Why can’t certain organs such as the pancreas or brain be transplanted? (what other organs cannot be transplanted?)
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Connections. Brains don’t just need all the corresponding neurons, interneurons and interlinking interneurons attached, they also need the dendrites and axions to not only terminate in the correct place AND have the corresponding dendrite/axion placements exactly configured correctly positive or negative, it ALSO requires the cerebrospinal fluid to be the exact same chemical composition for charges to build.
Eyes are orders of magnitude less complex but still far FAR too complex for modern equipment/processes to handle.
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.
I’m often amazed we dont do genital transplants for trans people. Match up a MTF and a FTM, and switch them.
Post op gender surgeries often don’t look great. Having a “real” one, even if not 100% functional, has to be an improvement.
Most mechanics just switch out a couple of parts. Many have to google and YouTube wtf to do. A heart transplant is like swapping an alternator. Kidneys like changing the oil filter. Now you’re wanting to do a full engine and transmission rebuild. Our best surgeons and hospitals just haven’t gotten there. With early heart surgeries, they were using tubing from the hardware store. With cutting edge medicine, they have to invent the techniques AND the tools.
I’d say that a “brain transplant” is perhaps better regarded as a “body transplant” seeing as the self-identify of the combination comes from the brain.
Anyways … there have been “head transplant” and even “head addition” (extra head) experiments done on monkeys … I used to have photos of these in my scrapbook as a kid, so we’re talking 1960’s or 1970’s. Perhaps there have been more recent ones too.
The “head transplant” is exactly as you imagine it, and the “head addition” was adding an extra head on the side of a monkey’s neck (presumably without attempting to connect the spinal cord?). I’m not sure whether in the “head transplant” they did connect the spinal cord, or just the blood vessels, but it was successful enough that the head regained consciousness and was alive for (if I recall correctly) a few days.
Given the modern success of reattaching severed arms etc, I don’t suppose there is necessarily any reason why reattaching the spinal cord might not work, although not sure how that would work in terms of life support functions like breathing while connections grew back.
I think the pancreas is technically a gland, and gel-like, not like a liver or more solid organ. I’ve heard that explanation in context of someone having pancreatic cancer (can’t just cut the tumor out)
The pancreas can be transplanted and is a boon to those with type 1 diabetes. The problem is that it is a very fragile organ and often not able to be transplanted from those who give hearts, kidneys, etc.
From a brain transplant perspective, even if we had the technical capabilities, which we don’t, we also do not have even a fundamental understanding as to what consciousness is.
Questions we do not have answers to include: Does consciousness arise from enough neuronal complexity formed in brains? Or is consciousness primary first and foremost, and the brain is only perceived from existing consciousness?
These questions may seem far out, but the leading edge of physics has compelling evidence (see Donald Hoffman’s work) that consciousness is primary and the physical world is only perceived or manifested by such consciousness.
Brain transplant…like, put your brain in a “new” body or give your body a new brain?
There have been a handful of researchers who have attempted body transplants (each individual is constituted somehow in the brain). Dogs, monkeys, maybe other animals have been experimented on.
Dr. White:
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