The United States and Russia have always had a bit of a competitive streak going. The race to space, the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, the race towards psychic powers, the flexing and posturing, it has all been going on for quite some time. Yet, more bizarre than anything else is perhaps the back and forth
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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, stil
The extraordinary life of an American neuroscientist who believed he could transplant human consciousness by cooling brains before removing and placing them in another body is told in a fascinating new book.
The work of Robert White, whose life ambition was to transplant a human head, is explored by Brandy Schillace in Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: A Monkey s Head, the Pope s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul.
In a race against the Soviet Union, White conducted brain experiments on mice and dogs in the 50s and 60s, before perfecting the head transplant surgery in 1970 through his work on hundreds of monkeys.