1970: The Barbaric Monkey Head Transplant
American neurosurgeon, Robert Joseph White, performed a monkey head transplant by purposefully severing the neck of an intact monkey, and attaching it to the body of a separate monkey.
Because the cranial nerves of the brain were unharmed, the new body’s circulatory system nourished the brain, and the head transplant was successful. The monkey was able to hear, taste, smell, and even follow objects.
One of the only two problems was that the monkey couldn’t move its body because he couldn’t reattach the brain to the spine. There was no known method back then. White also failed to account for the immune rejection, and the monkey died after 9 days!
During the 1990s, White wanted to take it a step forward and planned on performing the same experiment on humans. He even practiced on corpses in a mortuary. Although, White did manage to set things in motion with those brutal experiments, and people are now studying the possibility of the human head transplant.
Loading...
