Science is constantly looking for ways to prolong life and preserve human health.
Valery Spiridonov, a programmer from Russia, will receive a new body. From muscle atrophy, which a man suffers from, they die in childhood, but he survived, graduated from the university and now dreams that doctors will help him return to normal life. Now Valery is completely immobilized - he will have to part with his feeble body. Valery's head will be transplanted onto the donor's body. A unique operation is scheduled for December next year. Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero guarantees 99 percent success.
“This will either be a person after an accident, whose brain is dead, for example, after a car accident, or it will be a person after a massive fatal stroke, that is, he has a healthy body, but his brain could not stand it and refused, or it will be a criminal sentenced to death. This operation is not only for me. This will open the doors for hundreds of thousands of people who are in need, who are in an even more difficult situation than me,”said Spiridonov.
How to connect the millions of neurons that connect the brain to the body? No one has ever managed to connect the spinal cord and prevent the donor's body from rejecting the head. The most complicated operation will last 36 hours and will cost one hundred million dollars. Science challenges nature, and it is impossible to foresee all the consequences of such a step.
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The main dream of humanity, which people have nurtured for millennia, is to live forever. Or at least extend its existence as much as possible. To transcend nature, to learn how to change worn out parts of the body, how parts in a mechanism are changed - modern science promises that this is a matter of the nearest future. What price are we willing to pay for the hope of a new life, for a new body shell? And who benefits from maintaining comforting illusions?
The newsreel captured the experiment of the Soviet physiologist Sergei Bryukhonenko. In 1928, he demonstrated the resurrection of a dog's amputated head. The head reacted to external stimuli and opened its mouth several times - it seemed to be trying to bark and howl. This experience marked the beginning of a new era in medicine. It has been experimentally proven that the human body can be revived even after clinical death. But before this idea could be confirmed in practice, it was stated in the literature.
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The Italian is inspired by the experiments successfully carried out by his Russian colleagues back in the middle of the last century. A follower of Bryukhonenko, physiologist and biologist Vladimir Demikhov, in the fifties, for the first time in the world, performed a heart, lung and liver transplant on animals. He created an artificial heart for a dog and carried out a fantastic, even in modern times, operation - he gave the dog a second head.
The accumulated experience helped Soviet surgeons to do incredible things. In 1983, Lithuanian girl Rasa lost both feet in an accident. Newspapers all over the world wrote about the emergency operation carried out by our doctors. The sewn-on feet not only took root, but also serve the adult Race regularly to this day.
Professor Alexander Kaplan and his colleagues from the Laboratory of Neurocomputer Interfaces at Moscow State University are studying the hidden capabilities of the human brain and are looking for an answer to the question: what is the power of thought capable of?
The time will come when we can connect our brain to a computer and download information from there. As easily as transferring songs from a computer to a music player now, we will learn new skills. Any technical device will be controlled by the power of thought. This is quite achievable, Professor Kaplan is sure.
The development of the brain-computer interface began several years ago. The first results exceeded the wildest expectations. The symbiosis of man and machine is no longer a myth - it is our reality. New technologies are aimed at improving a person's daily life. But what will happen if a person, in pursuit of perfection, begins to change his biological nature?
The telepresence robot is another guest from the future that has become an integral part of everyday life. It penetrates into the most inaccessible places where there is a risk to human life, allows you to see everything that is happening and even touch distant objects. The creators promise: the moment is not far off when the robot will be given human features. And it will become indistinguishable from the operator who controls it.
The first step has already been taken - the production of androids, learning humanoid robots, has begun. The boom in such developments has come in the last decade. There are android porters, android orderlies, even soldiers. Believe it or not, the Japanese Kodomoroid infiltrated television and replaced the TV host.
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While it seems incredible: sick or inactive human organs will be replaced with healthy ones, like parts of a mechanism. But if scientific and technological progress does not slow down, such a future awaits us very soon.
Infertility is no longer a sentence for a woman who wants to have a child. Modern medicine guarantees almost one hundred percent result if the patient decides to resort to artificial insemination. Prices depend on the class of the clinic and the range of services and start at sixty thousand rubles. Can an expectant mother require doctors to set the biological parameters of the baby? The question is not so much a financial one, but rather an ethical one. Many scientists are convinced that genetic experiments can lead to the fact that a person as a biological species will change irreversibly.
More recently, test-tube babies seem like fiction. Today, in vitro fertilization, in everyday life IVF, is a scientific achievement, without which it is difficult to imagine medicine.
In 2012, scientists conducted an experiment: the insulin gene was blocked in mice, thus stopping the development of fat cells. These animals ate as much as they wanted, while remaining slim. And they lived on average twenty percent longer than their usual relatives. Scientists are convinced that sooner or later the achievements of human thought will radically change our entire life.
The superman of the future is born today. However, this is a long process. The date has already been set when he will finally be born - 2045.
Technically, it looks like this: a sensory suit with the help of numerous recording devices built into it records all the actions of its owner. And then, if necessary, all this information can be recreated. It turns out a backup copy of a person. In 2045, the human personality saved in this way will be transferred into an incorporeal hologram-avatar. The person will be able to feel the avatar as their own body. And the virtual environment will become as real as real life. But who will have access to this digital copy? The initial cost of producing a new cybertel for one person is estimated at $ 3 million.
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Theorists themselves, who proclaimed the imminent beginning of a new era, are in no hurry to become cyborgs. They listen to the advice of doctors and support the body with pills and supplements.
Developers of cryogenic freezing also speak about the possibility of eternal life, who send people to the future - without a change at a station called "death". It is enough to freeze the body in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus two hundred degrees Celsius. And our distant descendants will unfreeze. If only they want to bring back to life their ancestors, preoccupied with the problem of personal immortality.
In the suburbs of Moscow, in a nondescript hangar, there is the only crypto storage in Russia - a place where people rest who believed that someday scientific progress would allow them to be resurrected. The Egyptian pharaohs also took care to preserve their bodies in the hope of eternal life.
In America, the freezing of the dead began in the 60s of the last century. They say that many celebrities wanted to undergo such a procedure after death. The names of Salvador Dali and Walt Disney are called. However, all these are just rumors: one of the main conditions for the work of cryotechnicians is complete anonymity. The only thing they agree to name is the number of people who agreed to freeze. There are now forty-seven patients here.
Here, too, they have heard about a future head transplant operation, and put forward their arguments in favor of such a decision. Professor Canavero works with a living patient, and cryotechnicians work with the dead. But, according to experts in freezing, there is no fundamental difference.
The director of the company, Valeria Pride, even cryopreserved her own mother. Cryogenic freezing technology is based on the fact that even after clinical death, the brain continues to live for some time. As cryotechnicians assure, if you do not miss these minutes and freeze a person in liquid nitrogen, it will be possible to bring him back to life. As an example, cryonics advocates cite some species of animals and fish that thrive after being thawed in natural conditions. However, no one has yet been able to resurrect a frozen person. However, these arguments do not work for those who are ready to pay for the chance of immortality - 12 thousand dollars for keeping the head or 36 thousand for keeping the body.
Cryotechnicians say: we take the baton where modern medicine is giving up. Their technology is somewhat similar to the method of freezing human sperm, which are then used during artificial insemination operations. The difference is that in one case a new life appears, and in the other the illusion of flight into the future - where there are no diseases, wars and nightmares.
The previously famous futurist Ray Kurzweil made another series of predictions. In particular, he predicts that within sixteen years, 3-D printers for printing human organs will be used in hospitals of all sizes. Already, doctors are trying to create artificial muscles, skin and blood vessels based on bone marrow stem cells.
According to forecasts, within fifteen to twenty years, robotics will decrease in size by ten thousand times and become about the same amount of time smarter. And then nanorobots will penetrate our body, replacing pills and vaccines.
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If a million of these small robots are introduced into our bodies and programmed to search for and destroy cancer cells, huge prospects for medicine will open up. Nanobots will be able to replace damaged human cells, such as red blood cells. But all these are plans for the near future. And what can science now offer against disease, aging and death? American biotechnologist Elizabeth Parrish was injected with genetic material into a vein, which must penetrate into the nucleus of each cell and start a process that stops aging and rejuvenates the body. If the experiment is successful, Elizabeth's body will remain as it is until her death. Many experts do not share the subject's confidence.
Ray Kurzweil, who was at the origin of the Human Genome Project, is convinced that fears are unjustified. Scientists have obtained enough material to treat most of the known diseases at the genetic level.
But Professor Canavero hopes for his experience and money, which will make it possible to comprehensively prepare the future operation. At the same time, it seems that he cannot explain exactly which achievements of science and technology will allow him to achieve success.
According to the professor's calculations, after the operation, the patient will remain in a coma for about a month. During this time, the head adapts to the new body in conditions of immobility of blood vessels and muscles. If everything goes well, after coming out of a coma, a person will be able to move and even speak in his old voice. According to Canavero, he conducted similar experiments with animals, and everything went well. But these results were not recorded.
Scientists are in great doubt. The problem is not only medical, but also psychological: can a person's consciousness accept the fact that it continues to exist in a new body?
Valery Spiridonov tries not to think about death. He is worried about something else: what lesson will medicine learn from the risky operation to which he agreed?
The world is on the verge of changes that previously seemed incredible, fantastic, frightening, or the most promising.
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