This Blew My Mind. Take a look at the headline below and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Head transplant. Like…er…what?!
This article is not fake. I have cross checked through ABC and CBS news as well as The Atlantic and have found the idea is true. I had to take a moment just to think logically: make sure my head was on straight.I really couldn’t believe my mind when someone proposed a head transplant operation, let alone I wouldn’t imagine a single person volunteer to do it.
To Summarize, Italian neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Canavero has recruited Chinese surgeon, Dr. Xiaoping Ren, to serve as 1 of 80 surgeons to perform a lengthy and costly surgery. Their patient, a Russian man named Valery Spiridonov, suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann Disease. They plan to severe all connections (arteries, spinal cord, etc.) and transplant Spiridonov’s head onto a donor body of a brain dead subject.
The surgeons are planning to spend millions of dollars on a diamond blade (so thing it’s claimed to be transparent), a custom-made crane to transfer the heads, and formulating a chemical called polyethylene glycol (PEG).
When I first heard of this surgery, I thought, “Man this sounds like a sci-fi movie! Something like Star Wars.” I guess this speaks to just how far and how ambitious the human race has progressed.
Speaking of Progressing, I found it hard to believe we had developed a technology capable of delicately severing arteries, veins, spinal cord, the list is endless really. But I guess anything is possible. We have robots that drive our cars around autonomously and people named Siri who talk to us when no one’s around. But if you think in the simplest ways, we are building another type of humanity and I claim that we can only do so without controlling them.
Sooner or later, we will be dependent on these items for uses in schools too. I’m even using a computer to type this very blog, and maybe someday down the line, I will just need to think and the machine will process everything; turning my thoughts into a grade A paper. Ah the possibilities…
However, despite all this ease, I think as we continue to develop the latest technologies, we are ridding ourselves of the processes that make us human: how we write, how we read. Everything is altered.
While sure the possibilities for all goods are likely so are the chances for wrong to come forth. In the grand picture, if we somehow target our way of learning, which I believe is processed by how we read and write, we may very well be able to control people down to the smallest things we treasure: education. It may be far fetched, but if one can control the very process of reading and writing with technologies, that said person can also select exactly who/what gets the privileges. In a way, it’s kind of like limiting someone’s access to a library. Without it, one is uneducated and has fewer opportunities.