X-Message-Number: 12356
From: 
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 00:27:48 EDT
Subject: body transplants

As Chris Fideli mentioned, Cleveland Clinic's Dr. Robert White is reportedly 
ready to do human body transplants (also called head transplants). A 
quadriplegic with a dying body might be given the healthy body (same or 
opposite sex, probably wouldn't matter) of someone who was brain dead. The 
patient would still be quadriplegic, since they don't yet know how to connect 
the nerves, but would be alive.

Or an old person might be given a young body and gain some life extension--I 
don't think anyone knows how much. Material here for lots of gruesome novels.

Obvious problems include the ethical: If a healthy body were used to donate 
several organs to different recipients with different needs, several lives 
might be saved, instead of just one being extended.

Any public relations spinoff to cryonics? On the one hand, every advance in 
medicine makes our thesis more credible, whether there is a real connection 
or not. On the other hand, this could reinforce the antipathy of those who 
oppose anything that seems "unnatural" or Frankensteinian.

Interesting times.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society
http://www.cryonics.org 

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