How going Full Frankenstein can be made somewhat acceptable

The highly controversial effort to transplant human bodies is not a scam. There must be millions of dollars of funding for these effort which have been ongoing for at least 5 years.

Case why Sergio Canavero leader of the body transplant effort is a true believer and not a scammer

Multiple surgical teams that include neural surgeons and spinal surgeons have been performing test transplants on mice, dogs and monkeys and now a human cadaver.

The surgeries can take about 18 hours and involve over a dozen people on the surgical teams.

These people are not doing it for charity.

There have not been accusations that Sergio Canavero and Xiaoping Ren are not competent at neurosurgery.

Clearly competent neurosurgeons can about a million dollars per year just performing regular neurosurgery.

They must truly believe in the goal of transplanting entire human bodies (aka body replacement aka head transplant). They must have true believer financial backing.


Xiaoping Ren and Sergio Canavero, the surgeons behind the plans for the world’s first human head transplant. OOOM-SERGIO CANAVERO

How going Full Frankenstein can be made somewhat acceptable

If full body swapping is “perfected” and alzheimers and certain other diseases are cured or become treatable lifespans may be vastly increased. It would be brute force rejuvenation where 75 year old bodies get swapped for 25 year old bodies.

This would always be expensive but could be become more reliable and somewhat lower cost with more advanced robotic surgery.

1. Alzheimers and dementia is defeatable.
2. Complete Spinal cord repair is achievable.
3. Further advancement of robotic surgery can the lower cost and improve the speed and precision of complex surgery.
4. There is advancement of cooling the body for safer surgery that last many hours with a stopped heart
5. Need to work out the immune system transfer so that anti-rejection drugs are not needed.
But if you are swapping out the entire body. The donor body immune system would be the one to go with it
6. The sourcing of bodies and body parts could be increased pig-human hybrids

There is work to make genetically modified pigs as a supply of human organs and to eliminate rejection issues.

Brute force extreme life extension and body rejuvenation could then extend lives into the 140-180 year range. There would need to be brain stem cells and other treatments to keep the brains going.

Although if you can provide rejuvenation to the brain over a couple centuries it should also then become possible to rejuvenate the rest of the body, which would make the body transfers mostly redundant. The Full Frankenstein rejuvenation would be a transition to better immortality methods.

6 thoughts on “How going Full Frankenstein can be made somewhat acceptable”

  1. I know a lot of people have talked about brainless clones over the years, so allow me to throw in my two cents on the idea.

    Don’t we just need one thing to make it work? A brain specific promoter. There’s any number of genes we can then choose to knock down if we have just that one thing, and you can grow clones which are incapable of generating a neural action potential. The brain cells would still be there but no lights would turn on. There’d be life support issues, and we’d have to do some more work on those artificial wombs, but it seems a lot more feasible than human-pig hybrid bodies.

    It doesn’t even have to be a “clone” clone, it could just be any human genetic stock as long as you edit the handful of genes related to immuno-matching. Primarily that would be MHC class I genes (HLA-A, HLA-B, and HLA-C). (You can do this to the pig hybrid as well, so make a pig immune system that matches the head).

  2. I can’t reply in proper order with this obsolete browser, but…

    Fortunately the “wiring diagram” of the spinal cord is pretty dependably the same on the gross level, so if you butt the two severed ends up against each other, you get the right general nerves up against the right general nerves. And then using techniques like glycol cell fusion, you can get a fair number of the nerves to connect up.

    That doesn’t get you the exact “wiring” match you’d ideally want. But the brain has extensive learning capability, it will eventually sort most of the mistakes out. You’ll learn which nerves do what the same way you did the first time growing up.

    The result would not be remotely optimal at the present state of the technology, but the candidates for this procedure aren’t looking to become concert pianists. They’re looking to not die, and ideally not be totally paralyzed. You don’t need a perfect spinal fusion to achieve that.

    As I said below, with 3d printed bodies, and just a little nanotechnology to create an alignment structure where the cords were severed, you could do much better. But this is a start.

    • I think drugs or other treatments to enhance neuroplasticity will come before nanotech. But in any case I really like the 3d printed body idea. It’s hard, in that we are nowhere near the ability to do it in 10 years, but there’s no real reason why it can’t be worked out and every reason to believe we’ll make significant progress in that area. We’ll be redesigning developmental pathways from the ground up, but in the process we can simplify the crap out of the cells we’re using and ultimately unlock options that wouldn’t be possible with normal development.

    • I think Sergio and his team have only done mostly, or entirely, only same-head back to same-body transplants. This ignores the very real different size musculature, and especially, neural wiring from two different sources. Do any two human beings have EXACTLY the same nerve layout or even the same number of nerves? Does environment, age, genetics influence that gross layout? Even a slight difference could mean the difference between full recovery and paralysis or even death. And 18 hours is not a lot of time to coss-wire neural anatomy, especially if there’s lots of other stuff to do, like keeping the patient head and donor body viable.
      II’d feel a lot better if we knew the results of the experiments in more detail.

  3. I don’t see how the brain can be reconnected to something as complicated as the entire rest of the nervous system.

  4. Whole body 3d tissue printing will solve a lot of the problems with this approach to rejuvenation. A healthy body already immunologically matched to the patient could be provided without supply issues. Ideally you could even map out the nerve paths of the old body, to make sure the new body matched, and avoid issues with relearning your peripheral nervous system.

    All you’d need to add is a little bit of molecular nanotechnology, to construct an interface between the two bodies in situ, so that you could just pop the brain out, and drop it into a new head, without any difficulties, matching all the nerves, not just a fraction of them.

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