Stuff You Should Know - Is a head transplant really a thing?

Episode Date: May 23, 2017

"Head transplant" is a bit of a misnomer, because it's more like a body transplant. But either way, the idea is that one human will wake up from surgery with a decidedly different look. Is it possible? Probably not. But there are a couple of surgeons who are making a lot of news in their bid to find out. Learn all about this grisly potential procedure in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, there's Jerry, there's Stuff You Should Know,

and it's Stuff You Should Know about something that has nothing to do with the sun. Are you relieved? Yes. Are you suffering post-traumatic podcast disorder? A little bit. Yeah. But overall, I'm feeling good about this.

Okay, about this one coming up. Yeah. Finish strong. Yeah, what did Jerry say, always do the suck one first? Yeah, well, so far, so good. Yeah, it just remains to be seen whether this one's great, but I don't see how it could be worse than the Aurora one. Well, this one about human head transplants.

After I picked it, I thought, gee, should we even be covering this? Why? Because, well, if you read opinion pieces about this potential head transplant surgery, which we'll get to, a lot of people are saying like, this is bad, this is junk science, this is dangerous medicine,

and you shouldn't even be talking about this stuff. Right. But then I read an article in The Atlantic, and it's The Atlantic. And I was like, you know what, if they're covering this, then we should cover it too. And people probably said the same thing about kidney transplants and heart transplants

and skin grafts, you know? Oh yeah, for sure, but I think the big difference with this is, and I think this is what the medical and bioethical community has a problem with, there's this one maverick, possibly lunatic scientist, surgeon, who is plowing ahead with this surgery with the rest of the medical field worldwide, basically, saying, stop, stop, like you can't do this.

This is, we're not there yet. And he's saying, nope, we're there. I've even got somebody who's willing to do this. We're gonna give it a shot. Well, yes and no. He's, a lot of that is, and this Atlantic article really kind of spells everything out. A lot of that is bravado out of this dude.

Right. And there is probably no way that he's gonna do this in December of this year, like he said he is. Yeah, he said that he is going to go ahead with the surgery, at least officially, is what he's saying, in December of 2017. That's not gonna happen. Specifically, he's going to do it

with a Russian computer engineer named Valery Spiridinov. And- That may not happen with him. He has, Spiridinov has something called Werdnig-Hofmann disease, which is a spinal muscular dystrophy. Yeah, that's true. The atrophy. And has he backed out now?

Because he seemed pretty gung-ho in everything I saw. No, he's gung-ho, but he is on record of saying like, I don't want to be a part of an expensive euthanasia, whatever procedure. Yeah, well, that makes sense. I mean, the whole reason he wants to do this is to get better, to improve his lot.

He's wheelchair bound and his muscles are withering away. And he's 30, and he wants to be mobile again. He's 31 now, but yeah. I would imagine he was 30. Yeah, he doesn't want to do this just to die. Right, so he's kind of, and what we're talking about, I guess we should just go ahead

if people are severely confused. It's called a human head transplant. But what it really is, is a human body transplant. Because what you're doing is, is you're taking a person, in this case, this Russian gentleman, who has a fully functioning brain, and from the neck up is fine,

but his body is wasting away. And when they get to the point where they can do the surgery, they're gonna get a body from a recently, very recently deceased person. Or soon to be deceased person. Yeah, they would just need to be brain dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And move the heads, which would, in turn, give what's his name, Valerie, a new body. Yes, exactly. Which is as radical of a thing as you could ever imagine. There is no more radical medical procedure as we currently stand right now in this. No chance, not even close. And it's not like they're even swapping the heads.

The donor's head just gets thrown away. Well, in a bucket. Yeah, I guess. For a little chuck to find. Yeah, I didn't think about that, but yeah, you don't put it back on. No, there's no point in it. So this head transplant or body transplant,

depending on your perspective, the whole idea, obviously, it's kind of an old idea, like it goes back to Frankenstein, and you can make a case that Frankenstein is based on even earlier stuff, like creating a golem from clay, that kind of stuff. But the idea is not new, but the idea that it could actually be done

is fairly new. The surgeon who's planning on carrying it out, Dr. Sergio Canavero, he published an article in 2013, and said, here's how I plan to do this, and we'll get to that in a minute. But in the article that he wrote, the journal article he wrote,

laying out how the surgery could be done, one of the first things he does is cite similar surgeries that were carried out on animals. Yeah, which we've covered these before in past episodes, I think on, like, I think one of them was a top 10 list, like awful medical procedures or something. Yeah, I can't remember, but this one, one case specifically that stands out was in 1954,

there was a Russian doctor named Vladimir Demikov, and he, very famously, grafted the head and forelegs of one dog onto another dog. And apparently, both of the heads could smell and hear and see and swallow. And scream. And lived. I think he did this a few times,

and the biggest success was one of these dogs lived for 29 days. Right, which is actually from what I'm seeing, that's a very, very long time. Yeah. And this is at a time in the, what'd you say, 54, 1954? Yeah. This is a time when the only successful transplants

that had been carried out in humans were bone, blood vessels, and corneas. They'd never done a major organ transplant yet. And this guy's getting dogs with grafted heads, two heads to live for 29 days, so it was a big deal. But even still, and I'm sure at the time people were like, that's pretty tasteless, when looking back historically, you're like, don't do that, stop.

I wish that it never happened, what were you doing? And apparently, Demikov's ultimate goal was to just basically get transplants down and create a bank of organs, an organ bank, to where if you needed a transplant, you could get any transplant you needed any time. Transplants would just be so routine. And he saw this as a means to an end, learning techniques, because apparently grafting dogs together

would help you with that. Right. Which I mean, it makes a case. Yeah, he wasn't a mad scientist. He was trying to advance medicine. Right. So in 1970, I noticed there had just been really big gaps in a lot of this stuff, for good reason, I guess.

But in 1970, right here in the United States, there was a rhesus monkey in Cleveland, and one Dr. Robert White performed a head transplant. And the monkey survived neurologically for 36 hours. But I believe he never actually connected the spinal cord. No, no, and that's the biggest hurdle right now. Yeah, it was and still is. So Dr. White, I mean, still, this is pretty significant.

He transplanted a head from one monkey to another and managed to connect the major veins and arteries and resuscitated, managed to resuscitate the monkey. And it lived for a few days. But apparently it was just an awful thing, even at the time, one of the scientists that was there who's actually become Dr. Canavero, the surgeon who wants to do the human head transplant,

this other guy's become one of his greatest and most outspoken public critics. He was there at the time when this experiment in 1970 was carried out and he said, this is a terrible thing to do, even to a monkey. He said, we tried to feed it the first time we fed it. The food spilled out of its trachea onto the floor. Yeah, good Lord.

It was just an awful thing. And this guy's really beating the drum to like stop Dr. Canavero from carrying this out because he was there saying, or he saw the monkey experiments. But Canavero is saying, you can say that all you want. All the food could have spilled out on the floor. It doesn't matter because it was successful.

The monkey was revived for three days. But everybody agrees. They didn't connect the spinal column and that's the big hurdle. That's one of the biggest unknowns with the actual head transplant. Yeah, and more recently in the past couple of years, in fact, I think just last year,

there's a surgeon who's actually partnered up with the Italian doctor named Jiao Ping Ren. And he's a surgeon in Harbin, China who has successfully done this on mice. Yeah, he's also partnered with another researcher at Konkuk University in South Korea who's also carrying some stuff out on mice. And Canavero is basically using these studies

to say, hey, this is possible. But apparently the scientific community is saying, these are not necessarily good studies. Well, and Dr. Ren in China, before I gather, he's the one that's saying, let's just slow our roll here and do this. If we ever try to do it, do it when we really think we can. I've done a monkey. I've done some mice.

We're not ready to human yet, so let's just not talk about Valerie in December of 2017. And please stop doing TED Talks and going on news programs and just shut up for a little while. That doesn't sound like that's in Sergio Canavero's DNA. No, he is very brash, sort of... They said in this article, he says bread instead of money, like, hey, if I can't raise the money,

I'll go to someone like Zuckerberg and get the bread to do this. It says here in the Atlantic article, he says Canavero tends to make blowhard statements that denigrate his critics like this. I'm into jujitsu, he told me. So I have the martial arts mind that you need to tackle all the morons that come with idiotic questions. He's not doing himself any favors.

Yeah, I don't think he sees it like that from what I'm seeing. Like, where I get all my news, the Daily Mail, I saw a Daily Mail article on him and his procedure, and it has a photo shoot of him wearing scrubs with a man's head on a platter. Like, doctors don't do that. They don't do photo shoots like that. They are not trying to court controversy.

Like, yes, if you're a surgeon, like you have some part of your fiber is pretty cocky and arrogant, maybe even have a God complex. I think it's kind of required typically with that field, that profession, right? This guy is exponentially beyond anything that's even high-end for a normal surgeon as far as egotism and blowhardness goes. Most of them don't boast about jujitsu publicly. No, in fact, most scientists and doctors most don't like him at all.

They said, this is one quote, he glibly glides past major problems with his human centipede level medical horror show. His plan is insane, like James Bond villain insane, and will amount to an elaborate act of slow torture and murder. So, I think he's partially, obviously, really like that as a dude, but they don't have the money it takes. They don't have the bread, like $100 million to do this.

And I think he thinks all this media attention is what is going to get him the bread to carry out this operation. You're going to call it bread from now on? Just through this show. Did you see $100 million? The most I saw was $13 million. Oh, I mean, I've seen it all over the place. That's the thing, I've seen it takes anywhere from 30 doctors to 100 doctors

to assist in this, which is one of the other big problems, is getting up to 100 legit doctors that will do this. Right. You know? This guy's like walking clickbait. Oh, yeah. So, let's take a break, man, and then we'll come back and we'll tell all the grisly details of his plan.

Music On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck. So back in 2013, this Sergio Canavero hit the scene in a journal.

Oh, what's the journal called? Surgical Neurology International. It's an open source journal. Yeah, he's no quack, we should point out. He's been published a lot, and he's a legit surgeon. Right. Like he obviously knows what he's talking about. It's just the gamble that he's taking is so, so obviously stacked against him.

I think most people would say you would have to be insane to actually do it, or so reckless and indifferent to the fate of your patient that you shouldn't be practicing medicine in the first place. Yeah, because almost 100% of the doctors that they've talked to said, this will end in this man's death. Yeah, like think about this. They're working on rats. Rats have the best outcome of any animal so far.

And they have like 30 to 50% survival rate among rats. But even that just means that 30 to 50% survived no more than one day after having their head transplanted. They died from the surgery one way or another. It's just that survival rate meant that they were managed to be revived after the surgery. It doesn't mean that they went on to live a healthy life and bounce their grandchildren on their knee. They died within a day.

Yeah. There's no way that it wouldn't kill a human being. Yeah. I mean, even if the guy survived, the likelihood of him being like, well, I got my new body now is like 0%. Watch me bench this. Although, Ken Averro said he has a 90% chance of living a regular life. And Dr. Ren in China is saying, no, he doesn't quit saying that.

Right. You know? Yeah. This guy is exactly the kind of surgeon for this age, isn't he? Yeah. He really is, actually. Oh, it's a 90% chance to live a normal life. Where'd you get that?

Well, it just sounds good. We'll just go with that. Yeah. He fits with the times. So back in 2013 in that journal, Surgical Neurology International, Ken Averro published basically a step-by-step outline of how this surgery would go down. Yeah. And it's not super in depth.

It's basically an overview. But it hits, you know, most of the salient points. And he's basically gone and taken different surgeries and assembled them into this one massive surgery that would be a head transplant from one donor to the next or one donor to the recipient. Yeah. And I think even doctors say this isn't like, you know, he's not crazy. Like when you look at it, it all kind of makes sense.

They're just saying, like, it's not going to work. Right. That makes sense? Yeah. Yeah, totally. And the big stumbling block is going to be the spinal cord. Because basically everything else, all these other surgeries that he's cobbling together are proven surgeries.

Like they can be done. It's that connecting the spinal cord that's the biggest obstacle during the surgery. All right, should we go through this thing? Let's. So the first thing you do is you need two teams, two surgery teams, obviously, because you have two bodies in there. In the same operating theater. Yeah.

This has got to be a very quick. I think they said the heads have to be, or the head has to be reattached in like under an hour to have any chance. Right. But the spinal columns have to be reattached within less than two minutes. But you have an hour for the whole procedure from the moment the heads are cut off. So the first step, Chuck, is you remember how we had, we did an episode on therapeutic hypothermia?

Yeah. So they plan to use therapeutic hypothermia where they cool the head of the recipient down to like 50 degrees. Yeah. Which, you know, normally it's 98.6 degrees. And at that temperature, metabolism slows tremendously. So since you have fewer processes going on in the cells, you have less of a need for oxygen, which is good because you're cutting the head off of the body and oxygen can be

hard to come by. So by cooling the head down to 50, I think 54 degrees Fahrenheit, which is, I believe, Celsius, the metabolism slows down enough that you're buying yourself that hour. Remember there's that hour time limit? That's because you've cooled down the head, slowing the metabolism, and that gives you that hour to carry out the surgery. So you're cooling the head on the recipient, and then you're cooling the spinal column to the same temperature on the donor.

Right. So everyone's gotten cooled down to that point. The recipient is going to be lying down at first, and then later, like during the surgery, and then during recovery and everything, he's going to be in a seated position because, I guess, I guess that just makes sense. With gravity, you'd want to be seated. Doesn't that make sense? I think it makes the surgery easier for the surgeons, too.

Well, but during recovery, too, like they're not going to lay him back down. I don't think I'll ever be allowed to lay down again. Maybe not. So they make the incisions at each neck. They expose the arteries, the spine, the jugular veins. Obviously, they're going to clamp everything off. They color code all the muscles, which sounds funny, but it's actually pretty smart, I guess. Just like wires in a circuit would be color coded.

They want everything hooked back up to the right thing, so they're color coding muscles. And they lead the spinal cord for the last thing. Yeah, and this is the very, very tricky part here. This is where everybody's like, okay, you're crazy if you try this. But Dr. Canavero says, if you cut the spines, the spinal columns of each of the donor and the recipient with a sharp enough blade, and you make a surgical cut, you should be able to promote regeneration of those nerves that you're cutting when you reattach them. That if the cut is precise enough, the damage that's normally associated with a spinal sever

from some sort of trauma or injury, you won't have all the attendant scarification and inflammation that you would from that if you're doing it surgically with surgical precision. So that's a big thing that he's saying. Yeah, that's one of the biggest stumbling blocks to getting these nerves to reconnect is the second they're cut, they're going to start to form scar tissue, which makes it much harder to reattach. So in the case of these mice in China, they use a $1,000 scalpel with a diamond blade so thin that it's transparent.

Wow. And so this is too small, obviously, for this procedure, but they're going to get a scalpel like that big enough to work on a human. So actually, we'll just say a lot of the things that people object to with this. But what Canavero is saying is that with this cut, when you take the spines, are we at the head yet, have we moved the head? Well, yeah, we've cut the head and people should rest easy knowing they're not just picking the head up.

Apparently, it's going to be transferred on a specially built crane with Velcro straps. And the crane is actually kind of clever too because it can just hold it aloft above the donor body, right? So that allows for the surgeons to connect everything, again, in comfort without having to get into any weird positions or whatever. With the floating head staring at them? Yeah, the floating head hanging over the seated headless body. This is the point that we're at right now.

So one of the first things they'll do, well, the first thing they're doing, because remember, you have less than two minutes between when you cut the spinal column and when you reattach it. So the first thing they're going to do is attach the spinal column in the recipient's head and the spinal column in the donor's body and they're going to put the stuff in that apparently is made of magic and it's called PEG, polyethylene glycol glue. It's a medical surgical glue that supposedly works some some wonders on the body. Yeah, it is like magic and I don't understand how it works.

I'm not going to pretend on this show. But in China, with these mice, before they did the transplant, they would literally just take this blade and they would sever the spinal cord of this poor little mouse and then they would take it, apparently it looks like watered down scotch and they would, it's like an amber fluid and they would take a drop of it, drop it on that little spinal column, stitch the mouse up and then the mouse would walk again. Yeah, that's something that they were reporting from those, that these mice had their spinal columns totally severed and then reattached, glued together with polyethylene glycol and

yeah, within what, like three weeks I think or a couple weeks the mice were walking again. This one was two days. Geez. That was the dog that took three weeks. Yeah, and it said the mouse did not walk perfectly. These back legs lurched at times but compared to a control mouse, yeah, the control mouse couldn't walk. It would just pull the back legs behind itself.

So this polyethylene glycol, apparently what it does is it's hydrophilic and it attracts fats to it. So it'll go in, you squirt some into like the incision or the gap between the two spinal columns and allegedly what it will do is attract these damaged cells and basically fuse them together. They fuse together and regenerate basically into cells. That's one thing it does. And then there's this pig that's kind of enhanced I guess that these researchers at Rice University

are coming up with, they call it Texas pig that has graphene nanospirals in it. And those serve as basically a structure for the cells to grow along. And the whole point of using pig here aside from the fact that it can help cells repair and regenerate is that when Canaveral cuts the spinal column, he will have severed these nerves and axons, the white matter that transmit electricity through the body from the brain and vice versa, and they need to reattach. And if they don't touch one another, they're going to grow past one another and the electrical transmission will never be able to take place.

He's saying if you use pig, and these Texas researchers are saying if you use Texas pig, these nanostructures will provide a structure for the neurons or the axons to grow along and they will reconnect and regrow and the person should be able to have electrical transmission through their nerves again on the spinal column. This is the most controversial point so far. Yeah, and they're also going to have electrical paddles on hand because apparently burst of electricity can help reestablish that communication when you sever the spinal cord. So you want to take a break right now?

Yes. And come back and finish up with this gruesome operation right after this. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So we have now put the crazy glue, Texas style in place.

Uh, everything's reattached, all the color coded, uh, muscles and nerves and arteries and veins. Um, taking great care, they finally sewed the head on and then they're going to, um, they're not just going to say good luck with recovery. They're actually going to induce a medical coma with this gentleman, whether it ends up being, um, the, the Russian or somebody else, um, cause he, he's got a fatal disease. He may not make it if this keeps getting delayed. I don't think we mentioned that.

He's not just like, I don't want to live my life like this, like he shouldn't have lived this long. Gotcha. I didn't realize he was that, that bad off. Yeah. I think only 10% of people with his condition make it into adulthood and doctors are all like, you should have, you know, you're on borrowed time as it is. You should have gotten a head transplant years ago.

Exactly. So, uh, they're actually going to induce a medical coma, um, I don't know for how long did it say? I saw like three, three weeks is what he was roughly estimating. Just to keep everything, just to get everything growing back together as calmly as possible. That with, while preventing movement to, yeah, like the possibility of movement, he's just not moving for three weeks, which I mean, hello, bed sores. Am I right?

Although I guess it's probably the least of your worries when you've just gotten a head transplant. Yeah. I think so. But that's that they, I believe that's it. So they're, they're going to be inducing a medical coma and then they'll be passing electrical charges through the spinal column to try to induce, um, axon regrowth and repair the, this, this whole time.

Yeah. And then after three weeks, they'll get up, do a cartwheel and run right out of the hospital. No, after three weeks, uh, maybe he'll open his eyes and move his mouth. Um, that would be a success to a certain degree. Uh, what they're really going to be looking for is, uh, anything below the neck moving. Um, if he wiggles his fingers or his toes, that is a breakthrough like we've never had in medicine before. Yeah.

Um, but even if that happens, that would be just the beginning of a very, very long road of, uh, not only physiological rehab, but, uh, psychological rehab. Yeah. Apparently the psychological impact a lot of people are worried about when, um, Canavero wrote, uh, the, the initial article in 2013 in that same journal, a couple of other Italian surgeons wrote into the editors and said, there are a lot of things wrong with this ethically. Yeah.

Even, even just put aside all of the questions surgically, ethically, you know, this guy's not taking these things into account. One of the things they pointed out was that insanity would be a likely outcome from, uh, the head or body transplant because we form our, our sense of ourselves cognitively in large part through our body. So if you suddenly have a different body, you're, you would, um, you basically wake up to you overnight with, with, to a big fat, uh, body identity crisis or identity crisis in general.

Yeah. I mean, they've had, uh, they've seen this act out in like hand transplants and that's really, you know, you can't see your liver or kidney or your heart, uh, or cornea, like stuff like that. But, um, But I'm sure it's still, you still think about the fact that your, your kidney is from somewhere else, but you don't have to see it all the time. Yeah, exactly.

So just that reminder of a hand, much less an entire body, uh, is going to be emotionally and psychologically challenging to say the least. Right. Um, there's some other questions that this definitely raises as well. Um, for example, if you wanted to change your gender, would this be acceptable, an acceptable surgery? I tend to say yes on that one. Like an, change your entire body.

Yeah. Instead of just parts of your body. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just, you know, that makes sense. So like all at once, bam, done. What about someone who, what if this works and someone was super rich and just wanted a different body?

Like I want to be eight inches taller and muscular. So let's do this. Here's the million dollars. Uh, I would have an issue with that for, for one reason. And that would be that you have just taken the, um, the body of a potential organ donor that could have saved multiple lives of people who needed those organs. You took them because you wanted to be eight inches taller. Other than that, if, if there was a, yeah, well, that's a pretty big one.

I don't need, I don't even want to qualify it with saying other than that, I have no problem with it. Cause that's such a huge problem. It disqualifies it in my eyes. Uh, here's the good news though is that, um, he doesn't have to get a hundred percent of these cells to remain intact. There are studies out there, like, you know, legit studies that say, uh, your, your motor function, your basic motor function can be preserved if you just get 20% of those cells

to remain intact. So, um, the Atlantic says if he failed to fuse every four or five, um, he could fail on every, uh, I'm sorry, four of every five nerve cells and it still might succeed in there. Right. So the thing is, is Ken Averro's whole thing is anytime somebody raises an objection to it, he's like, peg, peg, polyethylene glycol will handle it. And it does seem to work some pretty amazing miracles, but the, it's not just some cure

all magic stuff that just fixes everything. It remains to be seen. And what's kind of fishy is a lot of the, um, or some of the recent papers on peg and what an amazing miracle compound it is are edited by Ken Averro himself. So right, the guy who's saying, no, it's this miracle substance. You should read about it is the one who's editing the stuff that he's telling you to go read about, you know, yeah, uh, I don't think we mentioned just like an organ can be rejected.

The, it could reject the body outright from the beginning, uh, which would be a catastrophic failure. Um, that would, that would kill you if your head, your body rejects your, or your head. Yeah. Well, I'm just glad he's hooked up with Dr. Ren at least because before that, um, before they had made contact, he was, he was plowing full steam ahead, um, and still wants to, but he hadn't even, he wasn't trying it on mice and monkeys. You know, like he hooked up with someone who was, it was like, Oh, well you're, you're

doing the real work. Let's get together on this. So his, um, his idea was that he would have to practice on cadavers. That's a good idea. Yeah. He needed to practice on cadavers, but apparently that would come after practicing on, um, animals. And apparently he, according to, to bioethicists, he would be hard pressed to get approval even to carry out an experiment like this on animals these days.

Yeah. And the medical ethics boards would be like, no, this is unnecessary. This is not, you shouldn't be doing this. So don't do that. At least in the United States, I should say. Well, he is never going to do this here. He would almost certainly have to do this in China. Uh, they have a lot more latitude.

I saw there's this hospital in Vietnam that's like us, us, we'll do it. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Cause they probably can get funding and, uh, press would be my guess. Yeah. I would imagine. I know they went to, uh, the Russians because this gentleman is Russian and he thought they could get the government to chip in and they said no.

And so now he is literally trying to raise money by selling things. Raise bread. He's trying to raise bread by selling like mugs and key chains and stuff. This is not a lie with his head on like these, these muscular bodies and stuff. Wow. So it's, uh, I did see, I finally found it said between 10 and a hundred million dollars, which is pretty big, uh, latitude there. Yeah.

I mean, there's like a, there's a, it's pretty easy to point at Canavero and be like, here, what's your deal, man? Yeah. But it, it, it makes it easy to, to look past, um, the patient, Spiridonov's, um, situation, you know, like, I'm sure he wants this to work so bad. Sure. It's heartbreaking. You know, yeah.

I mean, so much so that like he said, he doesn't want to just be an expensive, uh, euthanasia procedure, but he also said, you know, I'm headed toward death here soon. Like, why not? Yeah. I saw one other thing. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I saw that another objection to this by the medical community would be that it could conceivably

raise the yuck factor. That's what they call it, um, among organ donation, just around among the general public. And this yuck factor, I checked it out because it was in scare quotes. It's a real thing. And it, it's basically the general public's, um, disgust toward bio, like bio augmentation, food surgeries, um, odd transplants, this, this, a head transplant body or a body transplant or head transplant falls right into that weird yuck factor, almost like the uncanny valley. And I read this article about it and apparently there's something, there's a debate going

on on whether humans have an inner wisdom of what is good or bad or acceptable. And when our yuck factor is activated, it's actually an inner wisdom that's saying that's not okay, don't do that. And this, this author was arguing that that's not true, that it's actually what is called folk biology, that humans are kind of prewired to have an idea of what's natural and what's normal and we're just simply grossed out when we're faced with something that challenges that normalcy, but it doesn't mean that it's right or wrong. There's this debate over which one's correct, folk biology or the, the inner wisdom, you

know. Wow. That's interesting. It is pretty interesting. Well, we did an entire, uh, show in 2010, I think January or maybe it was June, started with the J and it wasn't July. Uh, I wrote it down, but I just threw it away. Anyway, how organ donation works.

So yeah. Go check that out. It's a good one and the therapeutic hypothermia one. Check that out too. Yeah. Well, if you want to know more about this head transplant operation, you can type those words in the search bar, how stuff works and it'll bring up a great article. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this, um, what should I call this one? I'm going to call this anniversary of the podcast. Hey guys, my name's JP and I'm a business administration major at Christopher Newport University currently studying at the University of Glasgow, uh, going into a, my senior year writing on my 21st birthday, which is also the fourth anniversary that I began following the podcast. My little brother introduced me to SOSK and immediately binged roughly 300 episodes. Not sure how many people write in saying this, but I can probably say, listen to every single

one. I know the episode in context of Hippie Robb's emergence, they haven't talked about him in a long time. No, he's been long gone. He seems like he would be like an assistant to the surgeon. You know, Hippie, I don't think that'd be a good idea. Oh no, it's a bad idea. And I don't mean a medical assistant.

I mean, like a, you know, he'd do the jujitsu on the idiot questions. Maybe, but it just be some like clumsy, like roundhouse kick that that was just like six inches off the ground. The past four years have been some of the most influential on my life as a whole. And your podcast has played a huge part in how I matured as an adult through Chuck's soft spoken tone and Josh's optimistic demeanor. How about that? As well as Jerry's elite producing abilities.

The podcast has made me look forward to Tuesdays, something I never thought was possible. I guess he doesn't listen to Thursdays. Optimistic. Yeah. Optimistic. That's you. Never, never would have called that one aside from how much I enjoy that maybe has us confused. Maybe because you have a soft spoken tone aside from how much I enjoy the podcast.

He really shaped how I think things through as well as my perspective on many issues. People often forget that some matters have multiple sides to them and that a full opinion should be developed from all the facts. I figured today was the most fitting to write in given how much the show means to me. Continue to look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays. Oh, there you go. There you go. And I'm anxiously awaiting for the release of your next live tour schedule.

Please come to DC. I think we are at some point, right? Yeah, sure. I've even gone as far as debating whether to get a tattoo, excuse me, a tattoo of the iconic stuff you should know microphone, but not sure mom would approve of it. John, I'm going to say don't do that. I don't know, John. Maybe do it.

Don't do it. I have high hopes that you'll do it. We're optimistic demeanor. Uh, anyways, keeping, uh, keep doing what you're doing guys. I'll be cheering from the sideline as you continue towards your goal of world domination. Cheers from Scotland. John Patrick Vitori. Oh, wow.

And that was a nice little touch at the end. Thank you. Uh, and everybody in Glasgow, Chuck and I know it's Glasgow, but we like saying Glasgow. It rolls off the tongue. Did I say gal? Yeah. Uh, who is that? John Patrick Vitori.

That's right. John. We appreciate it. Uh, I say go for the tattoo, but probably shouldn't listen to me. I say don't. You should probably listen to Chuck. Uh, if you want to know more about, oh man, something was wrong with me today, dude. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck like, uh, John did, you can tweet to us at

syskpodcast or joshamclark. You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Go back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite podcast favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot

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