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Comment by Joakal | Hacker News Reader

Question for the medical readers: a person dies when brain dies from lack of blood flow, right? So all those injuries, say a car crash where heart will stop soon. 1) Disconnect the head from body 2) plug it into a machine that supplies blood, etc 3) the body is repaired 4) reattach head to body. Overlooking the obvious trauma, is this possible?

While extreme/traumatic, I think it could be more reliable as other factors below neck are taken out if equation to dramatically increase chance to survive. Other methods rely on hoping the body isn't too broken to recover. Ie restarting heart, etc then literally giving up as the brain dies from lack of blood flow.

A lite version of above is cutting the veins in neck and attaching a dialysis. Would this lite method work?

Source: Hearsay reports of moving lips from beheaded woman was literally inspiration for this idea, not futurama heads.

Edit: https://theconversation.com/did-anne-boleyn-really-try-to-sp...

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We still cannot repair a spinal cord injury. A complete decapitation is a total spinal cord transection and more.

Head transplants have been carried out on mammals successfully in the past. The success criteria isn't in restoring limb function, but rather in keeping the brain alive on a host body.

One problem at a time.

source? I read on this subject about monkey experiments and it seems the results were far from 'successful'.

An Injury is not a clean cut. So when you use a scalpel to sever it its much easier

That's what an ECMO is... a last-ditch effort to perfuse the brain and vital organs to see if the body can recover. It rarely does.

Head transplantation is still too "out there."

One problem with head transplantation that comes to me, is that of resources such as hormones and neurotransmitters produced by the body (i.e. intestines produce neurotransmitters).

Thence it is not only a problem of oxygenation of brain tissue.

It bothers me that it's called a head transplant and not a body transplant.

If I needed to, I would definitely choose a new body over a new head.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxyg...

an extracorporeal technique of providing prolonged cardiac and respiratory support to persons whose heart and lungs are unable to provide an adequate amount of gas exchange or perfusion to sustain life. The technology for ECMO is largely derived from cardiopulmonary bypass, which provides shorter-term support with arrested native circulation.

It's not just the brain. All the body's organs require perfusion. The heart will also quickly die without perfusion. Other organs will survive a little longer.

Better than cutting the head (or the body) is to reduce the temperature and induce an hypothermal effect like in the article. It is used in some surgeries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_a... (Don't try this at home.)

step 4 is pretty hard.

Just do step 1 in reverse.

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