The Globe and Mail
Opinion
Dr. Robert White challenged the line between life and death, but his work can help us understand how to value a life
Brandy Schillace
Published April 9, 2021
White family archive
Brandy Schillace is the editor-in-chief of The BMJ’s Medical Humanities
journal and the 2018 winner of the Arthur P. Sloan Science Foundation award. She is the author of three books, most recently Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul,
from which this essay has been partly adapted.
The year was 1963. In Dallas, President John F. Kennedy was felled by an assassination. Civil rights protests roiled the South as Martin Luther King Jr. told thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., that he had a dream. And in Cleveland, a neurosurgeon named Robert White cut into a monkey’s spinal cord between the C1 and C2 vertebrae, just at the base of its skull, and extracted a perfectly intact, still-living monkey brain from its head.