Dr. Robert White: Total Head-Body Transplant

Time: 1962-1970. Dr. Robert White, a renowned neurologist and bioethics consultant to Pope John Paul II, belonged to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and stumped for what he considered the right to life at all ages.

In 1964, Dr. White performed the first successful brain transplant when he attached the isolated brain of a canine into the neck of a "host" dog, keeping it alive for several hours using the host's circulatory system.

On March 14, 1970, the first successful head transplant was conducted by Dr. White and his Brain Surgery Laboratory staff, with special help from microneurosurgeon Dr. Yoshiro Takaoka.

Two rhesus monkeys were sedated and laid out on separate tables inside the fourth-floor laboratory and labeled with letters A and B. The heads of both were removed and the head of A was attached to the body of B.

"And it woke up and almost bit me," says Dr. White. "It moved the muscles in its face. It blinked its eyes. It chewed on pencils."

More important, it mimicked tests that it had been trained to perform before the operation, proving, for the first time, that consciousness — or the soul, as Dr. White believes — can be transplanted by removal of the brain. What they had performed, the doctors realized, was not a head transplant at all, but a whole-body transplant. The monkey that had survived was the A monkey, after all — the head.

"Your body is a machine for the brain," says Dr. White. "The brain is where consciousness is located."

While the head was kept alive by the circulation provided by the "B" monkey's body, the spinal cord had been severed at the neck, and so the new brain could not control the body itself; nerve endings cannot be sutured like blood vessels. Machines were required to keep the monkey's lungs breathing, its heart beating.

In Russia, Dr. White had taken special interest in the experiments of Vladimir Demikhov, an experimental surgeon. Demikhov had transplanted the upper half of a puppy onto the back of a mastiff. This "two-headed dog" lived for several days, the puppy drinking milk from a saucer held up to its muzzle. Clearly, the puppy was conscious. Dr. White realized that if he transplanted not just a monkey's brain but an entire monkey head, he could prove it was conscious by facial expressions and eye movement.

More information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._White

Watch other videos of him here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SodaOTZWPPg