Head transplant

A head transplant is a surgical operation involving the grafting of one organism's head onto the body of another. Head transplantation involves decapitating the patient. Head transplants have been performed on dogs, monkeys and rats by surgeons, although all the animals were unable to move and died shortly afterwards. There are plans for the first human head transplant.

Charles Claude Guthrie succeeded in grafting one dog's head onto the side of another's neck on May 21, 1908.

Sergei Brukhonenko developed a device called the autojektor, a primitive Heart-lung machine. Brukhonenko carried out several studies on canines with the autojektor, including a famous experiment where the machine was attached to the decapitated head of a dog, depicted in the 1940 documentary Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. The head remained in a semi-conscious state and responded to simple stimuli such as the sound of a hammer or the administration of eye drops. This experiment provides a potential example of how to keep a donor's head alive while the body of the recipient is prepared. While no further experiments of this type were carried out, a second autojektor for use on humans was developed by Brukhonenko in the same year, with modern ECMO machines bearing many similarities to the autojektor.

Vladimir Demikhov experimented with dog head transplantation in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. His transplant subjects typically died due to immune reactions.

In 1959, China claimed that they had succeeded in transplanting the head of one dog to the body of another twice.

Dr. Vladimir Demikhov's work, among others, was deeply influential for the future science of organ transplant, as he pioneered many different forms of transplant in the 1940s and 1950s, including the use of immuno-suppressants. His work was well known by other scientists and during the 1950s and 1960s, numerous heart transplants were performed on dogs in the United States by Dr. Norman Shumway of Stanford University and Dr. Richard Lower of the Medical College of Virginia. The first human heart transplant was performed by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa, in 1967; however, as they did not have the chemical agents to utilize immuno-suppressants, the patient receiving the transplant died.

...
Wikipedia