The possibility of brain transplants and its impacts

One of my cousins was paralyzed lasr summer, losing the use of all of her limbs and was narrowly saved from organ failure. Looking at her condition, i wondered to myself if something like a brain transplant could save her or not.

Which brings me to the topic. Are brain transplants possible? What impact can they have on society?

Very... very unlikely for the foreseeable, close future. Transplanting the brain would induce massive trauma on the organ, so the procedure would lead to even further brain damage. We're a long way away from cloning even organs, so a full body replacement is even further away.

The closest thing that has a chance is stem cell therapy. Stem cells are quite similar to the state the cells of a fetus are in, i.e. they can turn into various different *kinds* of cells depending on their environment. How stem cells differentiate and turn into muscle, skin or cells of organs is not yet perfectly understood, but we're getting there.

There have already been some successful, experimental therapies with stem cells. If you want your relative to get better, support stem cell research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms

According to what this page says, it seems that it's not entirely impossible. But all the successful cases were on animals, perhaps we might see the day when body swaps or brain transplants will be feasible. It's just depressing to see my favourite cousin lying half-dead on a bed..

Yes, you can have a brain transplant. Right now scientists are working on partial transplants (on mice), which would move part of the brain that stores memory and part of your identity-personality wise. So yes people can have brain transplants because your brain is connected to the rest of your body . the brain is the part of the body that tells the heart to pump and keep your lungs pumping....

It is possible when it is done using fetal brain slices. Because it is difficult to regenerate functional connections between nerve cells if the cells are not actively dividing. Subsequent research has shown that an adult brain transplant might be feasible.

However it can only replace parts of it. As long the areas that control critical body functions are unharmed. Still, the donor brain must be compatible with the host. The molecular markers must be compatible. Usually nerve cells are vastly different from person to person. It is almost impossible to find 2 person with the same nerve cells. Also, you must consider the possibility of organ rejection. For the transplant to work there must be a match in 26 categories. With half of 26 categories, the transplant could work.

But it would need post-surgical treatments to prevent rejection. However for a compatible transplant, it is 1 in 100000. This problem can be readily overcome by using a clone of the original organism as the recipient of the brain transplant. This also bypasses many ethical hurdles of brain transplant but introduces others in regards to cloning human beings.

Well to be quite honest if you find a way of transplanting a whole brain, then you might as well keep the old one. Just repair it using the same methods. People who get paralysed due to spinal injury can't regain motor controll not because they're lacking a length of neuron to bridge the "cut", it's because the sheer number of different neurone going through your spinal column makes it infinitely difficult to reattach them. Much along the lines of you cutting a bunch of wires and then shoving them together, hoping that they stick back the way they did before you cut them.

So I'd have to agree with flaser, the most likely treatment method will be some sort of marker guided stem cells which turn in to neurons, which in turn connect up the "right" wires back together.

Of course there have also been cases where (at a young enough age) the spinal injury or brain damage was repaired (in a random fashion) and the brain readjusted functionality to adapt to the new wiring on its own. This isn't very likely.

Have a hard time seeing a thing like this realized with current ethic views on human experiments.

Those experiments dealt with artificially keeping the brain - or more precisely, the head - alive through artificial means. Unfortunately they offered no solution as to how neural damage - like a severed spine - can be mended. All they focused on, was whether the brain of the animals could be kept alive through purely artificial means.

Well, the way I see it is that now that we know how to keep the brain alive (as shown in the webpage) perhaps the next step in brain transplants are to develop a way to mend the spine and completely reattach a severed head onto a body. Hence the reason why I think brain transplants are not entirely impossible.

I'm sorry to say something that might hurt you, but it's better to say the truth than let one be deluded by false hopes. Those experiments were very rudimentary, and if you check the documentation they usually involved cutting off the head and artificially supplying them with blood and artificially oxygenating the blood in turn... we can do both these for decades now. They didn't even open the skull of the animals, something we frequently do today, but do so with trepidation. Opening the skull is still a risky procedure, so much so that neurosurgery seems to be moving toward gamma-knife surgery, that uses very focused gamma rays to precisely burn away tumors and only the tumors in the brain as this circumvents the whole need to disturb the brain matter et all.

Regrowing or "mending" neural tissue? Not possible currently, but stem cell research is very promising. We can sew back limbs that have been cut off, and the nerves there still have some plasticity, so they can "fix themselves" (the wonders of nature)... unfortunately this doesn't extend to the brain or the spinal cord. In rare cases, when the spine wasn't completely severed there were cases of patients recovering. Hopefully one day - and one day soon - we'll be able to trigger this change at will and cure paralysis.

Once the brain stores your personality, your memories and so on, it seems to me that a brain transplant would be impossible. Actually, it would be a body transplant, once the body receiving the brain would reflect the old bearer. In such a situation, there is a great possibility the person will not identify himself/herself in the new body.

According to current medical science "Brain transplants have never been tried, so therefore it can't work". I doubt we have the tech to keep someone alive while they are brain dead (your brain makes your heart beat, breathes for you, and many other thing simultaneously), until we then jurry rig the brain stem of the other brain into our spinal cord (which even then we aren't sure if after the procedure what would happen). That would cost more then it's worth. Think of it like this $50 million= 1 person? I could have lived off that money, had a family, buy a zoo, and maybe have enough for a private brothel in Amsterdam while filming the new Matrix series that I would write myself.

Meh we actual do have the technology to keep someone alive while they are completely brain dead, we can even sustain a dead body for about 12 days (plus that cost specification is completely off, 50 million can buy you completely new bio mechanical limbs and life support for a few years in addition to certain royalties for being nothing more but a mobile brain-in-a-jar experiment)The issue with brain transplantation or atleast from what I could understand from the OP , reaugmenting to circumvent paralysis isn't that we can't do it, it's just that because of the extreme sensitivity and difficulty in doing so no one would even suggest trying to aim for anything but worsening the situation. I mean seriously, just to return minimal control past the neck to about three muscles in your shoulders you would have to rewire and repair ALL of the brachial plexus,most of the musculotaneous nerve, and the radial nerve into the spinal cord and hope the peripheral nervous system is somehow possible to remain undamaged after the near impossible repairing of millions of nerve cells and regain the ability to connect to the central nervous system which also has to be repaired after eventual degregation and injury through God knows what. To simplify, the difficulty and complexity of simple repairs compared to a full on "transplantation" is equivalent to building a fully armed and operational supercarrier battleship with a SINGLE gas flame welder and hundreds of unprocessed materials whilst blindfolded and intoxicated.

Brain transplants seem to be possible, but I've never heard of a successful one; that means little, however.

All in all, I think that the successful performance of a brain transplant might yield results in the debate over whether consciousness is rooted in the brain or in some other facet of humanity.

Could this be, in any way, real?


If it is, then I would say brain transplants can be realized very, very soon

I'm telling you for the 2nd time: those experiments have nothing to do with repairing neural damage. Please do some better research.

[font=verdana][color=green]A brain transplant is, at the moment, a thing of fiction. By that, I mean a true brain transplant - the one which you seem to insinuate is possible in the near future. As Flaser has said, the stress put on the organ would result in brain damage no matter how you slice it. No doctor in the world would ever advocate trying a brain transplant.

In the next 10 years? No way. 20 years? Pfft, still no chance. 50 even? Still unlikely. A century? Probably more research would make it seem possible, but I doubt it.

In short, I'm sorry to say, but I severely doubt that your cousin will ever have the chance to get a brain transplant.

Before the possibility of a brain transplant could even be attempted a sufficient means of keeping a brain alive by itself during the transplant procedure would be needed.

Cause it takes a very short time before the brain is essentially dead due to lack of oxygen.

Trust me on this. Flaser tends to know his shit whenever he chooses to weigh in on an issue. I'd listen to him.

you have roughly eight minutes, before the brain begins to die from lack of oxygen and blood.

If you're talking about taking the entire thing, yeah not gonna happen.
You have to cut through your spinal cord, cut through 3 layers protecting the brain, remove it entirely all the while keeping it oxygenated and blood-fed. No to mention that the psyche of your cousin will be different. Even if she knows about being in a different body the shock from the operation will still be tremendous. Probably enough to actual shatter her psyche fully.

Then to place the brain into what body you're moving it to and hope to god that somehow you're able to reconnect the spinal cord, place the brain back within a new Blood-Brain-Barrier, and then make sure no infections occur during the recovery phase. In this day and age it physically impossible.

Edit: the only possible for your cousin is stem cells. They probably have to start in the pluripotent stage and be injected to the damaged area. Even then, there's no guarantee.

If your cousin's spinal cord isn't severed, there is the possibility of artificial limbs and power suits(courtesy to the Japanese) that will allow her to regain mobility.