What Happened To The First Human Head Transplant? (Feat. Medlife Crisis) 

I was against getting a brain transplant, but then I changed my mind. EDIT: Wow! 12k likes, I'm losing my mind here!

imagine brain transplants though, one second youre flying through your windshield, the next youre waking up in a body that just isnt yours.

We can't even repair a severed spine, and people thought a head transplant was possible.

I'm really glad to hear that the guy who had initially volunteered for the transplant is in a stable condition and married with kids. I can't fault him for having been interested in such an experimental procedure since I'm sure it's extremely difficult to handle having a degenerative illness, but I'm so happy to hear that he's doing well now.

My wife heard 22- headed dog, and I had to explain it was actually 20 2- headed dogs.....she was still horrified.

In January I would have thought this guy was a madman. In February I became more aquainted with my neighbor who has ALS. I learned he didn't have nearly as much care as he needed and i began helping 2-3 times a day. I took care of some simple medical and biological needs, basic meals and some... Herbology, which is legal in my state. My point is is that since Febuary his deteoration has been drastic. We just got him an EyeGaze device last week to help him speak. 2 weeks ago the family brought in hospice. If you asked him "Hey, man, do you want to volunteer for this crazy new experiment?" I think he would say yes. He knows he's dying, but if all he had was a few hours to play the drums again (he was amazing) I think he would take it.

If I recall correctly, Valery volunteered for this surgery for the reasons you mentioned - he had a pretty well informed and realistic attitude toward it. As someone with a chronic illness, while I don't think I can fully fathom what volunteering for something for this would be like, I did relate at least to his attitude about it and what he said. I am so happy to hear that he is doing well, and found happiness. There are plenty of disabled folks with hot spouses, some of them have been generous enough to share their experiences of what life is like being a disabled person with a life and not merely a sad or "inspirational" story, which its pretty cool.

For anyone curious, RU-vid does indeed let people show the two headed dog in their videos. I've seen it posted here many times. Here's the rub: it will age restrict the video containing said two headed canine and probably not let you monetize it. "Old RU-vid" is still here, you just aren't gonna find that kind of content randomly anymore because it's all age restricted, which kills it in the algorithm, which is why this dude doesn't show it. Not a knock, most people these days making these slickly edited video essays aren't doing it purely out of passion lol. This is their job, or in some cases they're at least hoping to make it their job. Gotta pay for that production and pump that viewer count up! And I wouldn't have stumbled upon this video.

As someone in the medical field , the thought of being able to repair spinal damage would be world changing. This would save so many people from long term complications and deaths. Also, it would be a major step to other neurological conditions!

I just watched watched a video about consciousness in decapitated heads, and the algorithm sent me here 54 seconds after upload.

Being able to fix spinal cords alone would be monumental.

The use of Eddie Izzard's "Cake or Death" joke is pure comedic genius.

They probably do way more good with this by NOT actually performing head swaps, but with the knowledge and power to do so, they could repair spinal breaks that paralyze people. If you can reattach a spinal cord you've severed on purpose, you should be able to repair one that was accidentally severed. And THAT would be HUGE.

The spinal cord repair would change so much in the medical field. Once I see promising results on that we can talk of head transplants.

I remember the face transplant. I am a emergency medical person, I had a nightmare that I had a scene where I had a decapitation that I was desperate to save. I woke up so confused and questioning everything I know. This is crazy to think someone is looking to do this with any urgency.

Thanks for this video! I did a project on it back in 2015 and haven't heard anything more from it since, this was awesome to hear what happened since and where things kind of are. Great job, and super well done!

Even if you transplant the head perfectly onto the body, there is a high likelihood that the body will just reject the head. We need to first figure out how to make the body accept transplant organs without just using immunosuppressants.

The brain transplant reminds me of that one Cyanide and Happiness short with patients repeatedly riding a motorcycle off a hospital roof because the same brain is being transplanted to other patients

10:45 Eddie Izard’s stand up special was one of the funniest acts I’VE EVER SEEN! “Do you have a flag?” 😂😂😂😂😂

THANK YOU! I’ve been trying to follow this for years but have been lacking. Thank you!

I'm so glad he decided to tell people to skip forward rather than not talking about it at all

A year before Stephen hawking died I sent him a proposal to become the 1st head transplant. His assistant wrote back that Dr hawking liked it but declined. He sent me his last autographed book as his gift

I had been wondering this exact same thing one and off the past year or two. Now I know, thank you.

I can't be the only one who read the title and thought "I wonder how that guy did with his new body..."😂

My brain has 2 cells left, and they're not in a committed relationship.

I don't know the clinical term, but almost 15 years ago, my shattered elbow was repaired using "nano sugar sticks" as an experiment here in Denmark. Only study i could find on it, was done on rats. Worked! Elbow has around 80% mobility

Thank god he didn't go through with it 🙏🏻 so happy for him and his family. I really was dreading what had happened to him at the start of this video x

That’s so weird! I wondered about this for the past 2 or 3 days! Thanks!

When you described them “labeling” the nerves, muscle, and blood system, I can’t help but imagine them doing it like a car stereo using masking tape on each wire and a sharpie to label each connection 🤣

Great chatting to you via the medium of RU-vid Studio! 😅 We should get our heads together more often…

I was just wondering about this. Thanks, Joe.

I was just talking to my fiancé the other day, wondering what happened with this whole situation. Thank you for the extremely informative video. ❤

An issue I haven’t heard anyone talk about is that it’s gotta be a lot easier to find people that want a new body than to find people willing to donate their body. You’d have to find people that have just died whilst still having a body that can still be alive?

14:54 reattaching a spinal cord would be HUGE if true, because aside from the head transplant thing (actually it would even become minor compared to the following), healing the spinal cord would help thousands of quadriplegic people who had spinal injury 18:03 21:17

This was a very informative video and I really enjoy your sense of humor! 💐

My body really really really wants a different head. So I'm very much looking forward to the breakthrough in this.

"Yeah, he dropped out of the surgery." Good for Valery!!! That. Is. A. WIN!

"Would you mind telling me who's brain I DID use?" "Abby.... Someone.."

I was waiting for this answer for YEARS

Wow, learned much during this video. Hopefully one day we can get that severed spine issue resolved, and help so many humans and animals. Thanks!

I saw "censored for RU-vid" and immediately jumped over to Nebula to watch the uncensored version. I sure didn't need that while eating dinner.

In programming we call this a “two weeks project”

Best one in a long time! Bravo...

Joe 😂😂😂 the choir of you going “we knew” 🤣🤣🤣 gold ❤ love you lol

I'm glad Valeriy has a new wonderful life. It may not be the life he expected to have, but it sounds like it's better than he hoped for.

I did a documentary of the first head transplant experiments in 1962 by Dr. White. His family gave me his original footage. I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. White on camera. The film DOES show graphic images of his experiments on monkies.

🤣 hahah. Subscribed. You had me in stitches.

I feel like these sci-fi technologies that would need to be developed in order to successfully transplant a head would themselves solve most of the reasons anyone would _want_ a head transplant in the first place. Some kind of miracle nerve repairing technology would mean you could fix severed spinal columns, treat nerve-degenerating diseases, and transplant missing limbs or far better bionic prosthetics than we have today. Why transplant your head when you can much more easily repair your own body?

They can't even fix the bulging disc in my back & they are seriously talking about head transplants? 😂

I can understand some people getting squeamish on the subject, but it is certainly nothing to lose your head over.

I have SEVERE nerve pain from a traumatic csection I had 20 years ago where at least one nerve was cut while I had surgery without anesthesia. I cant imagine the pain that would register on a body where all of your nerves had been cut and reconnected.

This was really good. Thanks for the wonderful info with a good laugh

Just a side note here, I am overjoyed that you chose to use footage from Young Frankenstein instead of any of the other actual Frankenstein flicks. Well done.

If my head was transplanted on another body, I would totally introduce myself as the person whose body I have and tell everybody they switched this smart head on me.

Absolutely loved the Eddie Izzard deep cut reference!! Cake or death?! Cake! Well we’re OUTTA CAKE! we didn’t expect such a rush!

Good to have you back on my feed ◼️

A perfect video to watch right before going to bed, in a hospital, a day before a head transplant operation.

There are worse things than death. Imagine surviving in Horror for 8 minutes post surgery ...

Did you see that Brainbridge had unveiled its concept for the head transplant system yesterday?

I feel like the two-headed dog method is onto something when it comes to head transplants.

“MY NAME IS FRANEKENSTEIN” made me bust out laughing. I must have seen that movie uncountable times cuz my first husband was obsessed with it and movies with that type of humor.

I find things like this surgery so funny. As a microbiologist I see this as a novelty with no practical use in the future. By the time the technology exists to perform this surgery, there will likely be methods to treat all or most of the ailments that this surgery would be used to treat, and it would be done without the extremely unnecessary risk.

This went right over my head

The "I can sum it up in three words" joke is fricking hilarious. That momentary pause just sells it so well.

Medlife Crisis is one of the most underrated channels on this platform. Glad to see him in this collab🙏🙏

I'm relieved to know that Valery dropped out because his condition stabilized and that he found love. I was following this somewhat closely years back and the narrative seemed to be that medical professionals got to him and explained that: if he goes through with it, there's a potential for him to go completely insane and how it was going a fate worse than death lol... Also, I remember cavanero talking about this. He said something like, it's feasible to reduce the spinal cord in a way that it would be less work to reattach it but still maintain its functionality... The whole thing is just bonkers. This was such a cool video, I really enjoyed your insight into this because I was kinda wondering how all this panned out. It's been crickets for quite a few years.

Reconnecting a spinal cord to its own severed mate is one thing. Connecting it to one that grew in another body is utterly unlikely ever to work. Not only will two spinal cords never actually be quite the same diameter, but the fibers within them, which each carry one endpoint's signal to the appropriate part of the brain, will never be arranged quite the same. The spine is massively parallel. It's not a single wire that carries a lot of signals sequentially. Every parallel signal needs to go to the right place in the brain. It'd be like connecting HDMI and DisplayPort, where you need an adapter that correctly attaches all of the randomly arranged lines from each end.

The study of connection of spinal cord repair is intense work. Most rich ppl just want results without research. I'm scared for this humanity

Transplants such as these, combined with the recent eye transplant on a blind man could completely change millions of people's lives. (Until corruption and greed kick in and make it inaccessible for those who truly need it, of course.)

I will tell you that every time I'm in a major incident and I need stitches or Staples I request super glue. I do this because when I was 16 and I had stitches it's scarred really bad and I got violently ill after the stitches were removed. I was in a major accident about 2 years ago and I had a head contusion so I requested super glue. The doctor looked at me funny and I asked him what super glue was made for. I then asked him if he had medical grade super glue which he replied yes I do. He told me it was going to hurt and I told him I would rather a little pain now than a scar later. That contusion was bigger than the first one when I was 16 but you can feel the stitched contusion that was smaller and you can't even see or feel the spot where he super glued. The hair even grew back. My point is that cyanoacrylate is some amazing s***.

your performance style immediately makes me want to participate in a head transplant surgery

So happy for Valery! The head transplant being delayed turned out to be a blessing in disguise! What a chad

“I ain’t got nobody….”

15:39 “Canavero and all the other head cases” - subtle and sly so I love it!

The cake or death insert killed me. Bravo.

Glad this ultimately got around to heads in jars as I just kept thinking about Futurama.

It’s definitely “body transplant.”

Honestly the biggest problem isn’t the spinal cord issue - it would be rejection by the host’s immune system. You can easily die from just a mis-matched kidney transplant. There is no way a complex tissue system like an entire head could be stabilized and the immune system arrested enough to allow the organism to continue living. There are just too many cellular responses systems involved and rejection would be inevitable.

“Nopes itself.” Haha, I love it.

Segueing from a video about head transplants to a sponsor read for a food company like a pro! 👏👏👏

12:14 'HEAVEN protocol' I thought it was called that because it would take you there if you volunteered💀 Edit: holy cow 156 likes? Tysm!☆

The doc at the end is probably right on how to do that as we can affix limbs back on around already somewhat.

I randomly think about this and wonder about it. Thanks for the update 😆

I have an "unusual" perspective on this because I've attended a surgical neuroseparation (beheading). I'm involved in cryonics, and once had an opportunity to assist (in a peripheral capacity) in the initial steps of a cryosuspension. The patient was a neuro (head only), so after the initial washout and cooling, where the patient is put in an ice bath and attached to a heart lung machine which is used to replace most of the blood with the initial cryoprotectants, it was time for, well, the beheading. I'm very aware of the common perception of cryonics, but having looked deeply into it, followed the research for decades, and gotten to know many of the key people involved, I'm an unflinching supporter. But even in the context of seeing it as a potentially lifesaving technology, the actual vertebrae separation was hard to watch. Heads aren't designed to come off, and it is NOT like in samurai movies! I'm proud to have been involved in a small way in giving this stranger a chance of living in the future, but if I ever meet him there he owes me a beer. I know that most people think that cryonicists are kooky, but while cryonics is speculative, but it makes sense if you accept the possibility/likelihood of the technology required to repair and receive cryonauts (yes, that's the term) being developed in the reasonable future. However, these people are claiming to be able to transplant heads TODAY, and that's provably bat shit crazy!

Intelligence is knowing that Frankenstein wasn't the monster, wisdom is knowing that he was.

Great video. 😊

10:51 The Eddie Izzard reference takes me back! The OG's will remember. Anyone remember the stop motion Lego video on here that reenacted that whole part of his stand up show. Wow, gotta look that up again.

5:42 22-headed dogs - now that’s something to see!

When Joe said that this is almost been a decade and I remember it like it was like three years ago my heart sank. I am old.

Hahaha I can’t express how much I appreciate the CAKE OR DEATH clip!!! 😂

14:02 The spinal column is stabilized with expansion screws borrowed from the surgeon's aunt

This is fascinating. You did a great job of pulling out the logic from fantasy. I have had nerve ablation surgery to help with pain from late stage Lyme Disease. The amount medicine DOESN'T know about nerves was unsettling. "The nerves will find each other again somewhere between 3 months and 3 years from now. We don't like to sever the nerves from their source completely because they have a tendency to 'find' the wrong loose ends." This was at Stanford. My nerves found each other and got back to creating pain within 6 weeks. I declined further treatments. You are so right about the monkey who was claimed to have had a severed spinal cord repaired. I call bs. Yesterday, I was having a debate with a stranger online (as you do). This person was insisting that I treat my dog's renal failure with crushed pineapple instead of the medication from his vet. "Pineapple gets humans off dialysis!" Well, what are you doing online talking to me? Get on the horn with The Cleveland Clinic and put out the word that the kidney transplant list can be tossed in the trash! (eyeroll)

I fall asleep to Joe Scott. Please believe me when I say this is the highest compliment I could give a RU-vidr. A voice that cradles me to sleep is like a warm blanket.

The moment James Tour popped up I went, "oh no..." out loud, lol.

Making a direct clone, then transferring the memories into the clone, would be a better way to go. Just like cloning & restoring a hard drive.

The engineer with the beautiful wife made me smile. I'm glad he chose her instead of being an experiment.

I can’t even keep my tv cables labeled correctly….. much less nerves and all that important stuff

Man, I think about this all the time wondering when the transplant would occur.

The one thing that makes this sound impossible, is the fact that a damage to the spinal cord can paralyze a person below that point. If we can't even reattach nerves that belong to the same body, what hope do we have of connecting different bodies?

As someone with some expertise in this area and having spoken to neuroscientists who very specifically specialize in the mechanics of spinal cord injury and repair - this is PURE FANTASY - and will almost certainly never be possible. The reason for this is extremely simple - well there's two parts to it. The first part is understanding that humans develop their nervous systems by functional connections in practice - not by design/plan. Nerves don't 'go to' particular parts of the body when they're growing - instead a crapton of nerves get sent out in that direction - and they're going to hit the required targets at the end - but you have no idea beforehand which nerves will get to which targets. The central nervous system then operates backwards it needs to achieve a function and it'll obviously match and pair with the nerves that achieve that functional outcome. All those other nerves and neurons that don't achieve function? They die off over time - when we talk about your brain 'maturing' over time this is mostly what's being referred to just more periphery - where an absolutely massive proportion of your neurons are pruned leaving you with just the stuff you're actively using. So now think about the spinal cord.... Imagine cutting into a big fat communications cable, with literally MILLIONS of individual fibreoptic lines in it... and you have NO IDEA which one is which, you might have a decent idea where roughly something will be but if it's not 1:1 it's a potential disaster, it wont work... if you were to slice that giant cable perfectly, and then move it apart like 1mm using precise machines, then try to move it back to re-create a connection.... chances are even then you'd not get it exactly right. Now imagine if instead of a consistent and fairly durable communications cable you were dealing with floopy floppy squishy flesh goo that has a tendency to recede, move, leak, or begin to die when cut.... okay that seems near impossible even when you begin with a perfectly connected spinal cord... but what if they were totally different... if there was no way to position it to match 1:1 even hypothetically with magic involved. That's only one part though - what really takes it from 'inconceivable' to 'impossible' is the second part.... and that's material limits. To put it simply - our understanding of physics would have to be effectively completely wrong in order to allow for any material/tech that could bridge the gaps between neurons needing to be reconnected. It's the same issue that makes brain-machine-interfaces that can effectively restore function impossible. The required electrode density would have to break our understanding of chemistry completely in order to be possible. Neurons are not wires - they do not work in the same way wires do. Neurons don't have the same problems that wires do when it comes to interference or cross-talk, and the material requirements for what it takes to send particular levels of current and voltage would necessitate an amount of material that would make them functionally unusable due to scale.... and like... everything else... ahhh it's a bit big of a topic to summarize super concisely -.-... why do I do this 😆ah well just passionate about this stuff I guess and if you are too you've got enough so gonna go make food now lol