Keeping Your Brain Alive In A Jar

September 14, 2011

My 12-year-old son, Minh, is a big fan of Futurama, the Matt Groening animated series set 1,000 years in the future. One of the show's most bizarre, and of course funny, gags involves famous people from the past, from Richard Nixon to Pam Anderson, continually making guest appearances as disembodied heads preserved in jars. The idea has developed such legs —hmmm, perhaps not the best choice of cliché -- that someone has even developed a Head-in-a-Jar iPhone App, which allows fans to create heads-in-jars of their own choosing, including their own likenesses.

But that amusing simulation may not be enough for those of you who earnestly crave immortality, even if it means spending it immersed in a chemical soup, unable to scratch your nose. And as it turns out, keeping a disembodied head alive and functional after the body dies may actually be possible, at least according to some scientists. There's even a blueprint in existence for a device that, hypothetically at least, could create a real-life version of Matt Groening's joke.

Brain in a jar: horror cliche or medical reality?

The French Tried 200 Years Ago

The concept of keeping the head alive apart from the body has been floating around for the better part of two centuries. In the early 1800s, French physiologist Julien Jean César Le Gallois, who was the first scientist to envision artificially pumping blood through the body with a machine, boldly ventured the notion that with such a device, "one would succeed in maintaining alive indefinitely any part of the body." That, of course, was an invitation for someone to try. As recounted in Mary Roach's book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, French researcher Dr. Jean Baptiste Vincent Laborde pumped canine blood into the head of a guillotined criminal named Gagny and succeeded in coaxing the dead man's eyelids, forehead and jaw to contract, though he was unable to bring him back to consciousness. But others had more success keeping smaller bits of living tissue alive artificially. In the early 1900s, Nobel laureate Dr. Alexis Carrel cut a piece out of a chicken heart and kept it alive inside a jar in his New York laboratory for years. In 1925, according to this Time article, one of Carrel's colleagues, British researcher Arthur G. Green, got so excited about seeing the immortal hunk of avian flesh that he gushed to a reporter:

Dr. Carrel introduces immortality in a physical sense. It is there before your eyes, and so long as this tissue is nurtured and irrigated it will live. It cannot die. Its growth is so enormous that it doubles itself every twenty-four hours and if it had not been pared down each day since the experiment began it would now be a colossal monster overspreading all New York.

Carrel's achievement ultimately inspired comedian Bill Cosby's routine about "the chicken heart that ate New York City," as well as a slew of preserved-brain horror flicks, like the 1962 opus The Brain That Wouldn't Die. His work was built upon by the late neurosurgeon Robert J. White, who in the 1960s and 1970s transplanted the heads of dogs and monkeys in an effort to find ways to keep alive injured human brains prior to surgery. (Here's a fascinating 1999 interview that White gave to Cleveland Scene, an alternative newspaper.) But the Cleveland-based researcher, probably to the relief of critics, who thought his work to be ghoulish, never got as far as actually trying to keep a disembodied human head alive. According to a 1988 Washington Post article, however, White was confident that "if someone came through and gave us $5 million to build the machine, we could do it."

Government Rejected Patent For Brain Box

In 1985, an attorney and engineer using the pseudonym "Chet Fleming" ( aka Patrick Kelly) actually tried to show how it could be done. He filed a U.S. patent application for a "device for perfusing an animal head." Fleming/Kelly envisioned a severed mammalian head propped up with a collar atop a cabinet, with tubes connected to the neck arteries and veins. Equipment inside the cabinet would pump oxygenated blood into the brain and then remove and filter carbon dioxide and waste products as the blood flowed from the brain back into the device.

Since we'd of course want disembodied heads to talk, the severed end of the trachea could be sutured to a tube that would provide it with slightly compressed, humidified air. The compressor would be controlled by a switch mounted below the chin, so that the head could turn it on or off by opening his/her/its mouth.

Fleming/Kelly -- who subsequently published a book further describing his idea, If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive — wrote in his patent application that after the invention was tested successfully upon animals, the inventor wrote that "it might also be possible to use this invention on terminally ill persons, subject to various government approvals and other legal requirements." However, according to the Post article, Kelly sought the patent -- which the government ultimately declined to grant -- not to promote the notion of keeping heads alive, but to slow down a technological revolution that he felt was inevitable, until there could be an open public debate about the ethical implications.

Indeed, the hypothetical device immediately provoked a storm of criticism; one prominent nerve researcher, Dr. Jerry Silver of Case Western University, told the Post that the notion was "fairly barbaric." Since then, the same sort of brouhaha has erupted whenever the disembodied head concept has reemerged. As this excerpt details, a German metaphysical journal gave philosophers a chance to debate whether a living head sans  body even qualifies as a full-fledged human being.

Thawed Brains Could Lead Quality Lives

On the other hand, it's not hard to imagine a market for severed-head support technology. After all, there's already a market for cryonic preservation, in which people have their bodies -- or just the heads -- frozen immediately after death in hopes that future medical breakthroughs may enable them to be revived and live anew. (Here's a 2010 New York Times Magazine article about the cryonics movement.) Presumably, a severed head that regained consciousness would be able to use its senses, contemplate the input and interact with the world. The essence of a person —that is, his or her personality and intellect -- would remain intact. As neurosurgeon White told Wired in 2000:

There are people who would be reassured by the fact that they could see movies, they could see their family, they could hear beautiful music, they could smell. And they could communicate. Maybe that's enough.

For those of us who don't get off the couch much anyway, that might work out pretty well —especially if Fleming/Kelly's device was updated to include a pair of robotic hands to operate a joystick or iPad. (Some of you disembodied- head purists might see that as a copout, but hey.) And if life on a pedestal got boring, we could console ourselves with the thought that eventually we might be able to have our head transplanted onto a new body. (You may remember the 2009 blog post I wrote about that notion.)

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

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