An Italian doctor claims that he can transfer human consciousness to a new body by transplanting a head onto a new body. This could hypothetically prolong the lives of people whose bodies are ravaged by diseases that cannot be cured.
Interest in disconnecting the brain from the body stems back at least to the French Revolution, when observers noticed signs of consciousness in heads that had been severed by guillotine. Speculation that the brain might continue to function after being separated from the body has been fueled by research into out-of-body experiences and similar phenomena. But the scientist who probably did the most to promote the idea of prolonging life through head transplants was Dr. Robert White, who died in 2010. White's most (in)famous experiment consisted of transplanting the head from one monkey onto the body of another. Because the transplant left the cranial nerves untouched and reconnected the old head to the new circulatory system, the monkey's head was still able to perceive its surroundings, eat, follow objects with its eyes, and bite the hands of the scientists that had tortured it. But because the spinal nerves in the body had been severed, the new body was paralyzed. Immune rejection caused the monkey to die within nine days. Critics condemned the experiments as "barbaric."