Robert J. White

Robert Joseph White (born January 21, 1926 in Duluth , Minnesota , † September 16, 2010 in Geneva , Ohio ) was an American neurosurgeon . He is known for his head transplants on live rhesus monkeys. He taught and worked as a neurosurgeon in Cleveland .

Life

Robert White came from the working class and lost his father in the Pacific War . He studied at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul with a bachelor's degree in 1951 and medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and from 1951 at Harvard Medical School , where he received his MD cum laude in 1953 . He then completed his specialist training as a surgeon at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital in Boston (residency 1954/55). From 1955 to 1958 he was a fellow in neurosurgery at the Mayo Clinic , where he was then permanently employed in research. In 1962 he received a Ph.D. from Harvard. for neurosurgery and physiology. In 1962 he became an assistant professor in the neurosurgery department and at the Brain Research Lab of the Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital , both of which he founded. He was also a neurosurgeon at the Veterans Administration Hospital . In 1966 he received a full professorship in neurosurgery at Case Western Reserve University . He was co-director of neurosurgery there.

White was married to Patricia Murray, a nurse, and had ten children. He was a devout Catholic (who also used to pray before operations) and since 1981 a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences . He founded the Committee on Bioethics of John Paul II. White felt like prank and self- deprecatingly called himself Humble Bob ( Humble Bob). When a student once dropped a syringe on his shoe during an operation, which pierced this and his foot, he only said that he probably wanted to kill his professor and continued to operate.

plant

Since the mid-1960s, he undertook experiments to separate the living heads of monkeys (and dogs) and to transplant them onto the body of other dogs or monkeys, with a first "successful" experiment to transplant a monkey's head onto the body of another monkey in 1970. The severed living heads could taste, see, smell, hear and bite of white.

During his head transplants with monkeys, cooling the blood in the brain (to around 10 degrees Celsius) was of crucial importance in order to overcome a phase of reduced oxygen uptake. He was a pioneer in this field and also used cooling in other neurosurgical interventions, such as brain tumors.

According to a Spiegel report from 1976, at that time (after several experiments on monkeys) he was thinking of transplanting a human head. However, he was undecided and saw this as the last measure in the event of a fatal illness, whereby the patient would remain paralyzed from the interface as in accidents with high paraplegia. At that time, however, he was also unable to control the immune reaction, which killed all of his operated experimental monkeys after about a week (his record was eight days). According to White, however, there was no shortage of patients who would have made themselves available and the Pope, as a devout Catholic, would have encouraged him to pursue his research further.

However, he did not continue the head transplant experiments after the 1970s and did not publish any further specialist articles on them.

He has made over 700 publications and performed over 10,000 operations, some of which took up to 18 hours. He has given lectures worldwide (nationwide in the USA, the Soviet Union, China and Europe, including inspecting hospitals in China and Russia) and was an advisor to the Burdenko Institute for Neurosurgery in Moscow and a member of the Ukrainian and Russian Academies of Medicine. He was a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher .

Because of his head transplant experiments, he was the target of violent protests by animal rights activists and attacks in the press, where he often spoke to Dr. Frankenstein was compared and when Dr. Butcher (butcher) was attacked. But that couldn't stop him from defending animal experiments in public at every opportunity.

Honors

He received honorary degrees from John Carroll University , Cleveland State University , Walsh University, and the University of St. Thomas. In 1977 he was President of the Society of University Neurosurgeons and in the same year he received the L. W. Freeman Award from the National Paraplegia Foundation (for paraplegics).

In 1997 he received the Humanitarian Award from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons .

Fonts

• RJ White, LR Wolin, LC Massopust, N. Taslitz, J. Verdura: Primate cephalic transplantation: Neurogenic separation, vascular association. Transplant Proc. 1971. 3: 602-4
• RJ White: Hypothermia preservation and transplantation of brain. Resuscitation. 1975. 4: 197-210
• RJ White: Head transplants. Sci Am. 1999. p. 24-6

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth and career dates in Pamela Kalte u. a., American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ Grant Segall, Dr. Robert J. White, famous neurosurgeron and ethicist, dies at 84 , The Plain Dealer, September 16, 2010
3. ^ Obituary by Grant Segall, 2010, loc. cit.
4. ↑ Head with a power pack, Der Spiegel, No. 44/1976 , October 25, 1976
5. ↑ He made the same statement to the journal Ärztliche Praxis, October 2, 1976 and there was a controversial report on Bavarian Radio about his experiments, the demonstration of which for television had to struggle with breakdowns (during an operation the monkey's circulatory system failed, the second did not give the brain enough oxygen). Konrad Lorenz spoke out against the broadcast of the film.
6. ↑ Max Lautenschläger: Der Quartals-Frankenstein, Berliner Zeitung September 1, 2000 on a lecture by White in the Dresden Hygiene Museum on August 31, 2000.
7. ↑ Berliner Zeitung, September 1, 2000, loc. cit.