Want Head?
When we were kids, body enhancements were unheard of. Oh sure, Uncle Arthur got a tattoo in the Navy and there were rumors Mrs. Mcgillicuddy had one of those newfangled nose jobs, but that was about it unless you counted false teeth. Flat-as-a-board Flora had no dreams of breast enhancement and Laura of the Luscious Thighs could hardly imagine liposuction. The boys never suspected Babe Ruth’s home run records might be obliterated by some joker shooting up steroids and doubling in size. The best you could do at the time was eat Wheaties (breakfast of champions) and hope for the best.
Now, there is no end to the dash toward cyborgism. Shoulders, hips and knees are replaced as often as old car tires. New prosthetic arms and legs are routinely affixed to war-damaged humans. Kidneys, hearts and livers are harvested from defunct bodies and popped into reeling ones. Need a new uvula? The man in the body-parts van will be pulling in about 11 a.m….we’ll have you fixed up by noon.
Is there no end to it? Apparently not. Recently, doctors have managed to transplant faces from one poor soul to another. You can imagine the chaos this causes at family reunions and customs depots. “I hate to say this, cousin Hal, but you’re looking much less glamorous this year.” To be perfectly honest, these early face replacements leave something to be desired. “Is that your nose, Uncle Ralph, or are you just glad to see me?” Improvements are certain to be on the way but if things break right we may not even need them. Who needs to worry about mucking around with a face when you can transplant the whole head? Yep, folks, noggin replacement surgery is on its way. And no, we are not making all of this up. Read on.
A Head Of His Time
Welcome in one Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon who intends to attempt the first human head transplant by the end of this year. You’re shaking your own head, obviously forgetting Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, men’s suspenders and the miracle of Depends. Dr. Sergio would like you to know he is not fooling around here.
Okay, so no successful animal transplants with long-term survival have ever been made, big deal. Once there was no Big Mac, once there was no lime Jello, once nobody lived on the moon and now look at the place. What you need is The Man With The Plan and that’s Dr. Sergio.
First problem is the difficulty of connecting the head to the spinal cord, a stumper for sure. Canavero has suggested improvements in the process, like using a special blade and polyethylene glycol, a polymer used in medicine as well as in everything from skin cream to the conservation of the Mary Rose, to help start growth in spinal cord nerves.
Being able to surgically remove the head in an orderly fashion (no guillotines, please) should allow surgeons to then reattach all the nerves and blood vessels to the new body once that pesky reject head has been removed. A special bio-compatible glue will hold the spinal cord together so it can fuse with the donor body. The patient will then be put in a drug-induced coma for four weeks while the connection between the head and body heals. This reattachment process is the most unlikely part of the effort. There has never been a successful procedure which reattached a fully severed primate spinal cord.
Dr. Sergio says all the technology he needs is available and estimates the procedure will take about 36 hours, requiring the services of 150 medical professionals. He estimates his chances for success at 90%, meaning the patient is up and walking around a few months after the surgery. This disputes the Las Vegas odds of 500-1, so Canavero and his allies are in a position to make a few bucks here if things work out. As usual, other medical professionals are skeptical, but they’re probably just jealous.
The real problem is the obscene cost of head-replacement surgery. After the pioneering effort, one hundred fifty medical professionals are not going to work for a few packages of Cheez-its. Only the multi-est of multi-millionaires will qualify. Then again, there will always be opportunities for rank outliers like, for instance, alleged U.S. president Donald Trump. For him, everyone in the country would contribute heartily.
Whoomp! There It Is!
In the unlikely possibility Dr. Sergio’s mission fails, scientists will have to get back to everyday brain problems like encroaching forgetfulness. Don’t think they haven’t got a Plan. A new “pacemaker” for the human brain funded in February by the U.S. Department of Defense could boost the memories of sufferers of epilepsy, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, which could be you.
The pacemaker operates through deep-brain stimulation created by electrical pulses using a closed-loop system to monitor and decode neural activity from direct brain recordings in humans. Targeted stimultion is applied to lateral temporal cortex to rescue periods of poor memory encoding. This system also improves later recall, revealing that the lateral temporal cortex is a reliable target for memory enhancement.
Twenty-five patients undergoing intracranial electroencephalographic monitoring as part of clinical treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy were recruited to participate in a study of the effectiveness of the above treatment. Results found up to 15% improvement in memory, a striking figure where seemingly small gains can sometimes mean the difference between 24-hour care and relative independence for victims of these diseases. They’re still working on the other 85%. If you left your teeth somewhere or can’t find your house, give us a call.
Is everyone ready for another exciting chapter in the annals of male birth control? Relax, this is the no-snipping plan. A new pill known as DMAU and taken just once a day would lower testosterone levels to those of a prepubescent male, halting sperm production. Results of a recent study presented at the annual Endocrine Society meeting in Chicago found that dimethandrolone undecanoate effectively reduced testosterone and other hormone levels responsible for sperm production without any serious side effects, according to Dr. Stephanie Page, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine and a lead author of the study. You just knew the major honcho of this thing would be a woman, didn’t you?
“Our goal,” swears Dr. Page, “is to develop a method for men that has minimal side effects, and the holy grail would be to develop something that also has a health benefit for men.” She didn’t say what the health benefit might be but abnegating the alternative of vasectomy might be health benefit enough. Page continues, “Forty percent of pregnancies worldwide are unplanned so there’s clearly an unmet need for novel contraceptives and men have very few options.” Do they still sell that pink foam that dams up your nether regions and blocks up the urethra? That was always a personal favorite.
Researchers found that after taking DMAU for 28 days testosterone in the blood dropped to “castrate levels,” which refers to the target range of testosterone in the blood after chemical or surgical castration. Here’s a little tip to the pill peddlers: skip that term “castrate levels.” It could be the worst selling point of all time.
The Miracle Of Self-Colonoscopy
These days, when someone instructs you to shove it up your anal cavity, it’s possible they’re being helpful. Against all odds, self-colonoscopy has finally arrived. For this, we can thank the esteemed Dr. Akira Horiuchi of Nagano Prefecture in Japan. As a boy, little Akira was not like the other children, skipping the karate dojos and baseball fields in favor of trips to the supermarket laxative aisles and spending hours poring over the endoscope catalogs. While home run champion Sadaharu Oh was the hero of most of the kids, Horiuchi favored Thomas Crapper, inventor of the modern toilet.
As an adult medico, Dr. Akira performed experiments to see if he could insert an endoscope through his anus to examine his colon. Turns out, he could. After days of fun practice and fine-tuning, Horiuchi wrote a report titled “Colonoscopy in the Sitting Position: Lessons Learned From Self-Colonoscopy,” which contends the task is both easy and effective. Others may sneer but the good doctor recently received an Ig Nobel Prize for his work from the sponsoring group at Harvard University. He offered to give a demonstration of the procedure at the ceremony but the prize committee opted for tea and crumpets instead.
Another Cup Of Joe For My Friend Here….
In the last couple of years, coffee has become recognized as a medical boon. Coffee, it has been discovered, increases memory, prevents depression, revs up metabolism, lowers the risk of diabetes, increases endurance, deters Parkinson’s disease and enables users to leap tall buildings with a single bound. And that ain’t all. Unlike those phonies in the seance business, coffee allows you to see dead people. Really. You just have to drink a lot.
A recent study from the United Kingdom quizzed 200 students on their coffee intake and found those with the highest consumption were prone to report seeing or hearing things that were not there, including people. Those who consumed a daily equivalent of seven cups or more were three times more likely to have extra-sensory experiences than low users. The Durham University study took in all caffeine ingestion, including tea, energy drinks, etc., but coffee was the main culprit.
Doctors remind us that while under stress the body releases a hormone called cortisol. More of this hormone is released in response to stress when people have recently had coffee. It is this extra boost of cortisol which links caffeine intake with an increased tendency to hallucinate. If you’re short on magic mushrooms or LSD tabs, give it a try. It’s recommended by doctors and the American Coffee Council and you can’t beat the price. You might even get to meet Attila The Hun.
Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang: Cool Move Of the Month
If you’re an arbiter of youth baseball and you’re tired of people asking, “HEY, UMP! ARE YIZ BLIND?”….have we got some news for you! Surgeons have recently restored a man’s sight by pulling out one of his teeth, placing a lens inside and then implanting the tooth in an eyeball. No, really. The catch is this technique can only be used when a person has a scarred cornea on an otherwise healthy eye. But still.
The process requires a living tooth as an implant because doctors suggest the eye would reject a plastic equivalent. A patch of skin is then taken from inside the cheek and placed in the eye for two months, during which it acquires its own blood supply. The tooth segment is finally transplanted into the eye socket. The flap of grafted skin is then partially lifted from the eye and placed over its sturdy new base. Voila! You’re back in business. Sounds like it deserves an Ig Nobel Prize to me.
That’s all, folks….
