All Episodes
Previous Next
June 13, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
50:28
Edition 551 - Brandy Schillace
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope that your late spring stroke, early summer is going well for you.
Life continues and we wait for news on our freedom from all of the coronavirus restrictions.
I think the question that we all have to ask ourselves, I certainly do, is I'm now at the stage where I can't remember what ordinary life was like.
I'm sure I'm going to get back into it, but I feel so disconnected from it all now that it's going to be an effort.
And I'm being honest with you, and maybe you feel that way too, but boy, I can't wait for the gates to be opened, and then I've got to try and find my way again with a, and as you will know, maybe you've been even more impacted by this crisis than I've been.
You know, all I've had to do is work from home over this period.
But, you know, there's an 18-month hole in my life.
Yours too, maybe.
And we have to somehow try to repair that.
But that's a whole other thought.
But whatever's going on with you, I hope it's good.
And I hope that you're enjoying the fact that here in the northern hemisphere, the weather seems to be improving.
Now, on this edition of The Unexplained with Myself, Howard Hughes, my radio conversation recently with Brandi Scalace, a medical author.
And we're going to be talking about her research that she's put into a book called Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher.
I'm going to quote here, the mesmerizing biography of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon and his quest to transplant the human soul.
Dr. Robert White was his name.
He was very active in the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond that.
And he had wanted to transplant heads.
Now, you cannot have a discussion like this without talking about some of the surgical procedures.
So it is, at times, a faintly bloody conversation.
And there are also details of experiments that would not be done and rightly would not be permitted today.
I have to warn you that listener discretion advised for this edition of The Unexplained.
If you don't like that kind of thing, please turn this edition off and find one of my other ones or another show because this will be difficult for you.
Not too difficult, but those details will be in here.
So Brandy Scalacci, the guest on this edition, and I would also like to point out for Brandy that this book, Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher, A Monkey's Head, The Pope's Neuroscientist, and The Quest to Transplant the Soul, this book is available in the second week of June in the UK and is available on pre-order.
It is also digitally available everywhere now and is a very, very well researched and written book.
And as you will hear, Brandy is a fantastic guest.
So I wanted you to hear this conversation.
Thank you very much to Adam for creating the website, theunexplained.tv.
Don't forget, you can also visit my Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
Thank you to Haley for booking the podcast guests.
And thank you to you.
More than anything else for all of your messages and thoughts.
Please keep them coming.
Go to my website.
You can send me a message from there.
And when you do, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Okay, this is my conversation then with Brandy Scalace.
So, Brandy, this is a big topic we're going to be getting into.
And, you know, I think I was right.
You tell me in just putting a little bit of a caveat warning there for my listener that some of this, those of a squeamish nature, may find a little bloody.
It's true.
Anytime you are working with experiments that involve animals, but also human surgery, you're going to encounter some things that are perhaps a bit grislier than the usual.
Right, and this certainly is.
Where do we start with this then?
I know in the introduction to your book, you talk about the view in history of transplantation of organs, even of doing autopsies and that kind of thing.
The church and other institutions regarded that very much as a no-no.
That's true.
You know, originally, the body was kind of a sacred space, and we didn't perform surgeries to the degree we do today in history.
We didn't have antiseptic.
Generally speaking, if you violated the external body and you opened it up to the air, you were potentially introducing death into the system.
So I think there's a sense of bodily integrity.
But there's also this concept that the person, that your selfhood, that your animating spirit, that all of these things were sacred to a degree.
And originally, the church did not want, and by the church I'm talking about the Western world here, and so largely Catholicism, going all the way back into the 15th century, they didn't really want you to break open the human body.
But it goes further than that.
Galen, all the way back working on Roman gladiators, they did not have a comprehensive sense of the anatomy of the human body.
And so frequently they were using animal anatomies to try and make those kinds of guesses.
So when we're thinking about medicine and anatomy and particularly organ transplant, this is new and strange.
And most of human history would not have been able to do the things we do today.
So if you couldn't violate in any way the human body, if you were not able to do those things, how would you ever learn in that era?
Well, originally, anatomy happened in a theater, kind of, and you had one person down below sort of cutting up a body and holding up bits of it, and a teacher at the top kind of explaining what it was that you were looking at.
And this is after they allowed human anatomy, but of course, this is still quite late.
And you can see illustrations of this.
It meant that the average person who was trained to heal other people probably never saw the inside of a human anatomy or the human body or understood even how it worked.
They had many, many misconceptions, particularly about the brain, which they weren't really sure what inside your head was even important.
The gray goopy matter they thought was just sort of cushioning.
They didn't recognize that that was the important stuff.
Gee, when did that motion change?
Well, it was a long period.
It sort of transformed.
I would almost Call it an evolution of thinking.
And so slowly we get to this understanding that, in fact, the gray matter matters.
It's not just blood flow.
It's not just, you know, a lot of people thought that the blood was the life spirit and things like that.
So we're coming quite late.
I mean, we're getting into later time periods, 18th, 19th century, before we really start that movement towards, oh, the brain, the brain is the important bit, not the heart or the gut.
I would guess because there have always been physicians of one kind or another.
The physicians, many of them, would have been agitating to want to know more.
That's true.
And even after we permitted, so it's in the 19th century, of course you want your doctors to have done anatomy at that point.
But at that time, the only way to get at a body was you needed a corpse, and they weren't ready to hand.
We didn't have a body donation program.
So grave robbery was quite common in both the United States and the United Kingdom, where physicians would go out in the night or they would pay someone else, people they called resurrection men, to dig up bodies that weren't well protected.
And they wanted relatively fresh ones as well, you can imagine.
So this was something that really disturbed and frightened people for lots of obvious reasons.
Now, to interrupt here, that was the famous case of Burke and Hare in London, wasn't it?
Yes, yes, absolutely.
And Burke and Hare, they started off, they kind of skipped a step.
So most of the time, you waited for someone to die and be buried, and then you unburied them and you sold them to an anatomist.
They decided, well, what if we just hurried that process along?
So they ended up killing people and selling their bodies to science, which is a real problem.
And when they were caught, one of them turned evidence against the other one, and the punishment was ultimately they were going to themselves be dissected by medical students.
So punishment fits the crime kind of situation there.
So you can imagine people, they were terrified.
They didn't want their recently deceased spouse or child to be dug up by doctors.
And so the resurrection men had a really ugly reputation.
And that also meant that that reputation colored people's perception of medicine too at the time.
Of course, largely solved by body donation programs in the 20th century.
And so this was all comparatively recent, wasn't it?
That the view of these things changed, the willingness to do research, the understanding that unless you do, after death, of course, you don't kill people for the purpose, if you don't do a certain amount of cutting, then you aren't going to learn how things work.
That's absolutely true.
But so we introduce a slight problem because we're entering into a time period.
And the book that I've written sort of starts here at the dawn of transplant science, transplant medicine.
This actually quite peculiar idea that you can take out your organs and put them somewhere else in someone else's body and they can work over there and that person can live on your organs.
That is something that would have seemed like science fiction until the 1950s.
But it introduces a problem because you need your organs as well, so you don't really want somebody harvesting them, at least not the ones you don't have in duplicate, right?
You don't want someone taking your heart if you're still using it.
So how do we make that determination?
How is a heart still beating, still alive enough to use, but the body or the person dead enough to harvest?
We're still wrestling with that one today, aren't we?
We are.
We absolutely are.
And so the book really begins at this time period where we had resurrection men in the past, and now we've moved to an era of harvest men, to this idea that if medicine and science is going to start transplanting organs, we get to a place where sometimes science and technology get ahead of our ethical understanding of how to operate in these situations.
And so it's a really critical time in our history.
When did we start to understand, it sounds comparatively late to me, that there are organs that are duplicated in the body, the kidneys, for example.
When did we begin to understand that you could actually function on one of those and you could transplant?
I have a friend in broadcasting who did exactly that with her partner.
When did we start to understand you could do that?
When did we come to understand then that some of our organs, like the kidneys, we have two of, and you can function with only one of them?
I know somebody who's donated one of her kidneys to her partner.
They're compatible, so that's the way that it happened for her.
But when did we begin to understand you could do that?
Well, quite early, we understood that you could, but regardless of how many times they experimented on it, every single time it failed.
And the reason it failed is because the body that you transplanted to would reject the tissue.
So even if you have the same blood type and are good candidates in other ways, the body itself would reject the organ that was put there.
And they did this experiment a lot on dogs, where they would take one kidney from one dog, put it in another one, another dog, and ultimately it would, atrophy, it would die.
Sometimes they would grow infected.
Sometimes they caused death because the kidney itself was, you know, had become corrupt inside the other animal.
And they didn't know what was causing it.
And they called it a destroying agent.
They felt that there was something in the individual body that was killing off tissue.
So even though they knew that this was possible, they couldn't figure out how to make it work.
And to be honest, the very first successful kidney transplant, which happens in the 50s at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, actually only works because they used identical twins so that their genetic makeup was the same.
And this is not an easy thing to do.
I mean, look, not long after I came into this world, there is a name that is forever imprinted on my mind, and I'm sure you'll know this name, Christian Barnard, the man who did the first heart transplant.
And my South African friends will always tell me off for the way that I pronounce this, but I think it's Hotuskua Hospital in Cape Town, which if you visit Cape Town, is actually on the motorway away from the airport.
You'll always See it there standing on a hill, and I always think to myself, that's where they did this.
But you know, those things are medical miracles, and they are, in our knowledge, in our understanding, they're recent things.
They are very recent.
I think we take that for granted.
So, for instance, if I talk about transplanting a kidney, a liver, even a heart, and the heart transplant history is quite fraught because there's issues of racism, there's issues of class, there's issues of justice involved in that story.
But if I tell you that someone's going to have a transplant, most people just go, yes, that's a thing that happens.
And we don't realize how strange it is.
And so part of my book's project was to make something, to re-weird some things and to make some things which seem quite fringe actually seem normal or normative, I suppose.
And so, you know, it is a very strange thing that your heart could beat in someone else's body.
And we have to know that you're dead enough to take it.
And this is the interesting point about the South African story is there was some disagreement, actually, about the heart of one of the gentlemen.
It was a black gentleman who had suffered an aneurysm while swimming, Claude Hupt.
And his heart was taken and given to another person, a white dentist, who lived another 18 months on that heart.
But what's interesting about that is the doctor in charge of the patient, he was not willing to say he was dead.
And what I mean by dead here is brain death.
And of course, there's a big disagreement.
In this time period, there wasn't a completely agreed sense of what brain death is.
And what shocks people is there still isn't.
We know that brain death is like death, but of course, they have two different names.
You don't call them the same thing.
One means your heart's still beating, and the other one means the body has died as well.
So there have to be agreement between physicians about this strange, ephemeral, difficult to pin down moment of death.
We know dead, we know alive.
It's that middle ground that's very difficult to understand.
And it's actually more of a checklist than a definition.
And that is only as far as the medical profession is concerned.
When you start to allow in the views of religion, when you start to allow in the views of those who deal in ethics and the way that they are practiced, then you have a bit of a minefield.
Oh, absolutely.
And this is just for transplanting organs that we agree we can do and that are a good idea.
The trick with the man I wrote the book about is what organ he wanted to transplant.
He wasn't interested in transplanting hearts.
He was interested in transplanting brains.
Which is an astonishing thought, isn't it?
I mean, look, there have been science fiction about that for many, many years.
I mean, the story of Frankenstein is just one of those things.
But that must have seemed, and we'll talk, we'll get into the specifics in the next segment of this, but, you know, that must have seemed to some people like an utterly, utterly horrific idea.
Well, people thought the heart transplant was a horrific idea, or at least there were many people who did.
We have emotional connections to ideas about the heart to begin with.
And then when you have a black body being harvested for a white person in apartheid South Africa, there's certainly fears that are generated that there's going to be unethical steps taken and that people are literally going to be harvested for another people group that are considered of more worth.
And in the United States, African-American newspapers picked up on this immediately and said, we're in danger.
We don't know when we go to the hospital if the doctors are actually going to help us or if they're going to let us die so that they can take our organs.
And so this concept about brain death suddenly, because of what happened in South Africa, became critical.
And they needed to put together a sort of ad hoc committee to try, from Harvard, to try and determine what brain death really was.
And they couldn't, they could not agree exactly.
They said, well, it's permanent coma.
You're never going to wake up.
You don't have brain signal.
You don't have reflexes.
And every single time, someone in that room would say, but is that death?
Can we really say that?
And we're even debating that now because we're saying that some people who appear to be dead as they lie in hospital may actually be in some ways cognizant of what is going on around them.
Well, what's fascinating to me is that what we ended up with wasn't a medical definition, but a legal one.
A legal case, the first one happened in the United States.
Basically, this is another situation where a black person was harvested for a white person.
And so I know that sounds really terrible, but it was kind of.
So a man had, Bruce Tucker was his name.
He had fallen from a great height and hit his head at work.
And he was rushed to the hospital.
And the hospital just happened to have a heart patient who needed a heart.
They were a good match.
And the doctors, they announced him to be an unclaimed dead.
And therefore, they didn't have to go through the usual procedures of getting permission.
They harvested his heart.
They put it in the other person's body.
He was brain dead.
In other words, he had an isoelectric or flatline EEG, but his heart was still beating.
And they put that heart in the other person, and his family sued.
They said, you didn't, A, you didn't try hard enough to get in touch with us.
And B, we think you murdered him.
And so, you know, to them, the fact that the heart was beating, even though there was no brain activity, they felt that meant life.
They did not see the brain's activity as an indication of death.
They felt that he had been killed.
And this goes to court where that ad hoc committee I mentioned, they're there, they're witnesses.
And ultimately, the court decides in favor of the doctor.
So it's the very first precedent that says brain death is death.
And it just so happens that that's all the kinds of definitions.
They're all legal.
And that means the rules are different.
You could be declared alive in one area and dead somewhere else based on what the legal precedent is.
What a horrendous case.
And my heart, obviously, you know, my heart goes out quite literally to that family because, you know, nobody in the world Had ever experienced something like that.
Before this was all pioneering territory, and for that to happen, it must have been quite awful for them.
I wasn't aware of the case.
Thank you for telling me about it.
Oh, yes, Bruce Tucker.
It happened in, I believe, Virginia.
The interesting thing is, nowadays, if I say brain death, most of your listeners are going to know what I meant.
But that wasn't true of the public at that time.
I mean, even the doctors themselves were just getting their heads around it.
Sorry, that's a terrible pun.
But no, I sure get what you're saying, Brandy.
When I was a little kid, the notion was that if your heart stopped, then that was it.
But if your heart was still going, then you were.
And this actually is complicated.
We're victims of our own success, because honestly, brain death would never have been a question if we hadn't invented artificial respiration.
Because your heart and your lungs work on different systems.
The heart is the autonomic system, and it can work without information coming to it from a brain.
So the brain can be isoelectric, flatlining, and the heart can still beat.
But the lungs have to have input from the brain.
So if you have an isoelectric symptom signal, then your lungs stop working.
And before artificial respiration, that meant in very short order, you would be dead in every other respect as well.
So it wasn't until we invented respirators and started having them available in hospitals that they could be given to people who were in coma, who'd had traumatic head injuries or whatever.
And those bodies were on respirators.
The respirator was doing the breathing.
The heart was beating on the autonomic system.
And some of the questions, doctors just weren't sure what to do with these people.
Like, do we just keep them hooked up?
We don't know what to do.
Are they alive or are they not?
And again, that's a technological advance.
We created the problem of determining brain death by creating systems that help keep the body alive on life support.
So, Brandy, there we are.
We are in the pioneering stages.
We're at the early days or in the early days of transplantation.
And as you've hinted, a lot of it is a gray area.
What is death?
How do you define that?
Is it brain death?
What is it?
Is when the heart stops beating?
There have to be definitions, and those definitions vary everywhere.
There are people who deal in ethics who say all of this is wrong, and people in religious communities who take a very, very dim view of this.
And then we come to the medics, who must have been, as medics always are, if we look at the current coronavirus question.
Then medical opinion to some extent is divided.
There are different views on what is efficacious and what the nature of the threat is we're dealing with.
So I'm guessing about this, there must have been tremendous controversy.
About brain death, yes.
It's difficult to have an objective opinion when it's a checklist and it's your experience, your eyes, your ears, you overseeing a patient and having to go through that checklist and make that determination.
Not everybody is going to come to the same conclusions.
Now, I will say it's much easier now.
We have a much greater understanding.
But in these early days, it was still very unclear.
And one of the things that's interesting is that you can ask the question, what is death or what is the moment of death?
But Dr. Robert White decided to ask its inverse.
What is brain life?
How do I prove where life is?
Could we answer this question by going the other way around?
If we prove what constitutes brain life, does that not shed light on what constitutes brain death?
And that was the motivating question for Dr. Robert White.
That sounds like a very reasonable question, but he took it a little further.
He certainly did.
So how do we determine whether a brain is living or not living?
One of his decisions, one of his ideas, was essentially to remove or isolate a brain.
And what I mean by that is pull it out of its bodily housing and let it still be alive so you could study it without the surrounding body, the surrounding skull.
You took away the screen of the body.
Now, how in the world would you be able to do that?
Well, he began with mice.
And actually, that is my first introduction to him.
I was given a notebook that belonged to Dr. White.
And as I'm flipping through it, it's got little rusty flecks of dried blood and all of this information about mice and mice's brains.
And so I'm holding in my hands the original idea of how to abstract a living brain from a living creature.
And that's how it begins.
But wouldn't the engineering of removing a brain, trying to make it function outside of the cavity in which it resides, the plumbing would be one thing, the trauma would be another.
It certainly would.
So it meant you had to re-engineer several steps in advance.
One of the things that Dr. White had been working on while still a graduate student, Dr. White was not just a neurosurgeon, he was also a neuroscientist with a PhD.
And while he was getting his PhD, he was studying cooling, the effect of hypercooling on spinal cord damage, on other kinds of things.
And what he discovered along the way is that if you super cool the brain, what is today known as therapeutic hypothermia, the brain becomes a less greedy organ.
It needs less oxygen.
Because of course, that's the problem.
Brain cells die quickly, rapid die-off after only the loss of a few minutes of, or less than that even, of oxygen.
So he realized he could cool the brain down, and that meant he had more time to work.
But even so, this required basically unplumbing one monkey's brain.
He ends up working with monkeys and re-plumbing it with the venous fluids of another donor monkey.
And so his original experiment, post-mice, required one large monkey, one small monkey.
And he just took the arterial, sort of like the venous fluid, the blood from this monkey, and he plugs it into a place where the veins were feeding blood to the brain in the other monkey, and he unplugs that from its own body.
So slowly, step by step, he's removing the connections between that monkey's brain and head and its body until he cuts the body away entirely and it falls to the floor and He is using only the head, the head suspended in these try, sort of these grabbers that hold onto it as he, and with screws, basically.
And he slowly has now this head, and he has to get in there.
He has to get inside to see that brain.
He slowly cuts away at the skull material.
He pulls the brain out.
It's still being fed with blood.
They're still pumping it through.
It's on a platform of a device that reminds me of a, it looks like a lava lamp without the glass top.
And it's just being fused with blood.
And it's there.
It's pink.
It's round.
It's plugged into an EEG.
And that brain, without any other part of its body, was sending EEG signals to graph paper.
And they could see that it was thinking.
Did his colleagues believe this research was valid?
So one of the interesting dynamics of this book is when it takes place.
You know, starting in the 50s, we've just come out of World War II, and it's the rise of the Cold War, the rise of the Soviet Union.
And there's a lot of tension.
There's a lot of ideological tension that if your science wins, your ideology wins.
And one of the reasons, and White himself felt that this was true, one of the reasons that this kind of research got as much support as it did is because the Russians were working on it too.
They had been releasing footage of, basically they had created a surgical two-headed dog where they had transplanted the head of one dog onto another dog's body.
They did that in 1958.
And, you know, just as with Sputnik launching the NASA space program because we didn't want to be outdone, the same kind of thing really was going on.
So you had the outer space race and you had an inner space race.
This sounds absolutely horrible.
And we have laws now on vivisection.
We can't do these things, can we?
I don't think anyone...
Dr. White deeply questioned the purpose of the two-headed dogs, even though he was fascinated.
It was a physiologist, quite a brilliant physiologist in Moscow named Vladimir Demikov, who was performing these surgeries.
He was proving that you could literally remove a head and put it somewhere else and it would keep going, which is also technically what White was doing.
White was trying to prove something specific, that brain life could exist outside body, right?
That brain could outlive its body.
If that's brain life, if brain life is graph paper ticking away from the EEG, then the absence of it must be brain death.
So he felt he had a reason to perform his.
He wasn't quite sure what was happening in the Soviet Union.
But the point is, we all looked at science very differently during the Cold War.
You had so much more, it's not acceptance exactly.
It's more fear.
It's fear driven that someone is going to outperform your nation and that that somehow makes them better and more dangerous.
And I will also say they weren't quite sure what was going on behind the Iron Curtain.
Dr. White said among physicians, people talked like, have they mastered, you know, reanimation?
Have they figured out, I mean, this is, it is Frankenstein.
Have they figured out a way to extend life in some way that could mean soldiers who don't die?
I mean, this was something people were really frightened of and threatened by.
And so when I, whether his colleagues, his colleagues did support it, at this point in time, they found it interesting.
They thought, okay, you can study a brain in isolation.
It probably tells us a lot of great things about the brain.
But they didn't entirely believe what White said.
White felt that the monkey was still in there and that those thoughts were the same thoughts the monkey would have if it were still in its body.
And there were many people who thought, you don't know that.
For all we know, this is some kind of, yeah.
It's almost a philosophical question.
How could you know that?
Right, right.
And to be honest, this takes us right back to the Soviet Union because Dr. White, he presents his findings at a meeting, and people were very excited about it, but nobody believed his claim that this was a brain that was living and that the monkey was still living.
Therefore, the monkey's selfhood was in the brain.
Nobody believed him, so he decided he had to find a way of proving it.
And he thought of Vladimir Demikov.
He thought of the two-headed dogs.
Both of those heads, they drank milk.
They were both alert.
The ears would perk.
I will say it's black and white footage, and that's good, but it's still disturbing to watch.
I've seen all the video footage for many of these things, including the brain isolation experiment, which is not black and white.
So it can be very difficult to watch these things.
And it did get him into all kinds of trouble with animal rights groups.
Well, I'm not surprised.
It sounds utterly, utterly horrific.
Right.
Yes.
And he didn't think of it that way at all.
To him, this was, oh, I'm learning things that are ultimately going to save human beings.
If we can prove where brain life and brain death is, we can transplant organs.
This is all about saving lives.
So for him, he was justified.
And he was also deeply Catholic and very spiritual person, which I know might seem strange, but he didn't think that religion and science were separate.
He felt that he had a God-directed mission to do these things.
So he actually travels to the Soviet Union during the Cold War to try and meet with Vladimir Demikov.
I actually followed his, I took the same journey myself and sort of followed in his footsteps as I was researching the book to find this Vladimir Demikov's lab.
And he does ultimately find it.
Was he getting newspaper coverage, media coverage at the time?
Not yes and no.
The funny thing is, that does come, but it comes later when White begins to think that media coverage might be useful to helping him push his own agenda.
He does have a look magazine covers one of his brain isolation experiments.
It doesn't really go the way he had hoped.
He thought that this would help get people on board with what he was doing.
He was covered by Oriana Felici, who basically made the surgery seem just as awful as it possibly could seem.
And she, as a result of her article on him, he actually got lots of negative press, not the positive press that he was hoping for.
But, you know, he continues on.
He's not daunted by the negative press at all.
As a matter of fact, he debates animal rights group leaders all throughout his career, happily.
You know, he does it in writing.
He does it in person.
He debates Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA, right here in Ohio, in Cleveland, at the City Club.
But when he comes back from Russia, he thinks to himself, okay, I can prove that brain's still alive if I just keep it inside its head when I remove the body.
So that becomes the basis for the first head transplant surgery.
Good Lord.
Maybe that's a good point to park it for now, and we'll come back in just a moment.
This is, as I say, listener discretion advised territory.
We're talking with Brandy Scalacci, Mr. Humble, and Dr. Butcher.
The story of a medical man who believed that he was doing the right thing in the furtherance of what we know and possibly helping to save lives.
Not claim them, but it is all very bloody stuff.
And if it is not for you, please tune out right now.
So he's got this idea that you can remove a complete head and put it somewhere else.
Yes, he does.
He does.
And this is 1970, 1971, when he begins the first, what he calls cephalic transplant, meaning head transplant of two monkeys.
And to perform this, remember, there's a whole re-plumbing that has to happen.
You have to make sure the brains are getting proper oxygen.
So this is going to be a complex surgery, and it's technically two surgeries.
You have to do this for two monkeys.
He has a big team of people.
He actually, he puts marks on the floor, so it's like dance steps.
This is going to be a well-oiled machine.
And the day they go in, they start before dawn.
He's got people monitoring.
He's got anesthetists.
He's got various students in there as well.
He's got his surgeons.
He's got himself Dr. White, slightly pudgy, slightly bald, big black frame glasses, and smoking a pipe the entire time.
And they begin the surgery.
Now, this takes hours and hours.
And essentially what they are doing is, I want to call to your mind the telephones that would be on the wall with the long cord attached to the receiver.
I know many young people might not remember these, but that sense that you have the receiver on one end and the phone on the wall attached by a cord is what they are doing with each monkey's brain and body.
They are lengthening the distance between the arterial connections, the blood as it's flowing between body and head.
But they are also severing at the C1, C2 vertebrae, and that means they've severed the spinal cord.
Right, so they believe that you can run the brain off an extension cable.
Essentially, yes, they are literally doing that.
They have the head is resting over here and the body is over here.
There's a distance of, I've seen the footage, it looks to be about a foot and a half between the head and the, but it might have been slightly less.
And then they pull the two monkeys together.
They put the two operating tables together and they begin the business of unhooking one and hooking it to the other.
So remember, the body at this point, with its autonomic, automatic heartbeat and artificial respiration, is feeding, like a machine, the head.
And they transplant monkey A's head onto monkey B's body, shorten the cords again, shorten up that phone cord, hang up the receiver, so to speak, and stitch it back together.
And the monkey is still under anesthesia.
And then they just have to wait to see if it will wake up.
Right.
And, you know, I almost hesitate to ask what happens.
So it's really interesting.
This room that they're performing in, it almost looks science fiction.
There's walls of equipment.
It's sort of that gray-green color that everything was with dials.
And there's a big clock on the wall that makes a really audible ticking noise.
Everyone's exhausted.
They are covered in sweat.
They literally have towels around their necks.
They're leaning up against operating tables and they're waiting.
They're waiting.
It happened to be one of his residency doctors who first notices the eyelid flutter.
And he calls everyone over and everyone crowds around this monkey.
And slowly it comes out of anesthesia.
It wakes up.
It opens its eyes.
It follows them around the room with its eyes.
It tries to bite Dr. White.
They end up, they give it a little bit of food.
They give it a little bit of water.
It can't actually digest anything.
They haven't reconnected all that stuff.
But they do have, like it can chew.
It's unhappy.
It's angry.
You can tell by its facial expressions that it is not happy about this because it's alive, the head, but it can't control the body it's attached to.
They have severed all connection.
So the only nerves that are still functioning is it can hear, it can see, it can move its nose, its mouth, its lips, its tongue.
And Dr. White said to the room, we've done it.
We have done it.
There was so much celebration.
They said people were screaming, people were crying.
They had done the impossible.
They had proved that a brain could outlive its body.
And White said at that moment in the operating room, have I come to the point where I can transplant the soul?
Because for White, the brain was the repository of all that is you.
And as a Catholic, he also thought it's where the soul resided.
That is the point then at which, I mean, maybe he was there well before that.
I have to say, I'm horrified by this.
By today's standards, by any standards, this sounds to me to be an appalling piece of research.
And just on a personal level, I wouldn't want that kind of research being done really for any reason.
You need to find another way and use science to find that other way.
But it was done.
It was what it was.
And it was in that era.
When he starts to say, I think I might well have got myself to the frontier of transplanting the soul, that is what starts to make him sound like a mad scientist.
He had a very interesting concept of how the soul and brain Connected.
And I have to agree with you that you'll notice that the title of the book is, it's really meant to bring to your attention or to your imagination that kind of Jekyll and Hyde moment, Mr. Humble, Dr. Butcher.
These were his two nicknames.
And I say that because Dr. White really did have kind of two identities in a sense.
Now, I've given you what is, I think, the more traumatic, the Dr. Butcher site.
He was called Dr. Butcher by PETA, by animal rights groups who there were bomb threats.
They attacked his car.
They chased him at one point, all wearing guerrilla suits, chased his car once.
He had a bloody plastic head thrown at him at a dinner.
So they felt he was Dr. Butcher.
He had overstepped.
There was no reason to do this kind of research.
But he was also a neurosurgeon.
And I'll give you just the sense of the other side of his personality, which I think is important to understanding the complexity of medicine.
He spent all day in a trauma hospital dealing with people.
He had lots and lots of teenagers who had been hit by drunk drivers, traumatic brain injuries.
He watched people's lives hang in the balance, particularly a lot of paralysis victims, people who were fine in the morning, had a bad fall, suddenly this child no longer can move its arms and legs.
And he became really obsessed with saving lives, even when other people said it couldn't be done.
There was a young girl who he literally created a surgery for because everybody else said it was inoperable.
And he's like, no, we can do this.
So he had a dedication to saving lives.
So much so that here in Cleveland, he's a bit of a hero because everyone knows somebody that he operated on.
And you have that working on him, this idea that you can save lives, you can save lives, you can save brains, which again, for White is saving the soul.
And he feels that that's the most important thing you could possibly do.
He begins thinking that the head transplant, or actually I should say, the body transplant, is going to be something that can save lives.
So just like if your kidney is shutting down and you want a new kidney, his point was, what if your whole body is shutting down?
What if your brain is fine, but your body is riddled with cancer or you have a wasting neuromuscular disease?
He used Stephen Hawking as an example quite often.
Wouldn't it be right to give them an organ transplant that essentially meant the entire body?
So for White, the experiment on animals was a step towards, in his mind, saving human lives and bringing those human lives a better chance of survival.
Now, I will say that I found a lot of this difficult to research as well.
I mean, some of this is pretty gritty stuff.
But one story in particular stood out to me that made me kind of go, okay, there's another side of this.
There was a man named Craig Vitovitz.
He was tetraplegic.
He had been injured in a diving accident as a teen.
And he kind of got written off.
He wanted to do therapy to get better.
And everyone was like, well, you have this terrible injury.
This is how it's going to be.
He refused to accept that.
He was an inventor.
He created a chair for himself.
He created a means of allowing him to still write, even though he mostly didn't have control of his limbs.
He got married.
He started his own business.
He had children.
He traveled.
He had a full life.
But his organs began to shut down because this happens quite frequently with paralyzed patients.
And it was his kidneys.
And he wanted to get on the list to get a kidney transplant, but they didn't consider him a good candidate because he was paralyzed.
And Craig felt that was completely wrong.
It was ableist.
He felt it was like they were saying to him his life wasn't worth as much as someone's life who had able-bodied, you know, who was able-bodied.
So he seeks Dr. White out in 1998, 1997, 1998.
And he meets him and he says, you know, I'm willing to be your first patient.
And Dr. White and Craig Vitovitz actually work on a human surgical protocol to see if it's possible to provide this quote-unquote body transplant.
He stopped calling it a head transplant after the monkeys, a body transplant, an organ transplant of all the organs, including the skin that wraps it all together.
That's what he focused on towards the end of his career to see if it was possible.
And for him, that was a no-brainer because he thought all that you are lives in your brain.
Now, I don't know.
I think I question that.
But it was something for him, you know, your brain on legs.
And indeed, your consciousness may reside, and that's still debated and probably will be debated for a lot longer, resides somewhere else.
How far did he get with this research then?
Well, I don't want to give too much away, but it went pretty far.
Let me say that.
It went quite far.
He did some things that I think you'd be quite surprised to learn very, very near the sorts of things that would allow you to carry on.
But see, for any big experimental surgery, you need, if you're going to perform a head transplant, you need four things.
You need a willing patient, which he had.
You also need a body donor.
You need a brain-dead body.
Now you can understand why his previous research was so important to him to get brain death to equate death, because then that means you can use a donor body of a brain-dead person when that body is still alive.
So you need a patient.
You need a donor body.
You also need permission from some hospital has to agree to let you perform this surgery, and you need money.
I mean, we're talking upwards of four, five, six million dollars.
It's a very expensive thing to do.
And you have to get all four of those things.
And they ultimately don't get all four of these pieces to make this work.
But you'd be surprised just how close they came.
The biggest problem, of course, is that times have changed.
This book covers 50 years, and things people might have been okay with in 1970, people in 2002 are not so okay with.
Well, I get that, but my thoughts are with the man who was the subject of this, who was progressively becoming paralyzed.
What became of him?
He actually ultimately outlives Dr. White.
Really?
But he does.
But that's partly because Dr. White became ill.
But he doesn't, you know, he never gave up.
He was quite furious.
At one point, I think it was Hard Copy ran a show about Dr. White and Craig Vitovitz, and they called him Frankenstein's willing monster.
And Craig was furious.
He's like, I am not a monster.
People who are disabled are not monsters.
And so for Craig, he really thought fondly of Dr. White.
He felt Dr. White believed that if you could still think, your life was worth saving.
And that's not always true of people.
It's really, it's a big conflict.
Actually, he wrote an article about this recently for the Globe and Mail in Canada because new legislation there got a lot of disabled people very worried that their lives are not being taken seriously in terms of right to die legislation.
So, you know, what's a life worth living?
Well, for Dr. White, as long as you were blipping that graph paper, you had a life worth living.
And I think you have to respect that, regardless of all the really strange stuff that might make you not like him as a person or not agree with his research, he certainly had a sense that the brain itself was the most important and valuable thing, and it was worth saving, almost at any cost.
I don't know what to think about some aspects of this story, and I'm absolutely clear what I think about the animal experiments.
Obviously, looked at in 2021, utterly horrific.
But as we stand today, there are people out there in this world who are close to doing the head transplant.
There's a man who was in and out of the papers a year or two ago, Sergio Cannavero.
Where do we, just quickly in the last two minutes we've got, where are we with this research at the moment?
Well, one of the things I hope the book brings to light is that we often arrive at the can before the should, and sometimes science gets ahead of ethics, and we don't want to abdicate the responsibility of ethics to someone else.
We all need to be sure that we're doing the right thing and that doctors are doing the right thing, that science, we want science to push the limits, but there still need to be limits.
Near as I can tell, so far, no real additional strides to what Dr. White had done have happened.
Do you think it will ever happen?
It's possible.
It's certainly possible.
The thing is, we could actually perform a head transplant tomorrow if we had those four things I was talking about, but you would still have a paralyzed patient on the other side with an uncertain future.
And we still now do not know whether you will be the same person on the other end of that surgery.
As you know, our guts have neurons.
We're learning increasingly just how important this embodied composite being that is the human is.
Not to mention the fact that identity is, it does matter what your body looks like.
This is the whole point of LGBT and sexual reassignment surgeries and things like that.
So to just assume that you can just pop ahead somewhere else and you'll be the same person is probably a trifle naive.
So it is possible.
It is possible.
But is it right?
Is it something we ought to be spending our time and energy on?
Do you know something?
This conversation, which unfortunately we must conclude now, but I do hope one of these days we get to talk again.
It's actually put me through the ringer mentally and emotionally.
I didn't expect that.
I really didn't.
I need to sit down and contemplate all of this.
I can go after this.
But boy, on that basis, this book is definitely worth getting.
It is called, isn't it?
Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher, A Monkey's Head, The Pope's Neuroscientist, and The Quest to Transplant the Soul.
We didn't quite get to the Pope's Neuroscientist.
He was an advisor to Pope John Paul II, so helped to establish the Vatican Council for Bioethics, which I think might seem surprising given everything else that he was up to.
Well, indeed.
Brandy Scalachi, thank you very much indeed, and what a conversation.
Thank you.
Please take care.
Thank you so much for having me.
As ever, your thoughts.
Welcome on this edition of The Unexplained.
Brandy Scalachi, who I believe will be making a return to this show talking about some of her other research.
An excellent guest, in my opinion.
What are your thoughts?
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can tell me from there.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
If you've made a donation to the online shows recently, thank you very much for doing that and for considering me.
And thank you for the nice things that you're telling me and the way that you're keeping me on track through everything that we have to experience in life at the moment.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, in the sunshine, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection