A History of Scientific Experiments: From Brain Removal to Head Transplant
Are there any radical surgical interventions possible in cases where the brain remains healthy, but the body affected by the disease becomes uncontrollable; and vice versa: when the physical shell is full of strength and the central nervous system is damaged? For more than a century, medical science has been trying to find answers to these questions, alleviating human suffering and conducting inhuman experiments on animals.
In the 20th century, the advanced minds of medical science were seriously concerned about the issue of extending human life by transplanting a head to another body, as well as preserving the vital activity of the brain, isolated from the rest of the body. A number of neurophysiological studies have been driven by certain moments. These were clinical situations in which, due to trauma or injury, the head was disconnected from the body, and serious illnesses that deprived of normal existence, and the desire to prolong the life of genius minds, whose physical shells had become old, and the intellect could still serve humanity.
However, long before the onset of the period of great discoveries in surgery in the 19th - early 20th centuries, this problem aroused keen interest of scientists, because the life of a head without a body was fanned by legends and myths. Until modern times, it was believed that a severed head was still capable of life for some time. In order to intensify the humiliation and suffering of the executed, the executioner lifted his head by the hair for all to see before the crowd; in some cases, the head was strung on a spear or placed in a container with quicklime.
The story tells that before his own execution, the outstanding scientist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier asked the executioner to look into the eyes of the severed head after the execution. If Lavoisier manages to wink, then the head does not die immediately. But the executioner refused to comply with the last request, saying that there was nothing interesting in it, and if a person died instantly, then every week you would not have to change baskets where these heads fall, because they gnaw at its edges.
Deep disagreement with the fact of death after the separation of the head from the body found expression in one curiosity that occurred during the Crimean War. Russian soldiers idolized the greatest surgeon Nikolai Pirogov so much, attributing incredible, almost divine abilities to him that once a decapitated soldier was brought to a field hospital on a stretcher. The doctor standing at the door, seeing the people walking, was indignant: “Where are you carrying? You see that he is without a head! " With sincere naivete, the soldiers replied: "Never mind, your honor, they carry their head after us, Mr. Pirogov will somehow tie it up, maybe our brother-soldier will still come in handy!"
50% of the brain
The brain, being the main organ thanks to which man became the king of nature, sometimes finds itself at the sight of a neurosurgeon's scalpel. Many diseases (hematomas, tumors, aneurysms, etc.) lead to surgical interventions on the brain. Perhaps the most radical operation can be called anatomical hemispherectomy, in other words, the removal of one hemisphere of the brain. The void that has arisen in the cranial cavity is eventually filled with cerebrospinal fluid.
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For the first time such an operative technique was tested on a dog in 1888 by physiologist F. Goltz. In relation to a person, this operation was applied in 1923 by the neurosurgeon W. Dandy, in the name of saving the patient from brain cancer. And already in 1938, neurosurgeon Kenneth McKenzie, having performed a hemispherectomy on a teenage girl, reported that surgical treatment helped to stop the epileptic seizures in the patient. Indeed, as it turned out, in the case of unsuccessful drug treatment of epilepsy, it was the removal of one hemisphere of the brain, in which the pathological focus of excitation was localized, that led to a persistent decrease in seizures, therefore such a serious method of neurosurgical practice found especially active application in the last century. Naturally,the operated patients showed a significant loss of body functions on the side opposite to the distant part of the brain, speech and vision were also impaired. But in an era of lack of effective medicines, this technique was a forced step in especially severe cases of epilepsy. Nowadays, such an operation is still rarely practiced by neurosurgeons in different countries.
Professor Brukhonenko's dogs
A pioneer in the study of life in an isolated head was the Russian physiologist Alexei Kulyabko. In 1902, the scientist cut off the head of a fish and, with the help of a system of tubes through which blood substitutes were fed, achieved the desired result: the fish head remained viable for some time.
Experimentally, in mammals, for the first time, Soviet physiologist Sergei Bryukhonenko managed to separate the head from the body of a dog and maintain life in it in the mid-1920s. With the help of the world's first artificial blood circulation apparatus, designed by the scientist, called an auto-light, the dog's heads after decapitation continued to "live" for several hours. One of the experimental heads was presented to the medical community in 1926 at the II All-Russian Congress of Physiologists. The amputated head, connected to an auto-light, retained a reaction to all kinds of stimuli: it flinched and raised its ears when the hammer hit, squinted and blinked when the lamp was pointed at it. Much later, in 1940, this experiment was repeated for a documentary film about the successes of Soviet physiology. The propaganda tape was translated into English and successfully shown in America. Professor Bryukhonenko's experiments became known in Europe. They even inspired Bernard Shaw, who expressed the idea that the idea of living the head separately from the body is quite interesting, because in such a case there would be no need to perform many daily needs for caring for your mortal shell, and you could concentrate exclusively on creating works of art. There is another interesting point, but already connected with the Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev. It is believed that his famous novel "The Head of Professor Dowell" was written under the impression of Karl Grunert's novel "The Head of Mr. Stiyl", but it is hardly possible that Belyaev himself had not heard about Professor Bryukhonenko's dogs.
Vladimir Demikhov, one of the fathers of world transplantation, has advanced even further than Bryukhonenko in his scientific research. In an experiment on dogs, the scientist performed a large number of innovative organ transplants for the first time in the world. Most famous to the general public was his operation to transplant a second head to a dog in 1954. Demikhov created a chimerical two-headed creature by transplanting the head along with the neck, as well as the shoulder girdle and front legs of the puppy on the neck of an adult dog.
From primate testing to human surgery
In 1962, American neurosurgeon Robert White promptly removed the brain from the monkey's cranium. With the help of special equipment, which provided nutrition to the brain, the organ in an isolated state demonstrated vital activity for several days. And already in 1964 White performed a brain transplant from one dog to another, placing the transplanted organ in the animal's neck. The neurosurgeon, along with his team, continued to improve operational techniques and finally in 1970 at the Cleveland Center for the Study of the Brain, the world's first successful transplant of the head of one monkey onto the decapitated body of another took place. After waking up after anesthesia, the monkey was conscious: it was able to hear and see what was happening around; the animal grimaced and gnashed its teeth, took the offered water and milk. But since the damaged structures of the spinal cord, in principle, cannot be connected, the monkey was in an immobilized state. The animal lived for about two days and died from rapidly developing reactions of graft rejection.
The news of a successful chimpanzee head transplant has made adjustments to a very specific business. We are talking about cryonics centers - institutions where the corpses of deceased people are stored in special vessels filled with liquid nitrogen with the aim of a possible prospect of their return to life in the future. And if in the second half of the 60s, whole human bodies were subjected to freezing in cryocenters, and this was quite expensive in terms of ensuring long-term storage of the dead, then after the success of R. White there were many people who wanted to sign contracts so that after their death only one was cryopreserved. head.
The famous neurosurgeon himself, inspired by the results of operations on primates, caught fire to transplant a human head. White worked tirelessly to transplant a vital organ into animals, and at the beginning of the 21st century announced that he was ready to perform an unprecedented operation on humans. The patient who agreed to this type of treatment was the American K. Vetovich, whose body suffered from serious illnesses. However, due to the large number of difficulties on the way to achieving the odious goal, the operation was never carried out.
And although it is still far from the real transplantation of a human head to another body, it is necessary to pay tribute to all those scientists who were busy with this problem. These brave people, despite the lack of understanding, rejection and persecution from the society, were extremely moral individuals who did their best to reduce the suffering of the animals with whom they worked. Such scientists as S. Bryukhonenko, V. Demikhov and R. White laid the fundamental foundations for further research on one of the most complex issues of transplantation and moral-ethical nature. It is fair to say that after several successful cadaveric face transplants carried out in the second half of the 2000s, the issue of a head transplant does not seem so monstrous and blasphemous. But even if it is impossible in the foreseeable future to transplant a head with the full functioning of the rest of the body, modern neurosurgery is sometimes capable of returning patients from almost the other world.
Miracles of surgery
In 2008, American doctors rescued a boy whose head was practically separated from his neck as a result of an accident. Fortunately, the child's spinal cord was intact. In fact, this condition is called "orthopedic decapitation". The chances of survival of the victim were no more than 1–2%. A team of neurosurgeons at the Cook Medical Center in Fort Worth performed a complex operation, completely restoring the connection of the head to the neck. After surgical treatment, the child was partially paralyzed, he had speech disorders. Nevertheless, the young body took its toll and at the end of a long rehabilitation the boy managed to return to normal life.
A similar clinical situation took place among British surgeons in 2006. They got on the operating table 12-year-old Chris Stewart, whose head was almost completely severed from the body as a result of an accident at children's auto racing. Almost the entire ligamentous-muscular apparatus connecting the adolescent's skull with the spinal column was torn; only the medulla oblongata and several great vessels of the neck remained intact. As a result of a long-term operation, surgeons restored the articulation of the skull with the first cervical vertebra using titanium plates, bolts and fragments of the patient's own femur. Taking into account the fact that in the postoperative period any physical activity of the patient could lead to death, Chris was put into a state of artificial coma for three weeks. Two months after the operation, the teenager walked around without assistance, rode a bicycle and swam in the pool. According to the doctors, the body of the unlucky racer was able to fully recover after a severe injury.
Russian surgeons also keep up with their foreign colleagues. So, in the autumn morning of 2008, a patient was admitted to the Yekaterinburg City Center of Maxillofacial Surgery at Hospital No. 23 in a coma that had developed as a result of blood loss. The poor man had his pharynx, esophagus, larynx, and also some important vessels cut. Essentially, the victim's head was supported by the spinal column and skin flaps. In addition, the patient's condition was aggravated by hypothermia: as it turned out later, 35-year-old Bolot Sadykov lay with his neck organs cut all night on the street. Surgeon Ilya Tumanov spent 2.5 hours on the most complex operation, masterly stitching all the damaged tissues. Three days later, the patient regained consciousness and was then discharged from the clinic.
Another interesting case took place in 2006 at the Mesyagutovsky regional hospital, where the surgeon Valery Trofimov literally sewed the cut-off head to the lumberjack Farvaz Iskandarov. It so happened that a chainsaw blade stuck in a tree suddenly bounced off the trunk and cut the worker's neck. When the ambulance took Farvaz to the hospital, blood splattered around him for several meters, and his blood pressure dropped to 80/30 mm Hg. Art. On the operating table, it became clear that the pharynx, larynx, thyroid, trachea, and two cartilages had been cut. With all this, the carotid arteries and the spinal column by a happy coincidence turned out to be intact. It took the surgeon only an hour and a half to restore the integrity of the damaged organs. The jewelery of the intervention performed by the doctor was manifested even in thethat on the third day the voice returned to the patient, and this, by the way, is very rare after such complex operations. Three weeks later, the unlucky lumberjack felt good and left the hospital. The Association of Surgeons of the Republic of Bashkortostan awarded Valery Trofimov the highest award, presenting him with the Golden Scalpel statuette and a diploma for the best surgical operation.
Every year, it is possible to help more and more patients who receive head and neck injuries, which were previously considered incompatible with life. The number of unique operations performed is in the tens, and soon hundreds of successful surgical interventions will be counted. Of course, the time will come when the achievements of world health will surpass even the most daring assumptions of science fiction writers, and even the Hollywood Terminator will be able to envy the effectiveness of surgical and restorative medicine.