed
more than 10,000 brain operations
before retiring in 1998—
but never the human head transplant
he dreamed of.
Since then, several scientists have
expressed interest in picking up
where White left off,
reviving unfinished debates.
Even if a doctor could successfully
connect a patient’s head
to a donor’s body,
who of the two would emerge?
And is extending a life
always worth the cost?
