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None of these are (head/brain) transplants. At best they were grafts that promptly failed, or in the middle case not a bain/head procedure at all.



- JRV, with all due respect for your credentials as a scientist, if National Geographic says it's a head transplant, that's good enough for me and I'd rather go with their opinion than with yours. (Read below for more details about the head and brain transplant).

- The second case was a successful face transplant, related to the topic, but I never said it was a head transplant. But obviously those cases are connected, the later showing dramatic progress in the ability to connect nerve endings and tissue.

- The third case from the 1950s was thrown in for the Frankenstein effect and to show how far back these experiments date.


From the Daily Mail, 01-05-2007 about "The First Head Transplant: National Geographic Channel", first aired Sunday, January 28, 2007

"[...] in the late afternoon of March 14, 1970, he [Dr White] went ahead with the world's first true head transplant, using two rhesus monkeys. Decapitating both animals, the surgeon successfully managed to stitch the head of one monkey on to the body of the other.

He and his team then faced a nervous wait until finally the 'hybrid' monkey regained consciousness, opened its eyes and tried to bite a surgeon who put a finger in its mouth.

The team clapped and cheered as their creation moved its facial muscles, followed their movements with its eyes and even drank from a pipette.

But though White regarded the operation as a major success, he knew it had one major limitation. Because its spinal cord had been severed as part of the operation, the monkey was paralysed from the neck down and it was impossible for the surgeons to reconnect the hundreds of millions of nerve threads necessary for it to regain any bodily movement.

Still, White insisted that such surgery might help a very particular kind of human patient - those paraplegics who faced imminent death because their heads were trapped on bodies failing due to the long-term medical complications which often accompany extensive paralysis. With a head transplant, these people, he reasoned, would remain paraplegic but their new bodies, 'donated' by patients who were brain dead but otherwise physically healthy, would give them a new chance of life.

White never got a chance to pursue this idea. When he went public with the results of his monkey head transplants two years after the event, it earned him only universal condemnation.

Shunned by the scientific establishment and threatened by anti-vivisectionists, he was forced to seek police protection for himself and his family and was denied funding for his work. He went from pioneer to pariah. Despite the controversy caused by his research, he remains convinced to this day that head transplants for humans may one day be viable.

And only now, 35 years after his first experiments on monkeys, does it seem that science may be about to prove him right. Last year, researchers at University College, London, announced plans to inject the spinal cords of paralysed patients with stem cells taken from the human nose. These are cells capable of regenerating themselves and adapting to many different purposes within the body and it is hoped they might create a 'bridge' between the disconnected ends of the spinal nerves, enabling paralysed patients to regain full control of their bodies.

If severed spinal cords can be restored in this way, perhaps head transplants might eventually become a scientific possibility - without leaving the unfortunate 'patient' permanently paralysed. Whether such operations would ever be deemed ethical is another matter - and the psychological and emotional implications simply beggar belief. But we live in an age when French surgeons have already carried out a partial face transplant, and in which British surgeon Dr Peter Butler has been granted permission by the Royal Free Hospital in North London to perform the first complete face transplant in the near future.

Will a full head transplant be the next question for medical ethicists to consider? It's a prospect that raises many disquieting questions, not least whether our souls reside in our minds or in our bodies, and whether a person's head, living on another body, would still be the same person."