Growing old bypass
What is definite is that head transplantation, or physique transplant, as some choose to name it, is a topic of rising, if speculative, curiosity in longevity circles, the type inhabited by biohackers, techno-anarchists, and others on the fringes of biotechnology and the startup scene and who type essentially the most devoted cadre of utmost life-extensionists.
Many proponents of longer life spans will admit issues don’t look good. Anti-aging drugs to date hasn’t achieved any breakthroughs. In actual fact, as analysis advances into the molecular particulars, the issue of loss of life solely seems increasingly more difficult. As we age, our billions of cells regularly succumb to the irreversible results of entropy. Fixing that will by no means be attainable.
By comparability, placing your head on a younger physique seems comparatively simple—a strategy to bypass getting older in a single stroke, at the least so long as your mind holds out. The concept was strongly endorsed in a technical roadmap put ahead this yr by the Longevity Biotech Fellowship, a gaggle espousing radical life extension, which rated “physique alternative” as the most cost effective, quickest pathway to “remedy getting older.”
Will head transplants work? In a crude approach, they have already got. Within the early Nineteen Seventies, the American neurosurgeon Robert White carried out a “cephalic change,” reducing off the pinnacle of a monkey and inserting it on the physique of one other, stitching collectively their circulatory programs. Stories recommend the pinnacle remained aware, and capable of see, for just a few days, earlier than it died.
Most definitely, a human head transplant would even be deadly. However even for those who 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 to that, too—a variety of which seem within the BrainBridge video. In Europe, as an illustration, some paralyzed individuals have walked once more after docs bridged their spinal accidents with electronics. Different scientists in China are finding out development elements to regrow nerves.
Joined on the neck
As stunning because the video is, BrainBridge is in some methods overly standard in its pondering. If you wish to preserve your mind going, why should or not it’s on a human physique? You may as an alternative preserve the pinnacle alive on a coronary heart lung machine—with an Elon Musk neural implant to let it surf the web, for so long as it lives. Or contemplate how docs hoping to resolve 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 might be positioned onto a pig’s physique.
Let’s take it a step additional. Why does the physique “donor” need to be useless in any respect? Anatomically, it’s attainable to have two heads. There are conjoined twins who share one physique. In case your partner was recognized with a deadly most cancers, you’ll absolutely welcome his or her head subsequent to yours, if it allowed their thoughts to stay on. In any case, the idea of a “dwelling 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?