I attended the San Francisco Longevity meetup on Thursday evening (highly recommended), they also have a sister organization in New York City. Longevity NYC has a meetup this coming Tuesday, November 15th. Details here:
Check the group out to learn more at their website here:
At the meetup I met Aaron King who is one of the people who is focused on the longevity side of the Foresight organization. For those unfamiliar with the Foresight institute they are a small team that describe themselves as follows:
Foresight Institute is a research organization and non-profit that supports the beneficial development of high-impact technologies. Since our founding in 1987 on a vision of guiding powerful technologies, we have continued to evolve into a many-armed organization that focuses on several fields of science and technology that are too ambitious for legacy institutions to support. From molecular nanotechnology, to brain-computer interfaces, space exploration, cryptocommerce, and AI, Foresight gathers leading minds to advance research and accelerate progress toward flourishing futures.
Foresight has some good resources on their website that I think people here may find of interest.
A ton of good seminar videos at this link:
Aaron also showed me an interesting online map of the longevity / biotech / research field - what he called a âTechTreeâ. A screen capture at a high level is here, but you can focus and get more info on each area. I found it helpful to look at to see how they divide up the âindustryâ or field.
One of the more interesting segments of the market I was not aware of was the area of âhead transplantsâ (putting older heads onto younger bodies; sort of the young blood approach taken to the natural extreme). And yes - people are apparently seriously looking at this.
Wow. Head transplantation is quite arcane. There was a famous lab that did it with monkeys successfully. Except they could not reconnect the spinal cord. They had a bunch of paraplegic monkeys!
In this article, I will focus on several promising approaches for gradual brain replacement and, potentially, complete brain transplantation.
âŚ
Head Transplantation - It May Be Closer to Reality Than You Think
The concept of head transplantation, technically termed cephalosomatic anastomosis, has rocked the media for many years. From the 1925âs Alexander Belyaevâs mad head transplant-performing scientist to Marvelâs gorilla-bodied and human-headed Gorilla-Man, the idea of brain transplantation has always been provoking the human consciousness. It quickly expanded from the written word to the movie screen and resulted in popular cinematographic pieces like 1962âs âThe Brain That Wouldnât Dieâ, the newer 2008âs âThe X-Files: I Want to Believeâ, or the newest one named âAltered Carbonâ.
It didnât begin or stop on the big screen or in literature. Experimental head transplants started as early as 1908 when a French surgeon named Alexis Carrel and an American scientist named Charles Claude Guthrie grafted the head of one dog to another, despite it proved mostly unsuccessful. Dogs went through another round of experiments with a Soviet surgeon named Vladimir Demikhov, who transplanted a dogâs head and the upper body onto another dog mostly to show how the blood supply connected, but the dogs managed to survive for almost a month.
Good news, I guess, for the startup companies pursing the head / brain transplant market:
Whole brain transplantation in man: Technically feasible
The unavailability of technologies that can successfully rejuvenate an aged body suggests that it is time to explore other options. BRAVE, the BRain Anastomosis Venture[3] is part of a larger scope project â PERSEUS â that aims at moving an old brain into a young immunoconditioned body (or a nonsentient clone tout court when this becomes available) and kick off rejuvenation of the brain, as afforded by Progressive Brain Replacement (J Hebert, accompanying editorial). The anchor of this project is the successful achievement of whole brain transplantation (BT).
Cephalosomatic anastomosis[2] might be construed as a form of BT, but the fact remains that â rejuvenation-wise-the aged face and other head tissues are left in situ, which defeats the purpose of enjoying a pristine body.
Not sure how real this is⌠but a long way out whatever the case. In the tech world we call this vaporwareâŚ
Head Transplant Machine - BrainBridge
âToday Iâm thrilled to announce BrainBridge, the worldâs first concept for a head transplant system, which integrates advanced robotics and artificial intelligence to execute complete head and face transplantation procedures. This state-of-the-art system offers new hope to patients suffering from untreatable conditions such as stage-4 cancer, paralysis, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimerâs and Parkinsonâs.â
(1) At the society level, if generating a clone of your body were solved and transplanting your head onto it were both solved problems, it could free up resources to focus R&D efforts on brain problems. Great point, but of course we do not stop trying to find new solutions just because we have one solution. Still, it could make the remaining problems with the brain / cranial organs more urgent and valuable at the margin, so the point stands.
(2) At the body level, I really do not know how much value you get toward brain health by having perfect (suppose for argumentâs sake) health below the neck. You can die from a stroke or an aneurism or ALS or a brain tumor, so I guess those types of things would remain as threats to focus on. And it certainly seems plausible that having a strong body could open doors to new treatments for some those types of issues.
I wish we had a good way to activate the glymphatic system. You know, something like a car wash for your brain:
Is this organization legit or just another cult like RapamycinNews? Anybody talking about âheadless clonesâ andâŚwait a minute, whatâd they call it?.. oh, yeahâŚâThe concept of head transplantation, technically termed cephalosomatic anastomosisâ (boy, thatâd make a garbage man sound smart!) makes me a little suspicious (@Neo ,Iâm looking at you). Will kool-aid be served, along with a lecture on Kohoutek by The Children of God ( it began a method of evangelism called Flirty Fishing that used sex to âshow Godâs love and mercyâ)?
It certainly sounds like @Neoâs ultimate fantasy. I, however, would lean more towards the potential of this concept - Training an AI chatbot on enough data to recreate a dead relative.
I think that at the speed that AI or now AGI is advancing, all we need is a way to download our memories and we could essentially recreate our brain/personality digitally. But, one crossed wire and you might end up sounding like Scarlett Johansson. @Neo prefers the head transplant method because he doesnât want to lose face. And we may all end up in virtual reality anyway. Itâs easier to keep a brain alive than a whole body.
Many sounded similar to your post above in relation towards organ transplantation in the beginning
(that was actually inspiration for the Frankenstein monster story if I remember correctly).
Same around defibrillators - could not be natural or righteous to bring someone back from the dead right?
Same with IVF for fertility - doctors paying god and babies will be born without a soulâŚ
â
If we could make say a teenager who is paralyzed and will suffer premature death due to the related complications a new body, or say a 20 year old with metastatic cancer that cannot otherwise be cured a new replacement body, would that be wrong or bad?
To be honest, this does trigger the âyuckâ factor for me right now, but virtually all surgical operations trigger that in me. Injections used to also trigger that in me, but Iâve slowly gotten over it over years. Ultimately, I think the body transplant is an issue of a sort of biological âOverton Windowâ that will evolve over time.
I donât think even rapamycin will allow you to live long enough to see âhead transplantsââŚoh, excuse me, I meant to say cephalosomatic anastomosis move from âUnthinkableâ to âPolicyâ unless you turn the Overton Window into a time portal. That has enough âyuckâ factor to live forever. I can see granny rolling over in her grave.
I suspect youâre probably right on this, but if youâre wrong, Iâm sure Neo and I will be the first to vote to deny you the body transplant option if you eventually decide you want it
Just do the head transplants in a calm, cool, and natural setting, like a small nature-themed surgical robot center. I donât know where youâre supposed to grow the headless clones, though.
Event Page: 