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The Bizarre History of Head Transplants
How a scientist’s daring experiments pushed the limits of medicine
On a cold night in Cleveland in 1971, Dr. Robert White waited for signs of life. He stood, exhausted and still enrobed in a stiff surgical coat, over an operating table. Fluorescent lights bled color from the room, leaving it sterile, silent. A rhesus monkey lay before him — its shaved neck with the stitches still showing in a zipper seam that stretched 360 degrees.
On the line were years of work, months of waiting, and the stinging wounds of battles he’d fought against animal rights groups, the media, and even his own colleagues in the name of science. One hundred frozen monkey brains, thousands of hours of painstaking preparation: It had all come down to this moment of proof. And at last, the eyelids fluttered.
White’s patient was awake, aware, and very much alive. But it had just woken up on a totally different body. Decapitated from its own shoulders, Monkey A had been reassembled on the headless torso of Monkey B.
The monkey, paralyzed from the neck down, gnashed its teeth to bite. “What have I done?” White asked as he watched its roving eyes. “Have I reached a point where the human soul can be transplanted?’” A peculiar question, perhaps. But he had just done the seemingly unthinkable: He’d performed the world’s first successful head transplant.
I spent two years writing about this story for Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher, and most people’s first reaction tends to be disbelief. Surely, you can’t transplant someone’s head or brain Frankenstein-style? Surely, this is fiction and not fact? But I have seen the video footage of this meticulously documented surgery; it is real and every bit as upsetting to watch as you might imagine.
Once assured of its truth, the second question is always the same: Why would anyone want to do it? I’ll get to that. But let’s take a moment to absorb the real story here: It is possible to transplant a head.
So, what exactly does this mean?
