The monkey’s eyelids flutter after 18 hours under anesthesia. Two medical teams stood anxiously at it. Doctors, nurses and a group of assistants held their breath and waited for a sign that the delicate operation – actually two delicate operations – was a success.
The brain surgeon, Robert White, holds a pair of pliers and taps gently on the animal’s nose. With a flash of apparent recognition, the monkey, a medium-sized primate known as a macaque, clipped its jaws as if trying to bite the doctor.
The surgical theater erupted in cheers.
White did it: the world’s first primate head transplant. He attached the conscious, living head of one macaque to the breathable, lifelong body of another, thus creating a single ‘new’ animal.
“Dangerous, sad and very unhappy,” White summed up his patient’s behavior in 1970. With good reason. The former healthy being was now paralyzed from the neck down and only had hours to live.
“The monkeys did not like Dr. White, and it really kept them,” Brandy Schillace, author of “Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher” (Simon & Schuster), told The Post. common factor in all five of the macabre head transplants that White performed – and confirms, at least for him, that the brain is the personality vessel, the literal seat of the soul.
In her new book, Schillace explores White’s career as a groundbreaking surgeon and researcher who nevertheless never achieved his ultimate goal: to perform the operation that would keep a human soul, wrapped in its own brain, alive after the original body failed. has.
“It was perfume, but now it’s an empty bottle,” he said in 1967 when he covered an isolated brain in the palm of his hand. “But the scent is still there.”
By that time, White’s surgical experiments had already led to techniques that preserved function in injured brains and spines, giving neurosurgeons time to do their life-saving work. The approach, known as hypothermic perfusion, is still used today for trauma patients and those in cardiac arrest.
But for 40 years, until his death in 2010, White nursed the hope of performing his monkey surgery – which he prefers to call a body transplant – on humans. By the late 1990s, he had even found a few potential patients: Craig Vetovitz, a quadriplegic who limited his lifespan, and a brain-dead man to serve as a body.
Unfortunately for White, a love of publicity gave the gifted surgeon a bit of quackery. A humiliating Halloween appearance in the tabloid program “Hard Copy” has White and Vetovitz as “Dr. Frankenstein and his willing monster.”
“He was frustrated because people could not overcome the shock factor,” Schillace said. “If you move around and take off your heads, it just upsets people.”
On the other hand: ‘He sometimes went out in public with the words’ Dr. “Frankenstein was put on his medical bag,” she added. “So he had these dual personalities.”
In addition, White was a devout Catholic and a father of ten who developed friendships with two popes. Both Paul VI and John Paul II asked him to serve in the Vatican bio-ethics boards that wrestled with the thorny dilemmas of modern medicine – including the question of when exactly life ends.
“White felt like he was in God’s team,” Schillace said. “He would say, ‘The guidance behind my hand when I work is from God.’ And he was always very convinced that he was doing the right thing. ”
But he never received a papal blessing for his plan to prolong one person’s life by vaccinating their head on another person’s brain dead body. Vetovitz’s operation did not happen either. White was unable to raise the required $ 4 million, and his performance probably cost him both the funds and the approval of the hospital.
“White felt that human lives – and for White it means the brain – were worth saving at almost any cost,” Schillace said. “But there can, and there must. We can do a head transplant today. But should we? And who decides?
“That’s the question I keep coming up with,” she said. “Because medical technology often surpasses our ability to understand its consequences.”