Jason Hartman loves to remind listeners that it’s an amazing time to be alive, and perhaps there is no better illustration of this concept than the guest and topic for episode #59 of The Longevity & Biohacking Show. John LaRocco is Head (no pun intended – you’ll see) of Engineering at Humai Tech, and he wants to talk to Jason about head transplants, among other things. You heard right. Head transplants. They’re not as far away as you might think.
Humai Tech
Humai is a company seeking to create a bionic body and synthetic organs. John LaRocco’s areas of research interest include neuroengineering, brain computer interface, prosthetics, additive manufacturing, sports biomechanics, 3D printed weapons forensics, digital currencies, synthetic organisms, and historical technology. As you will soon see, a single interview is not enough time to delve into even a fraction of these.
LaRocco has a BS in Biomedical Engineering from the College of New Jersey, and a MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rowan University.
What’s All This Talk About Head Transplants?
The idea of head transplants is as old as humans have been writing science and fantastical fiction. Believe it or not, this is not new technology but has been modified and improved upon in recent years to the point that a European team claims to be two years away from performing the first head transplant.
The real challenge, according to LaRocco, is to keep the head (brain) alive until a prosthetic body is ready and throughout the lengthy surgery.
The patient for the upcoming surgery is a 30-year-old Russian suffering from Locked-In Syndrome, a condition in which all voluntary muscles are paralyzed except for the eyelids. Victims are conscious and can think and reason but are unable to move.
In this case, the surgical team has a donor body on hand, a brain dead cousin who is being kept alive on life support until the surgery. The process itself is, obviously, prodigious. The patient will be put into a coma for 30 days while doctors reconnect thousands of nerves and blood vessels.
LaRocco’s Expectations
It’s no surprise that LaRocco is following the head transplant story with extreme interest. He has concerns. First of all, he believes there is a real possibility the patient will emerge paralyzed from the neck down. He also thinks the man might require immuno-suppressants for life as the body and head try to reject one another. He says the major challenge will be to reconnect the spinal column and keep the blood properly circulating during the surgery.
The Prosthetic Body Advantage
The patient in this case has a ready-made donor body. Not many people would find themselves the recipient of such a set of fortunate circumstances. But even so, due to the rejection risk, it might be better to start with an entirely artificial body.
Humai’s Mission
At Humai, the short term goal is to create a more efficient life support system. This addresses one of the major shortcomings in medicine today – failure prone life support systems. LaRocco points out that research groups creating disparate synthetic organs in isolation run the risk of not working well together when it is time to combine everything into a synthetic body upon which to attach the head transplant.
LaRocco suggests we think of the synthetic body as a container for all the internal organs and systems that must work together in order to have any hope of receiving a bran/head. In his words, you need an underlying system to maintain homeostasis (system that regulates variables to maintain stable internal conditions).
Once attached, the body needs a reliable system to supply glucose to the brain. As mentioned already, the circulatory system is critical. Without a reliable way of circulating blood, no head transplant surgery can expect to have long-term success.
How to Keep a Brain Alive
But to rewind a bit. Until scientists can keep a brain reliably alive for a length of time, nothing else matters. LaRocco breaks the problem down thusly: monkey and rat experiments have shown that it is possible to keep a separated head alive for about nine days. At that point every subject has died a septic death due to inefficient systems for delivering nutrients and taking away waste.
And to extend the idea to a human, what would be the effects of a disembodied brain kept in isolation for a length of time? With no sensory inputs of any type, might it lead to madness or insanity? That’s a pretty important question that no one knows the answer to yet.
Engineering the Brain
Not everything has to be as dramatic as an entire head transplant. There is also the issue of combining robotics with a perfectly functional human brain to improve performance. LaRocco sees future engineering as being limited by human response time. A good example is a jet airplane. The most complex part of this machine is not the engine but the avionics, in which computers can react much faster than a human pilot ever could.
Will we soon see implants able to automate parts of the human brain for a faster response time? You can bet some scientist somewhere is already headed down this path. Which begs the question: What if hackers figure out how to install malware in your brain? Could they harvest PIN numbers, alter memories, or even control your behavior?
Welcome to the Future
There’s a good chance that many people reading this article will be dealing with the issues raised in the interview sooner than they realize. To stay abreast of developments in the field, follow John LaRocco and his work at www.HumaiTech.com . (Flickr: Image | Tarkowski)
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