h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

With the partial face transplant announcement, brain transplants must surely move a little nearer.
For the sake of argument, there maybe those with more than my very basic medical knowledge who know otherwise, lets assume there will be 2 choices for types of brain transplant operations.
1) A transplant where a healthy brain is removed from an unhealthy body, to extend life, and transplanted into a healthy donor body. Systems will be in place to ensure the 4 minute brain death due to lack of oxgen is avoided, and so the essential "being" and memory of brain is intact.
2) Option 2 involves, again, a brain transplant from unhealthy body to healthy body, but this time the brain would need to be stored for a long time until a body is available, this would mean the persons brain is physically intact, and going to a health donor body, but the brains essential "being" would have died , and all memory gone.
.
....now putting aside the unlikelyness of such donor bodies being available, there are several points to think about....the moral implications, the effects of a brain transplant on the mental health of person involved (and relatives).... and whether that actually transplanting a brain in the second example would have any point, as the brain would have to learn everthing again and have no memory of it's former existnace...would we be sustaning life for the sake of it?,

That's pretty damn hypothetical . I wouldn't go expecting brain transplants in my lifetime.

But I have no idea what you mean by the brain's essential being. To me if the brain is intact then the mind is intact.

Having said that, if the brain were conscious but not attached to senses then that might be somewhat...maddening? If we had anything like the technology for brain transplants then I'm sure we'd be able to rig up a camera to the optic nerve etc. though (didn't they did this with rats?), or alternatively they could sedate the brain.

If we had the technology to do brain transplants then we wouldn't need to do brain transplants.

Ste

I'm still waiting and hoping for the new eye attached to the optic nerve/new optic nerve doobry.... the most obvious and logically nearest from the research that was going on at least two years ago when I coudl access propper journals, was that they've gotten somwhere* with getting some* nerve regrowth.... its amazing how little we undrestand of the CNS...

watch "Ghost in the Shell"

episodes, movies.

All about this.

What if you could make a synthetic brain, and transfer the "person" from a one body to an artificial one? THen what makes us human?

Of course, this is very hypothetical, and indeed if you could transplant brains, then you could possibly repair the usless body, but I was more interested in the results of such a transplant on the person involved, the partial face transplant has raised the issue of the transplanted face being recognised by donors family, something not possible with say something like a heart transplant.
I don't know what it would feel like to have my brain in another body. The nearest I could come to knowing is the example of "clumsy" teenagers dropping pens, etc. This is partly caused by their bodies growing by such a quick rate, even a couple of millimetres of arm lenghtening in a few weeks, which can fool the teenagers hand/eye/brain co-ordination and cause clumseyness...I would imagine a brain transplant patient would feel like that initially.
.....What I mean by the essential "being" of a brain is the persons unique identity, be it outgoing, depressive, thoughtful, caring, etc

Perhaps an artificial means of sustaining the brain will be developed - like in Dennis Potter's 'Lazarus'.

It strikes me as more likely that we'll be able to repair bodies sufficiently not to need to transplant. From the few experiences of people having hand transplants, I can imagine that some people might never come to terms with being ni the 'wrong body'.

I would think if the brain is intact then the personality would be too. Think of people who wake up from comas etc. Although being connected up to someone else's hormone system would surely affect some changes in time.

I tend to go along with Ste who said <>

Surely if the technology existed to connect all the nerve systems from the brain into a 'new body', to make the new body function well, then we would already know how to do that within the old body without needing to transplant a brain.

az

Re: Face transplant and the donor's family recognising the face.

The face shape and appearance are more to do with the underlying bone structure and enervation so if the family of the donor don't know the identity of the recipeint they are unlikely to pick her out in a crowd.

As for brain transplants...

If the mind remains intact throughout the process then the brain/mind will continue in the new body.

If the mind ceases to be then all you will have left is a few kilos of grey goo in a useless body.

I think it is more likely that the mind will be downloaded into a hardware substrate. I cannot see that there is a way of creating a living, blank adult brain to receive a mind. Mind/consciousness is an emergent property of brains in humans (isn't it?).

turvy

I think someone recently claimed to have been able to do head transplants with monkeys. Although they were paralysed from the neck down in their new bodies.

I saw footage of that particular nasty experiment. All they achieved from this ethically bankrupt study was to get the transplanted monkey heads to survive on their new bodies for a short while. I've actually never been so sad and dismayed at a scientist.

Ste

yeah, that one should win an ig nobel award (for science that shouldn't be repeated).

Well, the worlds first heart transplant didn't work for long either.

What would be the point of that experiment.
So what you can transplant bodies but they turn out to be paraplegic? What use is that?
Until you can get the spinal cord to regrow all you are going to get is a new paraplegic body.

It's a step in the right direction. and some might consider it better than the alternative.

It seems unsurprising that a head could be kept alive for a while if provided with blood, since the major connections to the head seem to be blood and nerves, and it's pretty clear from spinal injury patients that the brain can keep running with the bulk of its nerve connections severed.
I wonder what people thought would happen, and what the actual goal of the experiment was?
Possibly something less 'cuddly' than a monkey would have been a better choice, even if it was from a pretty unintelligent species.

But possible brain damage might have been better observed in a monkey. I think it was either a baboon or a macaque. I hope baboon, I never liked those.
I think the aim of the experiment was the same as with the first heart transplant, to see if they could keep people alive.

"Ethically bankrupt"
Why?
What type of research is ethically 'affluent'?

"Ethically **bankrupt**" refers to the **lack** of moral consideration of involving a clearly highly intelligent species in such a distressing and scientifically questionable study.

There are other ways to get at these sorts of questions that do not involve torturing sentient beings that are very closely related to humans.

Ste