The successful transplant of a primate's head from its own body to that of another must rank as one of the greatest medical achievements of the twentieth century, if not all time. Even if it didn't usher in a brave new world of head/brain/body transplants for humans, it would surely be embedded in the mass mind like Dolly the cloned sheep. But that isn't how it happened.
Dr. Robert White — at the time, a neurosurgeon at Cleveland's Metro Health Care Center — experimented with keeping disembodied monkey and dog brains alive during the 1960s. In 1970, he upped the ante by severing the head of a rhesus monkey, then attaching it to the headless, still-living body of a second monkey. An article from London's Sunday Telegraph Magazine sets the scene of the 18-hour surgery:
Chalk marks on the floor fixed the positions of more than thirty highly drilled professionals: two surgical teams, a squad of anaesthesiologists, assorted nurses, phalanxes of technicians, a bevy of scientists equipped to analyse blood and urine samples on the spot.
The poor creature regained consciousness and, according to White's paper in Surgery, it and the subsequent Frankenmonkeys were well aware of their surroundings, visually tracking people and objects. Traumatized beyond all comprehension, they were also agitated and violent, chomping a staff member's finger “if orally stimulated.” In her death book Stiff, Mary Roach writes:
When White placed food in their mouths, they chewed it and attempted to swallow it — a bit of a dirty trick, given that the esophagus hadn't been reconnected and was now a dead end. The monkeys lived anywhere from six hours to three days, most of them dying from rejection issues or from bleeding.
Although this amazing and troubling procedure initially generated headlines, it's been largely forgotten. In the past few years, isolated articles on White's work have popped up in the British mainstream media and the American alternative press (Wired and the Cleveland Scene, for example). But this seemingly impossible feat failed to become common knowledge.
White caught a lot of heat from bioethicists, fellow doctors, and animal rights activists. This, plus the expense of these operations, meant that he had to give up this field of research. Still, during his occasional interviews, he dreams of pulling the ol' switcheroo on human noggins. Several countries less prone to hand-wringing have expressed interest, he says, but the funding just isn't there. And who wants to be the first head on the chopping block? The procedure would be of most benefit to paralyzed people whose bodies are in danger of giving out. Because medical science still can't reconnect severed spinal nerves, any recipient would be unable to move below the neck. Once the people in white coats overcome this limitation, White could find himself back in business. And heads will roll. 