Tag Archives: BBC

Body-Snatchers: Did the Science and Ethics get a Bypass?

       Your choice. sir?                         frankenstein

Wow-I  just heard, on Radio 4 BBC, a whole programme featuring this Canavero person and his ideas for  head transplants. It is also all over the newspapers.

They keep talking about the person with a terrible disease of the body wanting their head transplanted to a healthy body.

WHOSE HEALTHY BODY? WHOSE BODY ARE YOU GETTING?

Come on guys. Are you suggesting we kill healthy people so that somebody can have their head transplanted onto them?
Really?
Whose?
I know- let’s go abroad and get their bodies!
From some poor family or some criminal or some hitch-hiker!
Really?
There is a dreadful exhibition that has toured the world where somebody displays plasticated humans.  Real humans. They call it an anatomy exhibition. It is completely disgraceful.
What it really is are Chinese prisoners that have been sentenced to death. If they agree to sell their bodies to the curator of the show (from, of course, a Western country) they will be shot by a bullet. If not, they have a slower painful death. Yippee. People murdered for your entertainment.
Please never complain about our ‘primitive’ ancestors when we go to things like this.
Please never complain about the visitors to Bedlam in the 18th century to watch the mentally ill for their entertainment. This ‘anatomy’ show is in the 21st century. All over Europe. Perhaps elsewhere too.
Now the proposal is that people are murdered so some old wealthy person, or some rich ill person can have their healthy body.
Oh this is so bad.
And what is really sick is that the said ‘scientist’ (I use the term, liberally) is bringing some man along who has a really awful physical illness as his side-kick. The said scientist is so deluded  that he thinks he is being kind and ethical trying to relieve this man’s suffering when in fact he is promoting something so vile and rotten I cannot believe he is allowed at a science conference.
It is also CRAP science- but nobody seems to care.
Canavero is so upset that the American public have not taken to his stupid vile ideas that he is taking his bat and ball in a hissy fit and going elsewhere.
Be careful where your children go on holiday.
The body snatchers are back.
See my blog below from  March 2015:
In a  recent report :

‘First human head transplant now possible’,

‘In 1970 Robert White successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto the body of a second rhesus.

Dr Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, has proposed using a similar method with humans.

 He believes that it a team of 100 could perform the operation in 36 hours — at a cost of £8.5million. Both heads would have to be removed at the same time, and reconnected within an hour’   (The Telegraph Newspaper):

Now let’s have a little think about this, using our own heads.

First- I am going to pretend to take this seriously and do the science:

Transplants are difficult things for two reasons:

1) immunological problems– where the recipient (host) rejects the donor (graft) tissue because they are incompatible.

Transplants require matching donor to recipient as immunologically close as possible, but the recipient (host) needs to take immuno-suppressive drugs (drugs that suppress the immune system) for life. This makes the recipient susceptible to infections.

Stem cell science gets funding because it does fundamental research that has applications that benefit this clinical area. One area is ‘Regenerative Medicine’. This is getting your own stem cells to grow new tissue, the tissues that have degenerated. If you grow your own tissues you avoid the problems of immunological rejection of a donor transplant.

2)  surgical problems- connecting the organ correctly so that it functions

Being able to re-connect broken nerve cells (neurons) would be of great benefit and the surgery that this claim invokes would be very useful in doing this for patients with spinal cord injuries.

We are having problems connecting the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The central nervous system (CNS) is even more problematic, probably due to the glial cell support, but we are not sure yet.

So all of this points to Canavero’s claim as CRAP SCIENCE!

Now let’s look at the ethics:

You know those ads  for gyms and beauty parlours that tell you that you can ‘get the body you want’?

Well the body I want belongs to someone else (I can’t decide between Brad’s or Angelina’s as I would be happy with either attached to my head!).

So who is about to donate their body so you can have your ugly mug on it?

We can’t even get enough kidneys for transplants and each of us has two kidneys and can survive on one.

Heart transplants rely on someone dying as you cannot survive without your one heart and most of us are a bit reticent about being a donor.

Getting an entire  (healthy) body is even more unlikely. If it is a healthy body why are they dying?

This is all so stupid that I wonder if Canavero doesn’t, in fact, need a brain transplant. Any donors?

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