Professor White's heads
The incredible story of a neurosurgeon who tried to transplant a human head
Elena Belova, "Biomolecule"
There are such news and achievements — with a touch of unhealthy sensation and even scandal, more suitable for the front pages of the yellow press than solid scientific biomedical publications. A human head transplant is just one of the category of such stories. For the first time I heard about a head transplant from the news about Sergio Canavero — in 2015, he announced that he was ready to transplant the head of a Russian programmer suffering from hereditary and rapidly progressive muscular atrophy onto the body of another person with brain death. A successful operation has not yet been carried out, but the media enthusiastically discussed this possibility, as if it was more suitable for a cheap fantasy novel than for the realities of serious biomedical research. Before I opened Brandy Skillace's book, I didn't know that Canavero had a famous predecessor — neurosurgeon Robert White, who thought about head transplantation back in the mid-twentieth century, long before transplantology became a serious and respected discipline, and people with transplanted organs had a chance to live longer than a few months. Brandy Skillaci's book tells exactly about this incredible story.
Brandy Skillace. "Professor White's heads: The Incredible story of a neurosurgeon who tried to transplant a human head." Moscow: Alpina Publisher, 2022— - 310 p.
The middle of the twentieth century is an era of great dreams and achievements, desperate and reckless actions that are often crowned with success (although not always), dizzying feats, incredible discoveries and breakthroughs of humanity. And all this is happening at a time when many modern technologies are literally in their infancy, and some will appear even decades later.
And at the same time, people in various fields dare and achieve unprecedented things: they conquer previously inaccessible points on our planet and go into space, implant electrodes into the brains of animals and humans, observing the incredible consequences of such manipulations, decipher the structure of DNA and split the atom. At the same time, doctors also carry out the first organ transplants, which are still doomed to failure: humanity has not yet learned to suppress the body's immune response to foreign tissues, and the transplanted organs are inevitably rejected, prolonging the life of desperate volunteers doomed to death for several weeks or months. And yet people tirelessly continue to experiment, expanding the horizon of the possible further and further, to where the realm of the fantastic lay not so long ago.
People are always impatient to look into the future, which is already very close. "We are on the threshold of many discoveries," the hero remarked Mary Shelley Victor Frankenstein, "and the only obstacle is our timidity and laziness." Do we dare to interfere with our technologies in the established world order? Answer: yes, we dare. From the "iron lungs" (special chambers with variable air pressure) to the current ventilators, from the first kidney surgery to innovations in gene therapy, from resuscitation by cooling the brain "by White" to implantable neural networks — the present of our medicine is the result of the bold daring of the medicine of the past. Before our eyes, what was once science fiction has turned into science - and yet organ transplantation still tickles our nerves with a combination of curiosity and hidden horror. Whose pulse is pounding in the ears of the mother of the deceased child when she hears his heart beating in the chest of another person? And if we get someone else's heart, lungs or liver, do we become different people in some way?
Brandy Skillace describes the story of surgeon Robert White, a devout Catholic, tireless researcher and outstanding neurosurgeon, a man who was able to save hundreds of human lives, while destroying the lives of hundreds of dogs and monkeys. This is the story of a man who first conceived the idea of transplanting a person's head to another body. The narrative resembles a fiction novel, there are no dry figures or complex and detailed descriptions of medical procedures, but the plot of this novel is real events, and its details are based on painstaking collection of invoices — interviews with participants in the events, studying interviews and articles and all the legacy that Dr. White left behind.
Talking about incredible medical breakthroughs, Brandy Skillache also mentions Soviet pioneering researchers engaged in the same problem - organ transplantation and even body parts, in order to achieve success and be able to transfer their achievements to medicine, transplanting organs and tissues to patients instead of those who refused. As a Russian reader, I was curious to look at the history of the technological competition between the two superpowers of the twentieth century — the United States and The Soviet Union — through the eyes of a Western journalist and historian of science. This is not often found in foreign authors. The desire to surpass the rival spurred people on both sides of the Iron Curtain, although, apparently, innovators in America had much more opportunities and technologies to realize their daring ideas. Although not much is told about Soviet scientists and their research, the book indicates the sources from which the author took information, so that an interested reader who speaks English can, if desired, find additional information about the episodes described by Skillache himself.
Immediately after the end of World War II, when this narrative begins, bioethics did not yet exist, and Robert White was one of those who influenced how and under what circumstances this discipline developed. White opposed animal rights activists, defending the right of researchers to conduct experiments on animals if the well-being of people, the well-being of patients and the progress of science depend on it. The book tells the story of the emergence of the animal rights movement in America, and the story of the confrontation between activists and colleagues of Robert White, for whom animal research was a necessary part of scientific work.
The story of a neurosurgeon who dreams of transplanting a human head and thus opening a new fantastic chapter in the history of transplantology is very easy to read, literally in one breath — unless, of course, the reader is not too impressionable and has a fair degree of equanimity and strong nerves. Surgery is a rather bloody field, especially when it comes to the inevitable animal studies in such a complex case, and it is simply impossible to talk about fantastic experiments on transplanting the heads of dogs and monkeys, omitting the unpleasant details of such a procedure.
If the reader is not deterred by the medical (and ethical) side of this incredible story and the accompanying physiological details, I can recommend this book for reading.
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