The extraordinary life of an American neuroscientist who believed he could transplant human consciousness by cooling brains before removing and placing them in another body is told in a fascinating new book.
The work of Robert White, whose life ambition was to transplant a human head, 광주 성형외과 is explored by Brandy Schillace in Mr.
Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul.
In a race against the Soviet Union, White conducted brain experiments on mice and dogs in the 50s and 60s, before ‘perfecting’ the head transplant surgery in 1970 through his work on hundreds of monkeys.
The scientist’s first successful transplant monkey died after eight days because the body rejected the head.
The monkey was unable to breathe on its own and could not move because the spinal cord was not connected.
Yet White fervently believed the technique could, and should, be applied to humans in order to transplant the ‘souls’ of people who were completely paralysed into a healthy body to give them a second chance at life.
A devout Catholic who was friends with Pope John Paul II, he believed that his work had the higher purpose of preserving the soul by saving the brain, but he died in 2010 before he was ever able to perform the surgery on another human being.
WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT: SCROLL DOWN FOR IMAGE OF MONKEY
The extraordinary life of an American neuroscientist Robert White who believed he could move a human soul between bodies by transplanting the brain is told in the new book Mr.
Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, 광주 성형외과 and the Quest to Transplant the Soul
Robert was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1926, the eldest son of Robert White Snr, a US army reserve officer in the coastal artillery.
He grew up in a deeply Catholic household, who moved to Minneapolis when he was 15, where his love of science was inspired by his biology teacher at DeLaSalle, a Catholic high school.
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His father died in World War II after serving in the Philippines and 광주 성형외과 Robert went on to sign up in 1944.
He graduated Valedictorian of his class, but his passion for science led him to the medical corps, and he was shipped out to Indiana to undergo intensive training.
The Russian surgeon Demikhov grafted the head and fore-paws of one dog onto another in 1959 – the animal lived for 23 days after the surgery
In 2016, 광주 성형외과 eccentric Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero claimed researchers in China had successfully followed in White’s footsteps to carry out a head transplant on a monkey (pictured)
Meanwhile in 2017, researchers in China affixed the heads of smaller, ‘donor’ rats onto the backs of larger rats, creating two-headed animals that lived an average of just 36 hours
White ‘perfected’ the head transplant surgery through his work on hundreds of monkeys and in 1970 he performed an 18-hour procedure in which he moved an entire head from one monkey onto the decapitated body of another (pictured)
The scientist’s first successful transplant monkey died after eight days because the body rejected the head.
The monkey was unable to breathe on its own and could not move because the spinal cord was not connected
He would end up in the Philippines, like his late father, where he treated American soldiers suffering from malaria, before he was moved to Japan in August 1945.