If there is a brain dead patient and a person with multiple failing organs, why is it not possible to transfer the brain to from patient to patient? I understand there are many ethical reasons to give somebody another’s body, but if both had given consent then would it be possible and if not why?
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The brain is connected to the rest of the body via a bunch of nerves. Each one of these nerves goes to a specific part of your body. It’s also not the same for everybody.
So imagine you have a big data cable with 1000 wires inside of it. You cut it and try to connect it to a different cable with 1100 wires. None of these wires are labeled or color coded. None of them lead to the same place. Trying to get them to match up and make it work is basically impossible.
If we had the ability to do this, we would first use it to help people who have accidents or birth defects where they end up paralyzed. Those damaged or severed connectors in their body we aren’t able to reconnect, let alone an entire nervous system
To piggyback on the other comment, if you had technology sufficient enough to properly contact all of those neural pathways, then you have technology sufficient enough to just reverse brain death.
Dude, there was a huge documentary about this back in the late 80’s if I recall…
“the man with two brains” it was called. Absolutely worth the watch.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned yet about the scale of reconnection is that even if we could conceivably plug a new brain into an existing nervous system “correctly” it would also have to be done incredibly fast. For example we can keep organs like lungs, kidneys and livers alive for between 9-12 hours outside a body. One of the most complex transplants currently performed is the lungs which can take up to 12 hours to transplant. So with a brain you’re looking at a longer procedure and more tissue death
There are three major problems (and probably more less major but still difficult ones).
1. As others have mentioned we do not have the capability yet of reattaching the nerves that connect the brain to the rest of the body. We can’t even reconnect the nerves in on person to their own same set of nerves, say by a spinal cord injury.
2. In order to do a transplant you need to keep the organ alive once it’s removed from the original body. There is a very limited amount of time to do this and for the brain it would be even harder because it has some very strict requirements in terms of blood and oxygen before it shuts down.
3. Our bodies are designed to fight foreign biological things inside us. The more foreign it is, the more they fight. When transplanting organs you try and find someone who mat he’s various important aspects about you as much as possible. The closer you can get (usually a close family member) the less chance the body will reject the organ. Even then you have to take medication for the rest of your life to weaken your immune system to keep rejection from happening. The brain is a super complex organ meaning it’s going to be a LOT harder to fight rejection AND you are very unlikely to find a patient who is a close enough match to serve as the donor body.
Perhaps someday we will be able to address all of these problems, but it’s more likely we’ll be able to replace or repair the persons own damaged body rather than transplanting their brain.
Did you know you can have part of your brain removed and it be fine? It’s a way to treat seizures!
Another point that I havent seen mentioned yet.
The brain starts to get permanently deamaged without oxygen after just 4 minutes. So you would have about 4 minutes to make the transfer or you would need to figure out a way to supply the brain with oxygen which we currently cant do. Another point im not sure if it is in every country but somee countries I know of death is defined as brain death. If the brain is dead you cant transplant it any more and befor the person is legaly alive so you would be taking an organ of a living person which makes it even harder because in most countries you cant consent to giving someone organs that would kill you.
Because, even if all brains look similar from a distance, upon closer inspection they are all different. Moving a brain from one head to another would be like trying to fit an Intel processor into an AMD socket (or vice versa). It would require a massively complex layer in between that could interface both parts.
By the way I believe this is the same reason why we won’t be able to “inject” someone’s mind into another brain any time soon. Running your “mind” in a computer seems much more feasible (even if far beyond our current technology).
If you somehow managed to extract the brain from the cranial cavity without damaging it at all, and making sure it doesn’t go hypoxic, and you somehow were able to identify and catalogue every single nerve in the donors body and figure out a way to attach them all to the recipients brain stem, you would still have one fundamental problem you would not be able to overcome with modern medicine.
Total and utter shock and confusion about waking up in a different body. Your brain has memories of how to use your body. It is suddenly presented with a new body and *nothing* works how the brain expects it to work. Including breathing and operating the heart. The patient would die thrashing around or perhaps even being paralysed in total and utter fear while they have a heart attack.
Normally if there is a limb that is donated the brain can learn to use this within a few months to a year. Now imagine an entirely new body.
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