Day Two

Refresher:

• Theoretically possible to transplant human head (mice, dogs, monkeys)
• Don’t know what complications may arise because no animal can communicate their pain
• Longest animal experiments were still relatively short even for lifespan
• No one is volunteering to be the first person for head transplant because very high chance of mortality (death)

• Could be the same of killing another person if you were to create a clone (as long as its a body and not a thinking a person)
• Psychological ramifications as to new body
  • Curious about social perceptions on a body (how old do we have to nurture the clone body until the transplant? Will the brain have to be preserved until the body has fully matured?
    • Or could it be possible to have a preset to have a clone already matured? Or is that not a possibility?
      • As it currently stands, there isn’t a method yet

Dolly the sheep is the first cloned animal (premature aging issues but proved its theoretically possible)

How does cloning work?

• Take cells from original host and culture them into certain type of cell
• Take a donor egg from whoever the mother is going to be and keep the cell but remove nucleus from egg and replace it with the modified one from the host
  • Essentially taken a blank egg and put in a nucleus from your cells = “somatic nuclear transfer”
• Egg into a surrogate and go through normal pregnancy

Two clones from one monkey, healthy

Q: Are monozygotic twins clones?

A: Genetically they are identical, but depends on definition of clone (will grow up to be slightly different due to environmental differences)

• We can fix the embryo with CRISPR so the disease will no longer happen in the body. Could we transplant our head onto their body? Should we do this?

By the time they hit the age that the head can be transplanted, the clone body would have their own identity already

• Since immune system is dependent on what type of antigens you see developing throughout life, it might not be enough to be a genetical match to you (might not be perfect)

A cure for aging? Parabiosis.

1. Take two mice that are genetically identical (highly inbred)
2. Take one that’s old and the other one as young
3. Connect their blood vascular systems together (all body fluids are being exchanged between two animals)
   1. Old mice get younger and the younger mice tend to get older
      1. Possibly the things damaging the old mice are being shared or that the younger mice are producing something that are benefitting the older mice
         1. Older mice tend to secrete  immune stimulating factors that cause rapid aging
         2. Senecent (stop dividing, not cancerous cels but unhealthy cells)
      2. Neurogenesis, their functions and metabolic markers for aging, tend to get healthier

Helps reverse head aging (Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, dementia)

If we could create a clone without a brain and attach our head and live longer

Keeping your brain alive outside the body

• Put brain into solution system and kept brain alive outside the body for several hours by providing it with solutions (blood and nutrients)
  • You could survive your brain in a jar

The axolotl has ability to regrow any body part and you can graft another head on an axylotol and it lives successfully.

• Secondary head wouldn’t have control over the body though

sograft = twin

Autograft = from your own body

Allograft = from same species

Xenografts = taking organ from a similar animal (mammal)

• Liver and pancreas will still secrete similar enzymes you need (just different genetic makeup)

ex. The eye

• Its easy to have eve surgery and only place where it successful to have gene therapy
  • Immunoprivileged
• Testis (reproductive organs) have to go through so much geneticmodification that the immune system would be attacking sperm/eggs
  • As men get older, sperm levels drop —> why don’t we xenograft between a younger male monkey’s testicles and a human’s
    • Transplanted slices of monkey testicles into human testis —> create first xenografts
      • No immune response
    • New healthy tissues as the monkey was new
      • Able to maintain new testosterone levels
  • Ovaries are also immunoprivileged
• Inactivation of porcine endogenous retrovirus in pigs using CRISPR-Cas9 (actually a paper I discussed in my NPCS paper!)
  • Retrovirus may enter genome —> so common that there are traces of this virus in genomes
    • 17 retroviral elements that are highly reactive in humans but benign in pigs
      • Used CRIISPR to eliminate the retroviral elements to crate first generation for organ transplantation of pigs
  • HIV doesn’t have much an effect in monkeys —> possibly inactivate elements to make safer organ transplantation

Q: Genetically engineering an entire animal body onto a human head?

A: Ethical to grow person to harvest animal body, but animal ≠ same standard as humans

More morally justifiable as an animal body rather than a human clone’s body

Then might be possible to replicate the mind (not the brain)

• If we can’t practice head transplants even after transplanting onto younger bodies, will soon reach a limitation
  • Instead, why not just digitally scan in every single structure within the brain and then build it into a computer and stimulate the brain??
• Not necessarily a head transplant but replicating your mind
  • Dissect brain at a molecular level, encode the brain into a computer chip, and possibly control the brain?
    • Quantum computers?

Psychological disorder like dissociative identity disorder —> how would we encrypt this data if others wanted to modify our brains?

Chalmers the philosopher

• Uploading our consciousness 

Easy problem of consciousness

How do we respond to stimuli, do we feel pain, how is something felt?

Hard problem of consciousness:

How does all your past experiences affect that?

How do we dictate how our previous experiences determine pain or pleasure?

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My own thoughts: Although it was my first lecture AND the first time learning about this topic, I really felt like I was strongly engaged with the seminar, as the seminar instructor continuously asked us so many engaging questions, had polls, and even had random QnAs of weird questions!

I was so fascinated by the possibility of practicing a head transplant itself because of the intricacy of the nerves in the spinal cords. Throughout this seminar, I learned how a head transplant works (and the reasons behind it, like freezing the head to suspend the cell interactions as most as possible), the ethical concerns, possible host/graft solutions and just head transplants in general!

We were shown numerous videos of the head transplantation process or any jokes from famous TV shows that mentioned head transplants like the Simpsons.

I will definitely not forget about this seminar, and I would love to learn more about it, since some of the content in this seminar (xenografts) were associated with the topics I discussed in my CRISPR research paper!

– Joanna Kim, July 9th, 2021, 2:46 AM KST –