Whole Body Transplant: This Doctor Spent His Life Attempting to Transfer Consciousness

Yes, it’s kind of like [amazon text=Futurama&asin=B00F77MAC2]…

Meet Dr. Robert White, and no, this isn’t a sci-fi movie (although it is remarkably like the plot of the [amazon text=X-Files: I Want to Believe &asin=B001OPFIG6] film).

Dr. White, who was the Pope’s personal adviser on bioethics just by the way, spent his career attempting to transfer one living being onto and into the body of another, consciousness and all.

Via NYT:

Most of the experiments on monkeys, cats and dogs described in the broadcast were first conducted in the 1960’s, but Dr. White believes the time is ripe for similar body transplants on humans. He acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that reconnecting the millions of neurons bridging the brain with the spinal column is as yet impossible, and that a person (or rather, a head) who acquired a new body in this way would be paralyzed and insensible from the neck down. But the brain would retain its memory, its intellect, its perception of sight and sound, and its sense of self.

He could ascertain that the brains were conscious and could “think,” but the brains couldn’t control the limbs because of the spinal column connection.

The interview above took place in 1998, nearly 20 years ago. Here’s another with White from The SPOTLIGHT, 1997:

“I have no doubt this treatment will be available in the public arena within the next 25 to 30 years.” White said. “There will be a lot of ethical and moral arguments, but I think they are inappropriate.

“What we are trying to do here is to prolong life,” he added. “The human spirit or soul is within the physical structure of the brain. I don’t think it’s in your left arm or anywhere else.

So it’s been nearly 20 years. Kind of makes you wonder what advancement science has made on this “problem” of bridging the brain and spinal column since then…

White was confident for decades that the procedure could be done successfully. In the 1974 book [amazon text=Mind and Brain&asin=0892260165] edited by Sir John Eccles, Dr. White has a piece titled, “Experimental Transference of Consciousness: The Human Equivalent”. He writes:

Science has reached the threshold where human consciousness can be transferred provided the organ which supervenes this characteristic is maintained. Whether research directed toward human cephalic transplantation should be undertaken requires extensive review by such fields as philosophy, theology, sociology, and medicine.

It would also require lots and lots of funding… which would likely only come from someone with a lust for immortality, as history shows that people with lots and lots of money to throw around on scientific projects like that tend to have ulterior motives that aren’t ultimately in the public’s best interest (Rockefeller, Ford, and Gates foundations come to mind).

Here’s Dr. White and his monkey head transplants (via Motherboard who refers to him as “our favorite real-life mad scientist”):