R's blood subjected to PH tends to become coagulopathic: Accordingly, R's head will be exsanguinated before linkage, and flushed with iced (4☌) Ringer's lactate. Experience with surgical clipping of aneurysms shows the safety of the procedure. Profound hypothermia (PH) curtails the onset of global ischemia and give time to the surgeons to reconnect the bodies.Ĭlinical experience in cardiac surgery has demonstrated that total circulatory arrest under deep hypothermia (18☌) for 45 minutes produces virtually no discernible neurological damage, with a slight increase on approaching the hour. Recovery following circulatory arrest for as long as 1 hour has been reported at <20☌ temperatures since the 1950s. Mammals can be sustained without blood flow for 1 hour at most when cooled to the accepted safe lower limit of 12-15☌: At a temperature of 15☌, the cerebral metabolic rate in man is 10% of normal. Once R's head has been detached, it must be joined to D's body, that is, it must be reconnected to the circulatory flow of D, within the hour. The only way to perform a cephalic exchange in man is to cool the body-recipient (R)'s head to such a low temperature to allow the surgeons to disconnect and reconnect it to the donor (D)'s body, whose head has been removed in the same operating theater by a second surgical team. It is argued that several up to now hopeless medical conditions might benefit from such procedure. This paper sketches out a possible human scenario and outlines the technology to reconnect the severed cord (project GEMINI). It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage. The greatest technical hurdle to such endeavor is of course the reconnection of the donor (D)'s and recipient (R)'s spinal cords. Whether such dramatic procedures will ever be justified in the human area must wait not only upon the continued advance of medical science but more appropriately the moral and social justification of such procedural undertakings.” In 1999, he predicted that “… what has always been the stuff of science fiction - the Frankenstein legend, in which an entire human being is constructed by sewing various body parts together – will become a clinical reality early in the 21 st century… brain transplantation, at least initially, will really be head transplantation – or body transplantation, depending on your perspective… with the significant improvements in surgical techniques and postoperative management since then, it is now possible to consider adapting the head-transplant technique to humans.” A few years later, he wrote: “… What has been accomplished in the animal model – prolonged hypothermic preservation and cephalic transplantation, is fully accomplishable in the human sphere. The monkey lived 8 days and was, by all measures, normal, having suffered no complications. In 1970, Robert White and his colleagues successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey on the body of another one, whose head had simultaneously been removed. Tsiolkovsky AT (1857-1935 Father of Astronautics)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |