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Weekend


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May 18, 2001

Strange But True!

  • A weekly column of incidental information, off-the-wall observations and other random facts about the world.
    • By BILL SONES and RICH SONES, Ph.D.
    Special to the Journal

    Q. Horrible accident, and now your badly mutilated body has got to go. But your head’s fine. Any chance you could survive as just a head on life-support machines?

    A. Too gruesome and futuristic to contemplate? This is already possible with current medicine, says University of Pittsburgh neurosurgeon Hae Dong Jho, M.D., Ph.D. Worse, it’s been done — sort of: Decades ago, a Russian brain surgeon took a head from one monkey and attached it as a second head to another monkey’s neck. The extra head functioned as an independent individual living as a parasite. “If a human head were kept alive with a machine, the head would be much like the monkey’s extra head.”


     
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