Re: Brain Transfer.
Originally posted by rooobarbcustardSure, why not.....might be cool! 😎
I had an interesting conversation tonight. Technology someday may provide a means in which someone's entire knowledge and memories could be transferred into your own brain. Would you take advantage of this new technology? What if you could, say, transfer the memories of your grandfather, or the knowledge of a top scientist, into your own brain? Would you?
Multiple personality???
Originally posted by Strangelove
It's highly unlikely that the technology would be used for the greater good
The same could be said for most forms of technology. The potential for misuse will always exist, but it is rarely worth killing a field of science on the off chance a few, or maybe even many, will do wrong, especially when there is such great potential for good from it.
Dr. Robert J. White, now retired, from Cleveland, Ohio has already performed countless successful head transfer experiments on monkeys, and has perfected methods by which the human brain can be isolated from its blood supply for an hour or so. With the recent breakthroughs in spinal cord research, brain transplants may now be possible.
Is the brain an immunologically privileged place? I found this (published in 2000):
"The discovery that immune system proteins play a role in the activity-dependent remodeling of the brain overturns a long-cherished dogma. For years, the brain was thought to be an immunologically privileged place—free from the immune system policing that occurs everywhere else in the body. Although neuroscientists have recently found evidence that the brain is subject to immune surveillance, few suspected that the brain produces its own immune molecules."
Don't know what to make of its implications for a brain transplant...so the brain makes its OWN immune molecules...I have come across articles published in 2005 that continue to refer to the brain as an "immunologically privileged place"...maybe the 2000 discovery does not make a difference?
Here is something more (from 2004):
"The CNS is an immunoprivileged site based on the presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB),3 graft acceptance, lack of conventional lymphatics, low T cell trafficking, and low MHC class II expression (1). However, it is clear that brain-derived Ags can induce strong systemic immune responses that either protect against cerebral infections or cause inflammatory brain diseases"
There's a new discovery that may help, in light of the fact that the brain has been found to not be much of an "immunologically privileged" site: essentially the donor's bone marrow is transplanted along with his kidney, in order to help "the recipient develop a compatible immune system." I'm posting it:
Voice of America
Organ Transplants Without Life on Medication
By Peter Fedynsky
Washington, DC
01 August 2006
The new lease-on-life enjoyed by organ transplant recipients comes with a price: patients must take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. But a promising new procedure could eliminate the need for lifelong medication.
South Africa's Louis Washkansky was the world's first heart transplant patient. He died of pneumonia 18 days after his operation in December 1967, because drugs used to prevent organ rejection also suppressed his body's ability to fight infection.
Organ transplants did not become routine until the 1980s with the approval of a new drug, cyclosporine, which prevented rejection without destroying the body's resistance to infection. But anti-rejection medications have had serious side effects and must be taken for life.
Today, Christopher McMahon takes no medications -- four years after his kidney transplant.
"It's been just a blessing. I love not having to get up in the morning to have my daily regimen of medicine," he says.
Eliminating the daily dose of medications involves transplanting not only the kidney, but also the donor's bone marrow, which helps the recipient develop a compatible immune system.
Dr. David Sachs is a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We essentially fool the immune system into thinking the donor's organ is part of one's own body."
The patient, however, must first undergo radiation and chemotherapy to weaken the original immune system -- an exhausting experience.
"It was obviously a tough and difficult process,” says McMahon, “but the rewards were so great it kept me going."
Jennifer Searl is another one of ten kidney transplant patients to successfully undergo the new procedure. "How I'd like to describe a conventional transplant, I say it's a treatment not a cure. And I feel like this is a cure."
This new procedure is currently used only for kidney transplants. But doctors say it could eventually be applied to other organ recipients.
the people who would benefit from brain transplantation the most, would be everyone - we would all have a chance to live for ever (until at least the brain itself deteriorates) or for much longer. And, Dr. Robert White has done nearly everything - created techniques to cool the brain for an hour, so that it can be disconnected from its blood supply etc.
I have tried to contact him, with not much success (he held a presentation on head transplants, early this yr ('06), somewhere in the U.S.) He is quite old now, but, I'm sure that other surgeons might be interested.
And, just as scientists started to make discoveries regarding spinal cord regeneration, another surgeon, a Dr. Tom Burke wrote this:
"I wonder, with an almost tenuous whisper, will we ever transplant the brain? The brain sits in our skull casing and its plug-ins are actually quite few: 12 pairs of large nerves, a few large vessels for blood supply and the spinal cord. Stop and consider for a moment how brain spinal cord repairs or perhaps even brain transplants would transform humanity.
...
A brain transplant has an intriguing sound. How near to immortality does this take us? But, at what cost? Imagine i f the person most close to you had advanced cancer but his or her brain was still OK? And then, suddenly, a body became available for transplant: A body whose brain had died. What if the body was much younger or older? What if the gender was different? Who would this new person be? Marriage, family and ownership?"
['Repairing a severed spinal cord
Notes from the ER', July 10, 2006]
Again, is anyone interested in joining me in advertising this fact (the senior citizens that we see everyday, would benefit from this); we could contact science writers, surgeons etc (I will try to start a students group devoted to this, at university next yr).
Here's a way by which they will be able to re-attach severed cranial nerves:
Nanofiber Scaffold Supports Optic Nerve Regrowth [June 2006]
Using nanosized peptides, a team of researchers has built knitted scaffolds that may be used to regrow damaged optic nerves. The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA), has managed to restore limited sight to blinded hamsters using nanoparticles resembling small fibers.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers cut the neural pathway that enables vision in hamsters. They then injected 16 of 47 adult hamsters with a solution containing nanofibers. The material was injected into the gap within an hour of the pathway being cut. After the first 24 hours, the researchers noted that the gap was reduced and that axons seemed to have grown through the center of the cut.
When tested, three-quarters of those hamsters could function well enough to identify a food source. None of the 31 hamsters that did not receive the nanosolution regained sight.
According to the lead researcher, Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, the technique offers a possible method for repairing neural connections. When neural pathways in the brain or spinal cord are damaged, they don’t usually heal. The damage can result in lifelong brain damage and paralysis.
When a neuron is cut, he says, it sprouts a growth tip, much like a tree whose branch has been cut. After that initial step, however, the growth stalls and scientists are not sure why. Axons can be encouraged to extend by exposing them to growth factors. But they rarely extend far enough to bridge the large gaps typical of most optic nerve injuries, he says.
Ellis-Behnke believes that the nanoparticles may block signals that trigger an immune response. Alternatively, he speculates that perhaps the nanoparticles coat the growing tip of the neuron, blocking any signals that tell the axons not to grow.
Gerald Schneider, one of the team members, estimates that 30,000 axons reconnected in the hamsters, compared with only around 30 in previous experiments using other approaches, such as nerve growth factors. The nanoscaffold is similar in size and shape to sugars and proteins. The team believes that the similarity between the size of the fibers and the features on neural material is what encourages the axons to bridge the gap. The scaffold is biodegradable and appears to eventually break down harmlessly.
And while the results are promising, Schneider explains that the technology is not necessarily a cure-all. “It will not replace neurons that have been destroyed. The axons are slow to grow. We have used the method only for situations in which they have to grow very short distances to get some recovery of functions.”
Schneider says that the scaffold could be included as one of many therapies, such as stem cells or growth factors, to help regenerate nerve connections in people who suffer strokes, spinal cord damage, and brain injuries. “We expect that the method will have to be combined with other treatments in some situations. In humans it will probably be used first in surgery on the brain and spinal cord,” he says.
Still, the scientific community is encouraged by the work at MIT. The knitting “could be very useful in combination with other treatments,” says Wolfram Tetzlaff, associate director of discovery science at the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries in British Columbia, which focuses on spinal cord injuries.
Tetzlaff cautions, however, that the hamster work involved a clean knife cut across the optic nerve, and “this is not how injuries typically present themselves.” Neural connections torn by a stroke or a car accident, for example, tend to be much messier and thus harder to bridge.
The MIT team has plans to explore whether the nanomaterial can be helpful long after the nerve damage has occurred. It may be useful to people who already suffer from spinal cord or brain damage.
Schneider also says that it will be several years before the technique is ready for human experiments. “We think the method could be used within five years in humans if there is sufficient support for doing the necessary research, which will have to include larger animals.”
The research paper was presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Research was supported by grants from the Whitaker Foundation and from the Deshpande Center at MIT, and by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong.