Why can’t certain organs such as the pancreas or brain be transplanted? (what other organs cannot be transplanted?)
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Most of these answers aren’t getting to the real root answer: it’s kind of insane that transplantation works at all.
You body’s immune system is constantly looking for anything foreign inside it so that it can attack and kill it. The idea of someone else’s kidney being inside you, doing it’s job like it’s inside someone else, that’s a bit of a miracle of science. For many people with organ transplants, daily drugs to tell the immune system to calm down are required, which is dangerous because the immune system often needs to be working hard to deal with other things.
The other major issue, especially with something like a brain transplant (which is really a ‘body’ transplant, in a sense) is the complicated connections.
When doctors perform a heart transplant, they have to carefully attach all of the arteries, the nerves that tell the heart to beat and probably a dozen other important things (I’m not a doctor). There isn’t a standard “heart” port that you just plug the new heart into.
And the brain is a million times worse. Even a little spinal damage can cause paralysis, because signals don’t travel from the brain to the body. We don’t have any easy way to reconnect those nerves. To replace a brain you need to cut and somehow reconnect an entire spine’s worth of nerves. We don’t really know how to do that. And imagine what might happen if you reconnect the wrong nerves?
In summary: transplantation is impossible except in a few cases. Doctors are miracle workers.
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