grumble about transplants

[marycatelli]

For some reason, I have recently happened to read stories in which brain transplants are used to achieve immortality -- for the transplanted one, not the poor soul nominated for it.

Ehem.

BRAINS AGE, TOO.

There will come a point that having a young body will do absolutely nothing to help your decrepit brain.  Senility anyone?

And if you have means to de-age the brain, why not just de-age the rest of the body with it?  Really, it's not like the parts are somehow sui generis in a way that would let you do one and not the other.

(to be sure, even if you could rejuventate yourself, it would still not be immortality.  Heat death of the universe will get you, if nothing earlier does.)

Comments

[rfmcdpei.livejournal.com]

This is subverted in Frederik Pohl's Heechee novels, where you've got elderly superrich people in the bodies of 20-somethings going through assorted dementias.

Re:

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I like that...

[marycatelli]

It's almost always nice when characters get what they deserved. . . .

Re:

[marycatelli]

Some writers actually manage to see through the most prevalent of tropes.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I've seen other writers depict this problem as well. Mind you, I think the problem would be solvable in the end -- eventually they would figure out how to rejuvenate or repair the brains as well. Not only will science march on from today, it will continue to march on from the point it reaches at any given future.

[marycatelli]

Itr's the transplant that's the problem. The issue is not being able to rejuv the brain, it's that they are (implicitly) able while being unable to to rejuv anything else.

And it's not body snatching. It's done for immortality and usually to clones.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

The most obvious and humane way to use brain-transplanting for life extension would be to make a clone of the subject without letting the clone develop a forebrain (so it would have no meaningful personhood), then transplant the old brain into the new body. This is probably scientifically though not currently technologically possible.

The advantage of doing it this way is that you greatly reduce the likelihood of tissue rejection, since you're being transplanted into a body which is as close or closer to your original one as an identical twin. You also avoid the obvious moral hazard of having to kill the body's previous occupant: it never had anything more than a hindbrain, and hence had less personhood (and logically, human rights) than a housecat.

Of course, your point still stands: the original brain is still old and continuing to age, and hence this is not "immortality" (or even "emmortality" in Stapleford's term for not dying naturally but being able to be killed), but rather mere "life extension." After a time (who knows how long?) one would be left with a senile mind in a younger body).

My guess is that biological immortality will be achieved through a series of life extensions, until eventually all tissue damage and degradation becomes easily-repairable. True immortality -- being able to be resurrected from death -- will probably require considerable advances in computer science, perhaps greater than the advances in biological science needed for mere emmortality.

[marycatelli]

The question is whether development without a forebrain would affect the rest of the body. Given the number of subtle interactions we get, it may be more complicated that it looks. There is, after all, not a "turn on forebrain development" gene. And if there were, it might code for other things, too.

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

Easier to limit forebrain development by removal of the tissues as they develop, rather than attempting neo-natal chemical means.

[marycatelli]

All surgeries fail, sometimes.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

Certainly that’s easier. And it’s easier still just to let the clone develop normally, with a full brain, and then cut the brain out. Easier, and, I would argue, the same degree of crime against the clone — which is a human being, every bit as much as its gene-donor is — else it would not be an accurate copy. Surely taking out all of someone’s brains is equally wrong whether you do it quickly or slowly.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I don't know the answer to this question. I suspect that one would want to block forebrain development with the careful application of chemicals to the specific sites required. I shudder to think at the experimentation required to learn the technique.

There are reasons why the clone-bodies-and-transplant-brains approach has never been my favored hope for humans achieving immortality!

[marycatelli]

how true

[ford-prefect42.livejournal.com]

You're right of course, but I think that, if I'm reading the data right, there would still be quite a bit of life extension that *could* be done that way. There are quite a few instances of people well into their hundreds that have not developed dementia or related cognitive declines.

There's also the "feedbacks" A lot of seemingly brain related maladies originate in the "body" poor heart-lung performance means lack of energy, low pituitary gland function mimics depression, etcetera.

So, would life extension by brain transplant be *limited* hells yeah! But that's not to say that it'd be *useless*. It's very probable that it could bring the average life expectancy to 150 years or better.

[marycatelli]

It could extend some people's lives that long, but they'd have to be in the "few instances."

And of course the clones don't live anything like that long.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Rather than risk unexpected genetic damage from tampering with the genetically-dependent parts of brain development, you could pith the forebrain of the clone embryo physically early on.
However, that still generates the same question about the lack of interconnections and feedback loops.
I'd guess that a great deal of experimenting on it would be attempts to figure out the limitations and faults such a lack of forebrain interaction might cause--nerve trunks that failed to get stimulated into growing out to connect a new forebrain to, for example. Artificially stimulating such growths anyway might cause other medical issues to show up, which likewise must be overcome. (Cloned sheep problems due to shortened telomeres come to mind, for example.)

The meta on your original question is still bugging me too. In sf & f writing, why do writers tend to think of brain transplants preferentially?
We're currently getting pretty cyborg about fixing up other parts of the body to keep things running nicely for the brain, and we're trying very hard to sort out the generation of Alzheimer's plaques and other degenerative diseases.
In an sf world, the folks who want a brain transplant have already done all that stuff, and still need a new new body?
The writers think of uploading meatbrain into siliconbrain too, with the various structural computing issues involved. Also, there's the artificial robot body sensory issues, or some combination of both, such as putting a robot recording into a meat clone body. If you could get recorded on a regular basis without dying, why would you want to jump entirely into silicon? If it doesn't involve killing you and dicing your brain to get that data in a set moment, why wouldn't you have a series of memory downloads as regular backup? All kinds of issues there in either a robot-bodied army with copies of your brain, or meat-bodied ones following you around. The class and wealth and privelege issues alone are enough to fill novels by themselves.

[marycatelli]

There are always failures in surgery to enliven such matters.

[izuko.livejournal.com]

Yes, but after the heat death of the universe, who's going to know you weren't immortal?

[marycatelli]

Ah, but I rather suspect most of us would prefer being immortal to having no one know that we weren't.

[izuko.livejournal.com]

Dunno about that. I think Tolkien was right when he called mortality man's gift. Plus, fifty years of good health and ninety billion years of geritol and diapers??? No thanks.

Granted, with body grafts, maybe that last part won't be a problem...

On a more serious note, I think I'm glad I'll die within the next century. I see the dehumanizing effects of "progress," and I don't want it. I never want to be artificially augmented, networked, downloaded, or digitized. I never want to live on a planet other than Earth. I don't want a society where we don't have to work and strive. A large part of my political beliefs come from the value I place on being human. I don't want to see the world as it will be in two hundred years, when mankind is alive, but humans are extinct.

[marycatelli]

It's not like dying is an distinct thing from the problems of aging.

And I doubt that humans will be extinct that way. Evolution would of course select for flesh because it reproduces most easily.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

If that’s your test, you might as well die in the normal course of events. After the heat death of the universe, it won’t matter whether you died at age 70 or age 70 million.

[izuko.livejournal.com]

Sure, but for the 69,999,930 years, the scoffers will delight.

[marycatelli]

To be sure, that's as good an argument for 70 million as for 70, without further info.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Well, the heat-death of the Universe is at some indeterminate date many more than mere billions of years in the future. (The date is indeterminate because it is a very slow process and one can pick and choose which events to count as "heat-death").

There is no such thing as "immortality" in the sense of "can't be extinguished under any circumstances," because no matter how good one's defenses and how many backups one has, one can postulate some low-probability occurrence which overwhelms all defenses and destroys all backups. Given infintie time, this low-probability event will happen.

Life, even life as a supposedly post-human immortal pattern which can incarnate itself in everything from flesh to silicon to the magnetic patterns of neutron stars, is a contest against the forces of entropy. Eventually entropy will win.

Having said that, there is a difference between living 1 year, living 10 years, living 100 years, living 1000 years and so on. The longer one lives the longer one can express oneself, for good or evil (one gets to pick the expression, which is the essence of Free Will). I could accomplish more in centuries than in mere decades, in millennia than in centuries, or so on.

For any lifespan, though, the important thing is to live well. This doesn't mean that life extension is worthless -- merely that, like any benefit, it has its limitations.