DailyDirt: Frankenstein Was The Doctor, Not The Monster...

Bleeding Edge

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Thu, May 7th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Medicine is often a somewhat gruesome practice. To treat some injuries/diseases, sometimes you need to perform some extreme surgeries. It's not always pretty. However, some surgeons are working on unusual procedures that sound a bit more like Frankenstein than modern medicine. Transplants from animals, whole head transplants -- if these procedures actually work, doctors could extend the lifespans of people in a way that brings up more and more questions about the quality of a person's life. These operations are far from perfected now, but so were a lot of surgeries not too long ago.

Some unconventional surgeons say a human head transplant will be possible in the near future. This sounds like a sci-fi movie -- because there is a movie coming out about transferring minds (not heads). The first real patient could be Valery Spiridonov -- a man with Werdnig-Hoffman disease -- who still needs a donor body and a medical facility to support the operation. [url]
Xenotransplantations have been attempted for over a century, and there are still lots of problems with implanting an animal organ into a human body. Beyond the animal rights protests, the odds of success for an organ transplant are hindered by immune system rejection responses and possible disease transmission problems. Genetically engineering an animal for better results might be a promising approach, but the technology to grow organs might catch up. [url]
Genetically modified piglet hearts have survived in the body of a baboon (in its abdomen) for more than a year now. The piglet hearts were designed to minimize organ rejection, and the next step is to try to replace a baboon heart with one of these pig hearts. [url]

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Filed Under: frankenstein, head transplant, life extension, medicine, organ transplant, valery spiridonov, werdnig-hoffman disease, xenotransplantation

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Anonymous Coward, 7 May 2015 @ 5:46pm

Well, from an ethical perspective, Dr. Frankenstein was the monster.
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Agonistes, 7 May 2015 @ 6:25pm

Always loved monsters in blazers.
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OldMugwump (profile), 7 May 2015 @ 8:11pm

Re:
In the book, not the movies.
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HMTKSteve, 8 May 2015 @ 2:39am

When I was young I thought sex change surgery used head transplants between a man and a woman who both wanted to change their sex.
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The borthers cousin of the bride of the reannimato, 8 May 2015 @ 3:12am

I was watching that documentry series the X-Files
And I saw the episode about Xeno transplantation, our government already used Nazi doctors to do this and it didn't end well people died!, we shouldn't be making past mistakes again..
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Anonymous Coward, 8 May 2015 @ 5:50am

Re: I was watching that documentry series the X-Files
> Xeno transplantation

Ah, there's my mistake. I thought you were talking about Zeno transplantation. You know, where the first half of the operation takes an hour, but the next quarter takes the next hour, the next eighth takes the third hour... and you never actually finish?
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DannyB (profile), 8 May 2015 @ 5:56am

Re: Re: I was watching that documentry series the X-Files
> > > Xeno transplantation

Maybe that was a typo mistaken reference to that other documentary series: Xena.
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Luke, 9 May 2015 @ 9:25am

Donor Bodies.
Doner bodies.

Bring back the guillotine as a firm of capital punishment.
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