On this episode of China Uncensored,
don’t panic!
Now’s not the time to lose your head.
Hi, welcome to China Uncensored, I’m your host Chris Chappell.
Meet Dr. Ren Xiaoping!
He was part of the the team
that performed the first successful hand transplant in the US in 1999.
Let’s give him a hand!
And now, he’s going out on a limb.
Because he wants to be the first person to perform a head transplant on a human.
That would involve taking a living head
and transplanting it on a recently deceased body.
Now this would make headlines;
truly a medical breakthrough.
There’s one tiny problem
it’s impossible to do,
according to pretty much everyone.
So it’s a little concerning that Dr. Ren already has a volunteer:
a 62-year-old Chinese man paralyzed from the neck down from a wrestling injury.
So if Dr. Ren goes through with the operation,
he will be transplanting this guy’s living head onto a dead body.
And it will most likely result in a new, fully dead body.
Is Dr. Ren throwing away moral ethics simply to get ahead in life?
Or does he just have a big head?
Well, according to him,
he’s a pioneer,
heading into a new era in medicine.
“50 years ago, there was a huge debate ahead of the first heart transplant.
Even the first hand transplant 20 years ago faced ethical concerns.
The impact of a head transplant will be even greater.”
There’s a difference, though.
Those operations came only after years of research and animal trials
and they still were incredibly risky.
This is sewing a severed head onto a dead body.
To be fair, over the years,
Dr. Ren has performed head transplants on hundreds of mice.
The problem is the result:
Every mouse dies.
Not every mouse really lives.
Well, some of them lived for about a day.
I would not call that a complete success.
Dr. Ren has also begun experiments “on human cadavers,
but declined to give details.”
I wonder if any of them came back to life?
It's alive! It's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive.
And that’s the thing,
Ren might be getting a little ahead of himself.
The first head transplant was performed on a monkey by an American scientist in 1970.
But it’s hard to call that monkey business a success,
since the monkey died several days later,
after the body’s immune system rejected the head.
And you don’t want to know what happened to the monkey’s paw.
It’s also more difficult to make the transplanted head
actually be able to control the new body,
since those spinal connections are really hard to reattach.
Though apparently Dr. Ren was able to restore some function in those mice.
The ones that died within a day.
So ethical issue number one
is that the head transplant patient will probably die.
But even if the transplant is a success,
who is the survivor?
The head or the body?
But let’s say we get past all those ethical concerns,
and it’s time for Dr. Ren to operate on his first patient.
Where will Dr. Ren get the donor’s body from?
People in China don’t have a tradition of donating their bodies to science.
And if you’ve watched this episode,
you know there’s some extremely sketchy things
going on with China’s organ “donation” system.
Like how state-run hospitals there are killing prisoners of conscience
and selling their organs for profit.
So it’s not unlikely that the body could come from someone in a labor camp.
Now I’m not saying China shouldn’t try to make scientific progress.
It’s just that Dr. Ren might be a bit too headstrong to let ethical considerations
or medical reality
get in the way.
So what do you think?
Is this the future of medicine?
Or is this just a shameless opportunity for me to use puns?
Leave your comments below.
Thanks for watching this episode of China Uncensored.
Once again I’m your host Chris Chappell, see you next time.