Xiaoping Ren means well. The doctor from Harbin Medical University in China has extensive experience in the realms of hand and face transplants. And he hopes his current research will lead to transplants that, according to the Wall Street Journal, “might one day be able to help human patients who have intact brains but broken bodies, such as people with spinal-cord injuries, cancer and muscle-wasting diseases.” He’s had some success with mice and may soon be moving up to monkeys. What Dr. Ren is working on, of course, is head transplants.
It’s not the kind of work that would have been permitted at Ren’s former job at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. China, on the other hand, has lavished Ren with millions of dollars in research spending. And he’s making progress, per the Journal:
Since the July 2013 operation, he and his team at Harbin Medical University have done operations on nearly 1,000 more mice, testing various ways to help them survive longer than their record so far of one day after the surgery.
It’s the sort of news that’s bound to excite the cryogenics crowd (and fans of Futurama). But for the rest of us, as the Journal notes, all sorts of bioethical issues arise:
There is also the question of where donor bodies would come from. China, like many other countries, has a shortage of organ donors. Dr. Ren says donors could be found, such as accident victims.
Define “accident” in China.
And needless to say, the whole affair is unseemly. In Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, which I previously reviewed for the Washington Free Beacon, Frances Larson writes about Robert White, a Cleveland surgeon who, in 1971, transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto another monkey’s body. “The operation took eight hours,” she writes. “When the monkey regained consciousness, White described his patient as ‘dangerous, pugnacious, and very unhappy.'” You think? She goes on, “The transplanted monkey’s head, which was anaesthetized so that it felt no pain, remained conscious and alert. It tracked the movement of people and objects around the room, it bit people’s fingers, it chewed and tried to swallow food.” At most, these victims “survived for between six hours and three days before dying from blood loss or immune response rejections.”
