Dr. Robert White Interviewed About Decapitating Monkeys

At ToM, we enthusiastically envision a future in which our bodies are disposable... a future when damage done to our mortal coil can be solved the the simple expediency of taking a hatchet to the neck, lopping off the melon on top and then quickly sew it to a new torso. Only in this way, we think, will we be able to achieve immortality. All other medical pursuits aimed at improving the length and condition of the human life? A waste of time.

So Dr. Robert White is on the top of our list of surgeons we'd like to give a hug: he is the man who first sewed one monkeys head to another monkey's decapitated torso. And Litmus Zine has a great interview up with him.

The major thrust of the lab was to uncover the metabolic, physiological and rheological changes that took place when the monkey’s brain was cooled – sometimes all the way down to 5 degrees centigrade – and then warmed back. And then we wanted to determine how long a period of time [the brain could remain in suspended animation], using an educated model, a monkey that was actually trained. We used in those days what was called the Wisconsin training device, a special cage, and these animals were trained for 6 months to a year. We used to call them the Monkey Case Medical Students. We felt that some of them were smarter … Anyway, what we would do is we would cool these brains in situ, we would not remove them, because we used the anatomy and the extracorporeal information we’d gained from Mayo. We dissected all that area and we knew where to put the cannulas to cool just the brain and where to recover the venous side of the circulation, and then we – now these were educated monkeys – and then we had worked out through anatomical dissection and rheological studies where to close off the blood vessels in the neck temporarily in the monkey so that we could examine long periods of ischemia, or long periods of circulatory arrest to the brain only in monkeys.

Another reason Dr. White deserves a hug: his adorable insistence that these are "educated monkeys" we're talking about here.

Interview with Dr. Robert White [Litmus Zine]