The monkey’s eyelids fluttered after 18 hours under anesthesia. Two medical teams were anxiously awaiting. Doctors, nurses and a troop of assistants held their breath, waiting for a sign that the delicate operation – in fact, two delicate operations – had been a success.
Holding a pair of forceps, Cleveland neurosurgeon Robert White gently tapped the animal’s nose. With a flicker of apparent recognition, the monkey, a medium-sized primate known as a monkey, snapped its jaws as if trying to bite the doctor.
The operating room burst into applause.
White had done this: the world’s first primate head transplant. He had linked the living and conscious head of one monkey to the breathing and vital body of another, creating a single “new” animal.
“Dangerous, bellicose and very unhappy,” White summed up his patient’s behavior in 1970. With good reason. The once healthy creature was now paralyzed from the neck down and had only a few hours to live.
“The monkeys didn’t like Dr. White and really kept that up,” Brandy Schillace, author of “Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher ”(Simon & Schuster), he told the Post. It was a common factor in all five macabre head transplants that White performed – and confirmed, at least for him, that the brain is the vessel of personality, the literal seat of the soul.
In his new book, Schillace explores White’s career as an innovative surgeon and researcher who, however, never achieved his ultimate goal: performing the operation that would let a human soul, enclosed in his own brain, live after his original body failed .
“It was a perfume, but now it’s an empty bottle,” he said in 1967, while cradling an isolated brain in the palm of his hand. “But the fragrance is still there.”
At that time, White’s surgical experiments had already led to techniques that preserve function in injured brains and spines, giving neurosurgeons time to do their rescue work. The approach, known as hypothermic perfusion, is still used today in trauma patients and in cardiac arrest.
But for 40 years, until his death in 2010, White had hoped to perform his surgery on monkeys – which he preferred to call a body transplant – on humans. In the late 1990s, he even met a couple of potential patients: Craig Vetovitz, a quadriplegic whose impaired organs limited his life expectancy, and a brain-dead man to serve as a full-body donor.
Unfortunately for White, the love of publicity gave the talented surgeon a breath of quackery. A humiliating Halloween appearance on the “Hard Copy” tabloid cast White and Vetovitz as “Dr. Frankenstein and his volunteer monster. ”
“He was frustrated because people couldn’t get over the shock factor,” said Schillace. “If you go around tearing heads off, it just upsets people.”
On the other hand, “He occasionally went out in public with the words’ Dr. Frankenstein stamped on his medical bag, ”she added. “So, he had these dual personalities.”
In addition, White was a devout Catholic and the father of ten children who developed a friendship with two popes. Both Paul VI and John Paul II invited him to join the Vatican’s bioethics councils that dealt with the thorny dilemmas of modern medicine – including the question of when, exactly, life ends.
“White felt he was on God’s team,” said Schillace. “He said, ‘The guidance behind my hand when I operate is from God.’ And he was very convinced, always, that he was doing the right thing. ”
But he never obtained papal blessing for his scheme to prolong a person’s life by grafting his head into the brain-dead body of another human being. Vetovitz’s surgery didn’t happen either. White was unable to raise the necessary $ 4 million, and his showmanship probably cost him the hospital’s funds and approval.
“White felt that human life – and for White, that meant the brain – is worth saving at almost any cost,” said Schillace. “But there is a possibility, and there is an obligation. Today, we can have a head transplant. But should we? And who decides?
“That is the question I always face,” she said. “Because, often, medical technology overcomes our ability to understand its consequences.”