 When Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, she envisioned the risks of scientific discovery. As a warning for pushing the boundaries beyond what a person can take responsibility for, Shelley may not have realised but science would almost catch up to her just over 150 years later. The experiment in today's video was something that could have been a prototype for Frankenstein's monster. And that is the transplant of a head from one body to another, but as with many experiments involving animals, there is an efficacy grey area, where the lines are blurred between what is butchery and what is not. The experiments covered in this video is essentially the vivisection of multiple animals, and can be argued for the good and bad of scientific discovery. Welcome to a new series of plain difficult videos where we have a look at some of the more ethically rocky scientific experiments. Head transplants have fascinated doctors for a long time. Imagine giving a paraplegic person the chance to regain their body independence back, being able to make use of a body that would otherwise be buried or cremated to give someone a new chance at a more normal life. It's possibly one of the final frontiers of Auckland transplants, a science that has brought back many from death's door. Today we are looking at the infamous 1917 monkey head transplants conducted by Robert Joseph White. To avoid the experiments sounds like the stuff of nightmares, the study did help push forward experience and knowledge in organ transplants. And because this is a new series, we've got a new scale, and it's the ethical scale, ten being legit evil and one being for the greater good of mankind. As such I'm going to rate the monkey head transplant a 6, purely because it's so grim and I'm pretty squeamish. Our story starts 18 years before Robert White was born, and the first dog head transplantation by American physiologist Dr Charles Guffrey and French surgeon Dr Alexis Correll. The surgery involved attaching a decapitated dog's head to another dog's neck, with the blood first flowing via the donor dog's head to the live victim. The experiment was a proof of concept as the donor head showed some reaction to stimulus but due to 20 minutes of blood loss during surgery, the extra new head deteriorated quickly. The test dog was put down shortly after. The blood had started to cause brain damage, and this would be the biggest hurdle to a head transplant. The two doctors, although arguably failing at this experiment, did use their knowledge to further organ transplant science, earning them a Nobel Peace Prize a few years later. Our next journey through the gruesome history of head transplants next stops in the 1950s and not surprisingly the Soviet Union with a doctor, Vladimir Demikov. In 1953, Demikov made strides in coronary bypass surgery, having successfully completed such experiments on four dogs that lived over two years post surgery, which in all books is a success. Demikov turned his sights on the ultimate in surgery, and obviously that's going to be head transplants. In 1954, Demikov achieved better results in East Germany than Guffrey and Carol, allowing the donor dog head to be able to lap water, be more aware of its surroundings and have limited movement. The surgery involved grafting the upper body, including front legs and head, onto the other dog. Demikov did several experiments with multiple dogs. The longest for any subject-survived post-surgery was 29 days, but most died within a few days. The process that was used preserved the blood flow to the donor head, hence more functionality post-surgery. The limitations of survival of the dogs was mainly due to immune response of the recipient to the donor causing death. The next major challenge of head transplantation involved immunosuppressive agent development. Enter stage right Robert J. White, the one who would do the infamous monkey head transplant. White in 1965 had started to experiment with the concept of head transplants. Although he focused more on isolated brain transplants and the difficulties in keeping the flow of blood, he created vascular loops to preserve blood flow between the internal maxillary and internal carotid arteries of the donor dog. This meant that the brain has uninterrupted blood flow, even after severing the second cervical vertebrae. The method was named by White as auto-perfusion. Using this method, White was able to successfully graft six canine brains to the cervical vasculature of six other dogs. Although the surgeries were successful, the dogs lived between six hours and two days post-experiment. Using monitoring equipment implanted in the brains showed good oxygen and glucose consumption, meaning they had a good metabolic state post-surgery. The experiment showed the feasibility of short-term isolated brain transplant. Although pretty gruesome, the methods learned meant White could attempt a monkey head transplant. On the 14th of March 1970, White would conduct his experiment. For the experiment, White accepted that, like all other head transplants to date, that the donor body would be paralyzed. Because of this, the isolated body would have to be kept in function by mechanical and chemical stimulation of the heart and lungs. This was due to the complexity of re-establishing the nerve stem, but the main goal was to keep the brain function to a similar level post-op to pre-op. White's experiment used eight small rhesus monkeys for a total of four experiments. Each of the four experiments would have monkey A's head attached to the monkey B's body. The experiment used White's auto-perfusion technique and re-attachment surgery, which had been perfected in the lead up to 1970. The operating room team even used marks on the ground to choreograph each and every move of everyone in the theatre. The rhesus monkey was chosen because the animal would give the most accurate representation of a human-like central nervous system. The monkeys weighed between six and seven pounds were initially put under intravenous pentobarbitial. Then each head of a transplant was instrumented with EEGs and the recipient bodies were instrumented with ECG. Once this was completed, the monkeys were tracheotomized and were servically transected at the level of the fourth and fifth cerebral vertebrae. At the same time, preserving the carotid jugular circulations, the preservation of blood flow was done through sutured cannulae loops. During previous experiments, it was found that just one carotid artery and jugular vein was enough to provide blood flow for the head, even after all other circulatory support had been severed. This was completed under constant EEG monitoring. For the transplant to the new body, one of the cannula loops was stopped and connected to the body. And after blood flow was resumed, the second cannula was stopped and connected to the new body. This allowed constant blood flow to the brain. Extra blood had been drawn from other monkeys in case of any hemorrhaging during the surgery. Antibiotics were under constant supply, along with immune-suppretive agents, to help prevent rejection of the new body-head combination. Three to four hours post-surgery, the monkey heads would start to show awareness of their surroundings, with their eyes following stimulus and would even attempt to eat any food placed in the mouth. The EEG records reflected that the establishment of a characteristic consciousness state. And in a grim way, the faces as seen here look rather scared of the situation, which obviously is understandable. If blood pressure fell, so did the head's awareness. A dye was used to mark the blood-brain barrier. The muscles in the face were active and looked like they were working as they should. In fact, looking at the footage, you wouldn't even think that the head had been amputated. The bodies did not show signs of rejection of their new heads, probably because the amount of drugs pumped into the bodies. Each of the four experiments lived between six and 36 hours post-surgery. Eventually, the mixture of drugs and blood loss from the amputation area killed off each monkey. After the experiment, each brain was dissected and showed no signs of brain damage or dye infiltration, proving the concept of a head transplant. The monkey head surgery showed that sephallic or full-body transplant was possible. And even though the longest of any of the monkey's lives was just over a day, with extra time taken on suturing with modern techniques of today, the surgery could have been a much more longer term experiment. White became well-known after the experiments and took a lot of flak from animal rights groups and even his peers. Although it did not seem to really affect his accomplishments as a neurosurgeon, who would in his career perform over 10,000 surgeries, albeit on human subjects. He would pass away in 2010 at the age of 84. The lessons learned from the experiments helped further transplant science, which, by the 1990s, had more improved mixtures of immune-suppressive agents, which had hindered the monkey's life expectancy post-surgery in 1970. The new drugs were a key factor when the first human face graft proved successful. Head transplants did not die of whites, however, as the mantle was taken up by Xiaoping Ren, who grafted the head of a mouse onto another mouse's body, which survived the six months post-surgery. And in 2013, Sergio Canavero published a method that he said would make a human head transplant possible by 2017, but that never happened, so take that with a pinch of salt. Where would you rate the monkey head experiments on my ethical scale? One being it's all good and ten being the work of pure nightmares. Thank you for watching. This is a bit of a new subject choice for me and a pilot of sorts of a new series. Would you like to see more videos like this? Then let me know in the comments below. Play this book videos are creative commons attribution share alike licensed and are made by me, John, in a not-at-the-moment-so-sunny corner of south-eastern London. 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