- It is my pleasure to present Professor Susan Lederer,
who is the Robert Turell professor
of the History of Medicine and Bioethics at UW Medicine
in the School of Medicine and Public Health.
She is a historian of medicine and biomedical ethics
and has published on the history of both human
and animal experimentation.
Her books include: Subjected to Science,
Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War,
Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature,
and Flesh and Blood: A Cultural History of Transplantation
and Transfusion in 20th Century America.
She's currently working with Professor Susan Lawrence
on a history of full body and organ donation in America.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Susan Lederer.
- Good evening.
I sometimes think I'd like to talk about Frankenstein
when it's dark and stormy, but I'm really glad
that it's light and not stormy this evening.
Although I have to confess,
the pollen has influenced my voice.
So luckily there is water.
So the occasion for this talk...
is an anniversary.
It is the 200th anniversary of the publication
of a work of fiction that has had an enduring
and compelling influence on western culture.
The book is "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus."
And this is the original title page for the 1818 edition.
I hope that many of you have read the book.
But I know that even if you have never read
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel about a pale student
of unhallowed arts who secretly animates a creature,
you know who Frankenstein is.
You've heard of Frankenstein.
I would be astounded that you've never heard
of Frankenstein.
And you may also know-- There's Mary Shelley.
You perhaps also know that in Mary Shelley's story,
Frankenstein actually refers to the young man.
He's actually a college dropout, named Victor Frankenstein.
And it's Victor who visits the graveyards
and the slaughterhouses for the raw materials
that he will use in his creation.
The creature, the monster, and he has a number of names
that Mary Shelley characterizes him as,
the mummy, the abortion, the misbegotten.
The monster has no name.
And indeed, that's part of the tragic nature of the book.
Victor Frankenstein creates this being
and then fails not only to give it a name,
but to aid his Adam.
And in the 200 years since Mary Shelley first breathed life
into her tale, Frankenstein has come to refer
to both the monster and his maker, the monster and the man,
who have become inextricably linked in our literature,
in our mythology, and also in our vocabulary,
particularly when it comes to talking about concerns
in biomedical advances and their implications
for human society.
So this is from the 1831 frontispiece.
This is the first depiction of the monster sort of in print
in that particular version.
So you know about Frankenstein.
And you may also-- But, you perhaps know less.
I might be surprised if you knew much more,
about head transplants.
And you may even wonder what is the link
between Frankenstein and the head transplants.
Let me just tell you right now there is one.
That's the subject of the talk tonight.
But let me first assure you, reassure you perhaps,
that head transplants are in fact a real thing.
They are not a gothic fiction,
nor a Hollywood horror story,
like this 1962 film, "The Brain That Would Not Die."
Although it's actually the whole head, apparently,
that would not die.
I have to admit I've never seen this film.
But you can guess sort of the plot.
Now it's true that a human head transplant
has yet to be successfully performed.
But it's not for lack of ambition on the part
of these two men, Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero
and his Chinese collaborator Xiao-Ping Ren.
Since 2013, and also in a now famous TED Talk
in which he used the picture of Frankenstein,
Dr. Canavero has been announcing the imminent performance
of a human head transplant.
But like many imminent things,
its arrival keeps getting pushed back.
But he keeps claiming it's going to happen any day.
And in the last five years, Dr. Canavero has talked
a great deal about the prospect of such surgery.
In so doing, he has claimed that Mary Shelley's
200-year-old novel directly inspired him.
I guess hence, Boris Karloff.
Not only does the book reveal a missing piece, he claims,
to his plan to replace the head of a human being,
it also provided the justification
for such experimentation.
Just as the fictional Victor Frankenstein discovers
how to animate lifeless tissue,
Canavero claims that his intention
with human head transplants is to cheat death.
I mean, that's an ambition.
And he's also predicted a future
in which even healthy people could opt
for a full body transplant as a way to live longer,
eventually putting heads on their own cloned body.
So he's also sort of imagining this as a future trajectory.
"I'm into life extension,"
this neurosurgeon has repeatedly informed reporters.
"Life extension and reaching the wall
"between life and death."
And I will say that he has courted the media
claiming that again, Frankenstein--
He's done this both in his published scientific papers
and also in his discussions with reporters.
But he's also posed for pictures
and given lots of talks to reporters.
And he's actually-- He's doing this, he says,
because he's attempting to crowdfund
what he estimates to be $100 million surgery
to perform the first human head transplant.
And because he can't get money from the usual sources.
So he's looking toward, to the public to help support this.
Well, like Victor Frankenstein and his creature,
Canavero has actually melded with the surgical procedure
he has so boldly proposed.
In both the popular and scholarly press,
the surgical procedure in which a diseased
and badly injured body is replaced with a healthy one
has been labeled Frankenstein surgery.
It's been called Operation Frankenstein.
There's been reference to Frankenstein experiments.
And perhaps not surprisingly,
Canavero is referred to as The Brain
behind the Frankenstein surgery
of the human head transplant.
Now Canavero has claimed, again, I mean, in numerous forums
to have been inspired by Mary Shelley's novel.
But it's not clear if he's in fact read the book.
Or actually appreciated, if he has read it,
what Shelley was actually trying to communicate
some two centuries ago, and in a message I think
that continues to have relevance for us today.
But Canavero certainly does recognize
the cultural power of Frankenstein,
again, the monster and the maker.
And he's attempted to harness that power
for his own purposes as he attempts to become
a 21st century Prometheus.
So let me just explain what I want to do tonight,
which is to briefly sketch out Mary Shelley's concept,
or conception of Victor Frankenstein and his plan
to collapse the boundaries between life and death.
And I will then give you some examples of the ways
in which the Frankenstein myth and the Frankenstein metaphor
have provided a very ready means to articulate anxieties
about a range of biomedical advances.
And this from, you know, the last third of the 19th century
to the present time.
And finally, at the end I will return to Dr. Canavero
and Dr. Ren to their proposed surgical intervention
and their efforts to rehabilitate Frankenstein
in the case of the human head transplant.
So that's my plan.
So let me turn now to the genesis of Frankenstein.
Well, some of you may know that Mary Shelley's story
began with a contest.
During the very uncongenial and rainy summer of 1816,
Mary Godwin, as she was then, and her lover,
the poet Percy Shelley, ran off to Switzerland.
There, on the shores of Lake Geneva,
the couple visited often with the poet Lord Byron
and his physician John William Polidori.
They spent evenings reading aloud German stories,
a fantasy in supernatural events.
And it was a Byron's suggestion that they each agreed
to a story competition.
Each of them would come up with their own tale
of a supernatural occurrence.
Mary Godwin was just 18 years old,
but she took the task very seriously and worked
to bring the story to fruition.
So she worked on her manuscript for two years.
Percy Shelley took quite an interest in her writing.
He made over 1,000 suggestions and changes to her manuscript
and actually wrote the original preface for Frankenstein
as it appeared in the 1818 edition.
By the time the book appeared in 1818,
Mary Godwin had married Percy Shelley.
She was mother of several young children.
She was just 20 years old.
Now Mary Shelley's name did not appear in the book
or on the title page.
Although published anonymously,
the book did have a dedication.
She chose to dedicate the novel
to the philosopher William Godwin.
A radical political thinker, Godwin also happened
to be Mary Shelley's father.
And it was an effort to gain or to come back
into his good graces.
But the dedication to Godwin, his radical, political views,
excited great speculation about who had written
this strange novel.
Some people thought it was the work of Percy Shelley,
who was associated in the public sphere
with William Godwin and his ideas.
No one seemed to think that it could have been
the work of Mary Shelley,
despite her impressive literary lineage.
She was not only the daughter of William Godwin,
the philosopher, but her mother was the formidable author
Mary Wollstonecraft, a radical philosopher in her own right,
and the author in 1792 of "A Vindication
"of the Rights of Woman."
So the original novel was published in 1818
without Mary Shelley's name on it.
Her name appears in a new and revised edition
of Frankenstein, is published in 1831.
And actually Mary Shelley has the opportunity
to write her own preface to the novel.
And in so doing, she discusses,
or she explains how she has been so frequently asked
about how she as a young girl had come to think of
and to write about such a hideous idea
that she wanted to give an explanation for it.
And her explanation was that she recalled
long conversations in which she was a silent listener,
a conversation between Byron and Shelley
about the nature of the principle of life,
about the possibility that it could be discovered,
it could be harnessed, it could be manipulated
for the good of mankind.
And as she wrote in the 1831 preface,
"Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated;
"galvanism had given some token of such things;
"perhaps the component parts of a creature
"might be manufactured, brought together,
"endued with some vital warmth."
And I would argue that part of Mary Shelley's genius
in fashioning the story of Victor Frankenstein
and his creature was her ability to draw on
the natural philosophy, the medicine,
natural history of her day, which she had experienced
through her own program of extensive reading,
which again set her apart from most of the young women
of her time, or through meeting,
through her father and his publication,
of many of the most eminent scientists and physicians
of her day.
Now in the early 19th century, the boundary between life
and death intrigued physicians and other students of nature.
There was, for example, considerable excitement
and interest in the possibility that one could resuscitate
the near or newly dead.
Beginning in the 1760s, what were then called
humane societies, were organized by both physicians
and reformers who sought to teach methods
on how to revive people who might have been drowned
or suffocated or had even gone on to death itself.
First organized in 1774, the Royal Humane Society in 1796
boasted of having revived more than 2,000 people
through various methods.
This is actually some of their propaganda
showing sort of the discovery of a young man
sort of apparently drowned in the lake,
but methods of resuscitation were applied to him.
And then you see him happily restored
to to bosom of his family.
Also among those revived was in fact
Mary Shelley's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.
Mary Wollstonecraft actually set out to commit suicide
in 1795 following an unhappy love affair.
In a letter that was written shortly before
her attempted suicide, she expressed the hope
that her body would not be insulted by being snatched
from death by people like this.
She actually jumped into the Thames.
She lost consciousness, but was then rescued
by some watermen.
And in a letter that was written after her successful revival,
she expressed not gratitude,
but actually resentment that she had been revived.
She wrote, "I have only to lament that when
"the bitterness of death was passed,
"I was inhumanely brought back to life and to misery."
Now in addition to sort of these physical methods
of resuscitation, the application of smelling salts,
using a bellows to breathe air into the lungs,
the direct application of electricity, or galvanism,
to revive the dead also generated intense excitement
among physicians and the public.
In the 1790s, the Italian anatomist Luigi Galvani
performed an extensive set of experiments
in which he applied sort of an electrical current
to the dissected muscles of a dead frog,
thereby producing movement.
So again, sort of interest in the possibility
that you could discover the spark of life,
and that again this could be harnessed and manipulated
was a Promethean dream of the time.
Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini,
actually took his uncle's work to the public.
He conducted extraordinary public demonstrations
throughout Europe and throughout the continent
and also in the United Kingdom in which he would apply
electrical current to the ears and noses
of newly decapitated animals.
This is from an 1803 engraving
in his book on galvanism showing the application
of electrical current to the head of an ox.
And also, he would apply electrical current
to the bodies of decapitated human beings.
For example, in 1803, Aldini visited London
and held public demonstrations that were attended
by the Prince and Princess of Wales, among others.
He applied current not only to dead animals,
but to recently executed criminals
from London's Newgate Prison.
After applying the electrical current to the muscles
of the face, I have a closeup, the muscles of the face,
reportedly the jaw began to quiver.
The adjoining muscles were horribly contorted in the face.
And then one eye, actually opened.
And this was a sensation.
Now Mary Shelley drew on the science of her day
to create the story of Frankenstein.
But I would submit sort of the science
wasn't her primary aim.
In so doing, she was especially interested
in the creator's responsibility in using
these godlike powers of reanimation and resuscitation.
In the novel, Victor Frankenstein has these powers.
He's been appalled at the outcome of his experiment
and abandons his creature.
And again, it's this creature's profound alienation
from all of human society,
his intense loneliness, his abject isolation
from all human contact, the rejection by his own creator
that leads him to mayhem and murder
and sort of the ensuing tragedy that fills the pages
of the book.
So let me turn now to the use of Frankenstein as metaphor.
Mary Shelley's depiction of a creator,
who despite his best intentions,
and I think Victor does have very good intentions
in the novel, but instead makes a monster,
quickly becomes part of the cultural vocabulary.
And in fact, for three decades of the 19th century,
Frankenstein was actually the most popular novel
in the English language.
Translated into at least 29 other languages,
the novel, I think it's something of a record,
has been in print continuously for some 200 years.
But the Frankenstein story, as opposed to the novel,
also became both more and less of Mary Shelley's creation.
In the stage adaptations that were quickly made
after the publication and popularity of the novel in 1818,
the Frankenstein story was dramatically streamlined,
not surprisingly, perhaps,
to condense a several hundred-page novel
to an hour-and-a-half stage adaptation.
But it was also dramatically simplified.
I suggested elsewhere, but I do think it's true,
that the popular culture version of Frankenstein
can be reduced to actually two simple sentences.
It's alive, and the more ominous, it's escaped.
And it was in this form that the Frankenstein story
actually reached sort of a broader and more diverse audience
again in Europe, in England, and in the United States.
And perhaps not surprisingly, it also became
a recognizable metaphor in both political discourse
and in political cartoons.
It came to symbolize, or to manifest
people and things that were out of control,
that were monstrous.
And I think one of the best examples of this
is from the British magazine Punch.
These are English men being menaced
by the Irish Frankenstein, who are freakish, violent,
out-of-control, an example of power that has been misused
and now threatens the good of the English nation.
Now in the American context, the Frankenstein metaphor
began to appear in discussion of medical developments
in the 1870s.
And this comes from a story that appeared
in a San Francisco newspaper, the Daily Alta California
in October 1871.
It's a front-page story that talks about
a nice surgical operation.
But the operation was hardly nice in the conventional sense.
The article goes on to say, "Mrs. Shelley's fearful creation,
"Frankenstein, will presently take its place
"among the possibilities if science and surgery
"continue to advance."
And it goes on to describe the surgical skills
of an Illinois physician who takes pity
on a young woman whose face has been horribly deformed
by a cancerous growth, which renders her an object
of loathsome horror.
Working with a dentist, he implants new teeth.
He creates a new jaw for her.
He applies some of the new techniques that were developing
in surgery involving the grafting of skin.
This shows sort of skin grafting, sort of,
you know, taking skin harvested from the body
in an effort to repair grievous injury.
And this is not-- I don't know particularly the kind
of cancer she had.
But again, showing sort of what an effort to make whole
someone who had been rendered an object of loathsome horror
because of their appearance.
Now Frankenstein metaphors were useful not only to reporters
but also to physicians themselves.
And in the 1880s, for example,
discussion in the obstetrics literature,
in both England and in the United States,
referenced Frankenstein when describing the necessity
for caution in using ergot on pregnant women.
It was a drug that was used
to stimulate uterine contractions.
Sorry, further ahead than I wanted to.
But again, the point that they were making was
that the incautious use of this drug
arouses a Frankenstein whose brute force
we are unable to control.
We prefer to use an instrument which is under the control
of hand and head, which we presume to supplement
the force of nature.
Now in the 20th century, the medicalization of Frankenstein
intensified after the enormous success of the 1931 film
featuring Boris Karloff.
Although, I put this up just to show you,
he doesn't actually get credited for his performance.
It's sort of the Monster as question mark.
And this film did have an enormous impact.
And just as Mary Shelley had drawn on contemporary
developments in galvanism and resuscitation
in creating her original monster,
the Universal filmmakers drew on intense interest
in the 1930s to achieve immortality
through organ transplants and artificial organs.
And one scientist who generated enormous interest
in the 1930s was a chemist at the University of California
named Robert Cornish who successfully revived dogs
that he'd actually killed with cyanide gas.
In 1934, Cornish was in hundreds of newspapers
around the United States when he claimed
to have successfully reanimated Lazarus IV, shown here.
And he's quiet about Lazarus I, II, III.
Nonetheless, he's successful here.
And again, I think somewhat like Canavero,
Cornish had something of a genius for self-promotion
and publicity, and naming the dogs Lazarus
was just the tip of that iceberg.
But the successful revival of dogs like Lazarus was marred
by concern that their reanimation had somehow altered
in a profound way the animal's mental state.
And in newspapers, you know, reporters would say
the fear that such experimentation on a human being
would evolve a fiendish Frankenstein monster.
And in fact, there's no record that Cornish was ever able
to attempt his reanimation technique on human beings,
but not for want of volunteers.
He received hundreds of letters from people
around the country volunteering to be killed by cyanide gas
and then revived.
I can't explain it, but I've seen the letters.
And he actually did go to the governors
of several western states which had just introduced
the gas chamber.
And he asked for permission to attempt to revive them
once they'd been successfully executed.
But this excited all kinds of newspaper speculation
about what would their legal status be?
Would that mean if they were revived they would be free
to go out and be free of prison?
Or would they have to go back to prison?
And again, there was this concern that once you're revived
from the dead, you're never quite the same.
Now the most sustained use, however,
of the Frankenstein story came in the late 20th century.
It occurs in the context of the advances in genetics
in the 1970s.
In the summer of 1976, as campuses across the country
debated the safety and the wisdom of using
the newly-developed recombinant DNA techniques,
the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example,
voiced very strident opposition to allowing
Harvard laboratories to engage in this research.
"We want to be damn sure," he told reporters,
"that the people of Cambridge won't be affected
"by anything that could crawl out of the laboratory.
"They may come up with a disease that cannot be cured.
"Is this the answer to Dr. Frankenstein's dream?"
And here you can see sort of Frankenstein lurking,
but there are other kinds of monsters.
In this audience, some of you may recognize
what's coming out of that one particular bauble.
So again, this occurs in the context of genetic research
and also, not surprisingly, in sort of cloning research
that occurs in the 1990s.
Perhaps not surprisingly when the Scottish researcher
Ian Wilmot announced the successful cloning of Dolly in 1997,
the Frankenstein myth received renewed attention.
One reporter called it a major outbreak
of the Frankenstein syndrome.
That was the most immediate consequence of the cloning
of this Scottish sheep.
And again, what she meant by this was invoking fears
of a force of evil unleashed by science
onto an unsuspecting and unprotected public.
In the 1990s, the invocations of Frankenstein,
which articulated ambivalence and anxiety
about developments in biomedical science,
were so widely recognized that they could be signaled
by the prefix Franken.
And again, sort of Franken as a prefix to brand something
unnatural, with its origins in the laboratory.
I traced the earliest use to 1992
in someone describing Frankenfoods.
The reporter from the New York Times who says,
talking about genetically-modified foods,
"Ever since Mary Shelley's baron rolled
"his improved human out of the lab,
"scientists have been bringing just such good things to life.
"If they want to sell us Frankenfood,
"perhaps it's time to gather the villagers,
"light some torches, and head to the castle."
And this is just one specimen of the power
of the Franken prefix, as deployed by Greenpeace,
sort of genetically modified Frosted Fakes,
you know, Frankenfood, bad.
Kids get your own gene splicer,
you know, or this, "IT Came from the Grocery Store."
You know, it's not labeled,
the horror of genetically modified.
And then sort of scientist at his laboratory.
And you know, you've seen these genetically,
you know, Frankenfoods.
Oh excuse me, "Frankenfood on Parade."
You can also see "Frankencow."
It morphs into "Frankenvirus,"
when you can build a "polio pathogen from scratch."
I don't know if people recall the Frankenfish scare,
you know, the fish that walks on land from pond to pond.
I don't have a slide for this, but I was interested how,
in a Manhattan courtroom in 2003,
a judge invoked the specter of Vic Frankenstein
chicken nuggets.
Now it was in a lawsuit that was actually brought
against McDonalds, which held the chain liable
for obesity and other illnesses
in unsuspecting young people.
The judge actually threw out the lawsuit,
but in so doing, he labeled Chicken McNuggets
quote, "a McFrankenstein creation of various elements,
"not utilized by the home cook."
So an unnatural thing to be sure.
And now I submit you don't even need Franken,
because you recognize the iconographic elements
of a Frankenfood, you know, the scar, the bolts.
And sort of-- I love this cartoon by Gary Larsen,
because you don't even need to mention sort of the Franken,
but you know that this flower is an unnatural creation,
right, trying to escape from the laboratory.
Now GMOs and foods produce the most sustained invocations
of Frankenstein, with a few alternatives.
Frankenstein, I would submit, had much more power
as a metaphor than Pandora,
and in this case her picnic basket.
And Farmaggeddon also didn't seem to catch on.
But Frankenstein, you know, frames for ongoing critiques
of biomedicine continued in human closing in 2001,
sort of cartoons like these.
So what's the big deal, what could go wrong?
You're alive, those sort of hubris, reproductive clone.
Also, and sort of when it comes to--
It provides a framework for talking about medical
and surgical interventions that are seen as unnatural.
So in this case, in the treatment of Ashley X,
this was a young girl in Seattle who had a developmental
brain condition known as static encephalopathy.
Her parents in, I think a good faith effort,
effort to keep her at home, sought medical help
to keep her small and not to have her develop
sort of reproductively.
But when this sort of came to public attention,
you know, there was a lot of criticism.
And in particular, some critics charged
that the Ashley treatment was creating
a 21st century Frankenstein that involved maiming a child
for the sake of convenience of her parents,
who are also her most dedicated caregivers.
And particularly, and finally I'll get to
human head transplants, shown here sort of in the Lego form.
Now currently, neurosurgeons, Sergio Canavero
and Xiao-Peng Ren are generating the most attention
with again their most highly publicized plans
to go forward with a human head transplant.
So as I mentioned at the outset,
Canavero first announced his plan in 2013.
His idea, which again I think was well-intentioned,
to extend the lives of people whose bodies
were degenerating through horrible degenerative disease,
or from fearful injury.
But I point out, although, that the idea of head transplants
seems outlandish, it's certainly not new.
And so for more than a century, scientists, physicians
have been attempting to perform head transplants
in the first half of the 20th century,
actually for the entire 20th century,
not on human beings, but on animals.
In 1908, for example, the American physiologist
Charles Guthrie, grafted a dog's head
onto another dog's neck, showing that blood could flow
into the decapitated head.
In the 1950s, the Russian researcher Vladimir Demikhov,
who was a pioneer in both human heart and lung transplants,
grafted the upper bodies of young dogs
onto the shoulders of other dogs,
creating dogs with two heads,
and demonstrating that both were able to move and see.
And they even apparently drank water.
These are images that appeared in Life magazine in 1959,
although these were experiments that were not
without criticism at the time,
even from some surgeons who couldn't see
what value this might be, what demonstration of this
would produce.
In 1965, the Cleveland surgeon Robert White transplanted
the brains of six dogs onto the necks of other dogs
in order to demonstrate that the brains could be kept alive
in another body.
In the 1970s, he actually transplanted the entire head
of a Rhesus monkey onto another monkey's body.
The monkey could reportedly see, hear, and taste.
In this particular transplant, he didn't attempt to fuse
the spinal cord.
The monkey lived for several days,
although there seems to be some uncertainty
about just how long the monkey lived following the surgery.
But White believed that his successful experiment
established the inevitability of head transplants.
Actually writing in Scientific American in 1999,
he forecast what has always been the stuff
of science fiction, the Frankenstein legend,
in which an entire human being is constructed
by sewing various body parts together,
will become a clinical reality early in the 21st century,
which is what Canavero and Ren are actually trying to do.
So it goes on to predict that this reality is inevitable.
And in fact, building on White's research
and his embrace of the Frankenstein legend,
Canavero announced in 1913 what he called
his HEAVEN Product, namely the Head Anastomosis VENture.
So again, having a good title, I think can be very useful in promoting this.
And I'll just remind you that an anastomosis in surgery
means sort of, you know, creating a connection
between body structures that carry fluids,
such as blood vessels, or even the bowel or the intestine.
In 1915, Canavero announced that he actually had a volunteer
for someone to undergo the first human head transplant,
a terminally ill Russian man named Valery Spiridonov,
who also appeared and gave a number of interviews
talking about his willingness to be the first recipient
of what was going to be really
a sort of a human body transplant,
as opposed to a head transplant.
He had a terrible disease, Werdnig-Hoffman disease,
that causes sort of rapid degeneration
of nerve and muscle.
He'd been in a wheelchair since he was one year old.
I don't usually use the Daily Mail as a source,
but, you know, here's again, sort of one example
of the kind of sensational Frankenstein narrative
when Canavero was actually preparing
for his Frankenstein surgery by attempting
to reanimate human corpses.
But it also says that the Russian man who had volunteered
to undergo this, reported that his girlfriend was opposed
to him undergoing the experiment.
And for reasons that remain unclear and undisclosed,
he's no longer a candidate for the surgery.
In 2017, Canavero announced that he would move
his operation to China because of the resistance
of medical communities in the United States and in Europe,
and their refusal to permit what was and continues to be
a very controversial procedure.
"The Americans do not understand,"
Canavero has told reporters.
The move to China had the support of the Chinese government.
It signaled China's desire to become a world power
in a variety of fields, including medicine.
The Chinese president wanted to restore China to greatness.
He wants to make it the sole superpower in the world.
And this operation, Canavero claimed, was going to enable
them to do this.
And Canavero has continued to criticize the United States
and Europe for their failure to host the surgery.
And I won't go into it in detail
because you really should hear it from an expert,
but I will tell you, and this won't surprise you,
that it's a very complicated surgery.
It does involve the simultaneous severing
of the spinal cords of both the donor and the recipient.
You have to immediately chill
the recipient, you know, put them into a state
of deep hypothermia.
It requires a group of 150 medical personnel
in a procedure that's expected to take some 24 hours
to separate and then reconnect the vertebra,
the jugular veins, the trachea, the esophagus.
This is an extraordinarily complex surgery.
And not surprisingly, there are enormous concerns about it.
And they're the concerns that you might imagine.
First, there's little evidence that this has been successful
in animal surgeries.
And although Canavero and Ren have made,
recorded a lot of publicity for their procedure,
they haven't published very much in scientific
and peer-reviewed journals that show the results
of the animal studies that they claim to have performed.
Secondly, there's the concern that now the head transplant
is going to be undertaken in China,
a country that has a history of taking positions
on bioethical issues that are at odds with Western Europe
and North America.
For there is, for example, strong evidence
that Chinese institutions have engaged
in forced organ harvest from prisoners.
On the research side, they are much
more likely and ready to engage in
stem cell and genetic editing techniques, especially CRISPR.
And some people have pointed to the fact
there's no legal mechanism to stop
potentially dangerous and fatal experiments from occurring.
Third, there are concerns about the patients,
including Mr. Spiridonov,
who are desperate and willing
to undergo this procedure.
Canavero has claimed he has received
lots of email and letters from other people
who are desperate enough to volunteer to be the first ones
to undergo the procedure of head transplant.
There are many more, but I won't go into them now.
And for his part, Canavero has dismissed all these concerns,
saying that Western bioethicists don't understand
the Chinese and they should stop patronizing the Chinese.
And that in fact what the Chinese have is a determination
to move the field forward, to advance that
we will all be better served by their willingness
to advance research in this.
Now Canavero, again, has claimed the mantle of Frankenstein.
Here's an article that he published
in Surgical Neurology International,
HEAVEN and Frankenstein together.
And he's claimed Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
as his inspiration.
And perhaps he is right to do so.
In his 1995 book on Frankenstein,
the English social scientist Jon Turney has written,
"We're never going to be rid of Frankenstein,
"even if we wanted.
"The story is too deeply embedded in our culture,
"not to leave echoes and traces
"wherever and whenever we discuss biomedical advances.
"But if we cannot rid ourselves of Frankenstein,
"perhaps we can recall,"
you know, the subtitle, that doesn't get as much discussion,
I think, in the literature on Frankenstein,
the subtitle that Mary Shelley chose in 1818
of the modern Prometheus.
You may recall that in Greek myth, Prometheus was punished
for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind.
But for Mary Shelley and her circle of friends
and her family, Prometheus represented a figure
of great optimism and hope for the future.
When she was preparing her husband's poems
for their publication after his death in 1822,
Mary Shelley actually wrote, "Prometheus used knowledge
"as a weapon to defeat evil by leading mankind
"beyond the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance
"to that in which they are virtuous through wisdom."
And I've always been struck in my own readings
of Frankenstein by what Mary Shelley wrote
for Victor Frankenstein's final words.
As he lays dying, he tells his friend Walton,
you know, that the monster has already been
sort of dispatched, he tells Walton,
"Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition,
"even it be only the apparently innocent one
"of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.
"Yet why do I say this?
"I, myself, have been blasted in my hopes,
"yet another may succeed."
So thank you.
(audience applauding)
- [Man] Were there popular resistance
to the first solid organ transplants?
- Are you referring to kidney transplants?
- [Man] Yeah.
- You know, I would say not to kidney transplants,
but certainly to the first human heart transplant.
In 1964, the first human heart transplant,
or excuse me, first heart transplant was performed,
actually in Jackson, Mississippi.
It involved taking a chimpanzee heart
and implanting it into the body of a human recipient.
And there was great criticism of this.
And it may have actually slowed progress in the field.
But I think, you know, in 1967 when Christiaan Barnard
went on to perform the first human heart transplant,
the fact that the first recipient, Louis Washkansky,
lived for 18 days, excited enormous
excitement.
I mean, it was the discovery of the century.
And you know, one of the things I've often found fascinating
about that first human heart transplant is that
Washkansky undergoes this heart transplant.
When he actually recovers from the surgery
and is able to talk to the nurses who are caring for him
in that hospital in Cape Town, South Africa,
what does he say?
He says, "I am the new Frankenstein."
Even though Frankenstein as a book was banned
in South Africa because it's about
monsters killing their creators,
which is not something that could be sustained
in that particular context.
But one of the things that I'm struck by is that
people are often willing to accept a great range of things
in the promise of, you know,
restoration of function or treatment for disease.
You know, Canavero has claimed that one of the things
that disturbs people about head transplant
is what's called in bioethics "the yuck factor."
It's simply too yucky to consider having a new head
implanted on another body.
It's just outside the band.
As a historian of medicine, I am much more struck
by the fact that people are willing to do
an incredible amount of yucky things if it promises
relief from disease or a better outcome.
There are lots, you know, when I look back at the history
of medicine, for example, when I think of maggot therapy,
that doesn't seem to be something one would want to embrace.
Although, again, it's used today in some circumstances.
It's effective for what we want it to do.
And it does the job that we want it to do.
So I think yuckiness is not an absolute standard.
- [Man] You mentioned the need for $100 million,
I think it was to-- - Yes, that's what they--
- [Man] Did you ever see the budget?
And where are things right now in terms of him going ahead?
Has he raised 50 million, for instance?
- You know, he is not forthcoming about many things.
And that's what makes it hard, I think, for many people
to take seriously what he's doing.
You know, I think, I've never seen a budget.
I don't know that anybody has actually sort of calculated
just how much money you would need.
But I do think people have thought about
just how much manpower you would need
and how many surgeons would be necessary,
how many nurses, how many technicians,
how long the surgery would take place.
And plus, there's the aftercare.
This is, again, this is not just a simple technical thing
to perform, but you have to care for that person.
And then other people have raised,
I didn't raise it here, but the immunological issues
from an unrelated donor body.
You know, most of us don't have a clone
in which we can have our head transferred
that's immunologically identical with us.
So I mean, there are again, sort of the number
of technical problems is huge.
And again, because it hasn't been subjected to
rigorous peer review, you know, the only things that we know
about just how far
the prospect of HEAVEN has proceeded,
we know from Canavero and Ren.
And it's hard to trust them completely
as the only sources of information.
One bioethicist who has written about this has said,
"The road to HEAVEN has been paved with good intentions,"
right, or bad, good intentions.
There's a lot, again, that we just don't know.
And it's hard to accept on trust.
And this is one instance in which I think
Canavero misreads Mary Shelley's novel.
Because part of problem of Victor's pursuit
is that he does it in secret.
He isolates himself from everyone.
He conducts his solitary research
away from everyone's eyes.
And then, not surprisingly, there's a bad outcome.
So secrecy is inimicable to the scientific venture.
- [Man] You mentioned that Dr. Canavero has had
many people volunteer to be the donors.
I'm presuming they're the head donors, not the body donors.
Where does he claim he's going to get the bodies,
given what you said about the timing of this,
presuming it's a very recently deceased body, or?
- It has to be a very recently,
it has to be a freshly dead body.
- [Man] Does he say where he intends to get these,
the body side of this equation?
- He has been silent on this.
And that's one of the concerns is about the move to China,
because there have been charges leveled against the Chinese
that they can arrange for an organ to be available
by executing a prisoner, once you have the right match.
So if you can order up a body, as it were,
that would be a tremendous advantage
from a technical point of view, of course,
that has massive ethical implications as well.
But you know, again, I would say it's not surprising
that people are in desperate situations
and are willing to do almost anything
to become, to have a better outcome.
I didn't mention here, but some people have been concerned
that Canavero has said that he's been approached
by a number of transsexuals who want to have
a different body.
But he has maintained that he would only do this procedure
on someone with a neurodegenerative
or neuromuscular or a wasting disease, physical disease,
rather than somebody who is a transsexual.
- [Woman] It seems like a brain transplant
might be easier than a head transplant.
Is there that discussion in the field?
- You know, I haven't. That's interesting.
Certainly Robert White, who was experimenting in the '70s,
was very interested in brain transplants.
But that hasn't come up in the literature.
So I mean, it's an interesting idea.
But I also don't think that a brain transplant
would necessarily be completely a walk in the park, right?
I mean, these again are very complex surgeries.
But for his part, Canavero has said,
well, there was opposition to heart transplants.
There was opposition to face transplants,
because again, the issues of identity
and the psychological implications for the individual.
But again, there are some people who have been
so massively disfigured and harmed
that they've been willing to undergo this procedure,
and with some success.
So I mean, his argument would be the history of medicine
advances, or medicine advances by people willing
to take chances.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)