The Morality of Head Transplant: Frankenstein's Allegory

In 1970 Robert J. White (1926-2010) tried to transplant the head of a Rhesus monkey into another monkey’s body. He was inspired by the work of a Russian scientist, Vladimir Demikhov (1916-1998), who had conducted similar experiments in dogs. Both Demikhov and White have been successful pioneers of organ transplantation, but their scientific attempts to transplant heads of mammals are often remembered as infamous. Both scientists encountered important difficulties in such experiments, including their incapacity to link the spinal cord, which ended up by creating quadriplegic animals. In 2013, neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero claimed his capacity and plan to carry out the first human head transplantation. According to Canavero, spinal linkage offers now the possibility of successfully transplanting the head and, by doing so, circunventing many of the somatic diseases afflicting human beings. In this article, we anticipate and discuss some ethical problems associated with the potential practice of human head transplants, and we consider how the possibility of a head transplant deals with our long-held metaphysical views on personal identity. Finally, we resolve for a moratorium of head transplants due to its lack of biomedical consensus.