Head transplants involve severing a person’s head and attaching it to another body. The procedure has only been successful in animals due to the difficulty of grafting a detached spinal cord. It has been proposed as a potential option for those with multiple organ failure and quadriplegia.
A head transplant is a procedure in which a person’s head is severed and placed on another body. It should not be confused with a brain transplant, a hypothetical procedure in which a brain is transferred from one individual’s skull to another. As of the early part of the 21st century, this form of surgical grafting has never been performed on humans. Head transplants in animals have, to some extent, been successful.
The first attempt at head transplantation in animals was performed in May 1908 by Charles Guthrie of the United States. Guthrie grafted a puppy’s head onto the side of a full grown dog’s neck. The arteries in the puppy’s neck and head were grafted to those of the adult dog so that blood would flow successfully through both heads. While some movement and reflexes of the second head were recorded, too much time had elapsed between decapitation of the head and circulation restored for the second head’s brain to function properly.
Other, more successful head transplants were performed on animals in the years that followed. In the early part of the 1950s, Vladimir Demikhov of the Soviet Union developed a method for reducing the amount of time the severed head was deprived of oxygen through the use of “blood vessel stitching machines.” The experiments that followed included both a dog head transplant by scientists in China in 1959 and a highly controversial monkey head transplant performed in 1963 by a team of researchers in Cleveland, Ohio. This head transplant was somewhat successful as the monkey retained its senses of smell, taste, hearing and vision. Additional head transplants involving rats have also occurred in Japan.
Transplanting a human head would require highly advanced technology that would include cooling the secondary head’s brain to the point that all neurological activity ceases. This would be necessary to prevent the death of neurons in the brain. Technological advances have not yet made it possible to successfully graft a detached spinal cord. Thus, the subject of a head transplant would have no use of body limbs and would be quadriplegic. It has been proposed that this surgical procedure could be beneficial for people who suffer from multiple organ failure and are already quadriplegic, or who prefer to live a life without the use of limbs.
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