From Popular Mechanics
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It may be possible to transplant an entire head and spine into a new body by 2030.
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Even outlandish medical goals can benefit others, for example those seeking limb transplants.
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Head and brain transplants are still mainly the realm of science fiction and body horror.
The Independent reports that a head transplant—really, it’s more of a body transplant—may be possible by 2030 if surgeons include the spinal column. The bizarre fixation on head transplants has mostly been the stuff of immortality legend, but with this step into the realm of possibility, more mainstream doctors are finally joining the discussion.
Brain transplants in fiction date back decades, at least, including a very upsetting Roald Dahl story. But connecting the fine, fussy nervous system after any kind of incision has been thought to be impossible or, at best, really suboptimal. Dr. Bruce Mathew’s inspiration for a solution came from fiction, too: He was consulting and collaborating on a sci-fi novel about a surgical path to immortality.
The secret, Mathew believes, is to separate the brain and the spinal column in one piece that will be introduced into a new body. This cuts out, so to speak, what Mathew considers the most daunting obstacle. If you never have to sever the spinal cord at all, you don’t have to solve any of the thorny problems created by all of the different proposed solutions before now.
There’s an inherent downside to Mathew’s idea, even if it were to become feasible in the next 10 years. If a surgery can only successfully be performed on people with intact spinal columns, that rules out one of the major suggested goals of such a transplant, which is to restore mobility to people with disabling spinal injuries who are trying to reverse them.
Mathew acknowledges that limitation but says the procedure could, hypothetically, help patients with other disabling conditions that affect the muscles or even skeletal system. Unfortunately, the fringe interest in so-called “head transplants” in real life has come from advocates for human immortality, where able-bodied people simply don’t want to grow old and die and are willing to pay astronomical amounts of money to avoid it.
Without a way to successfully reconnect the spinal cord, early adopters of the cryonics movement are even less likely to ever be reanimated. (For what it’s worth, an expert in that field has said that, too, will be possible in 10 years.) Scientific interest in reanimating corpses using electricity date back to the 1800s, best embodied by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but carried out in real life by well meaning experimenters who mistook electrical reflex responses for signs of life.
Mathew told the Independent he believes the gap in understanding will be sealed by artificial intelligence and surgery enabled by robotics. Severing the spinal cord will remain irreparable forever, he believes, but connecting smaller numbers of individual nerves at the different points where they join the spine is less “daunting.” If he’s right, successful and plentiful limb transplants will be feasible before this hypothetical entire body replacement.
The literal reconnection of the spine and brain into a new body is still a very high hurdle, and it’s just one of many, including some doctors can’t accurately foresee. Mathew says a donor body would need to be genetically compatible and gut-biome compatible, both of which are difficult and risky. But a 2030 timeline for this kind of transplant, like President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the moon” speech, could motivate research into projects that will end up benefiting a much wider swath of willing patients with all kinds of injuries or disabilities—and, yes, maybe eventually a whole new body.
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