The monkey’s eyelids flew after 18 hours under anesthesia. Two medical teams remained uneasy. Doctors, nurses and a troupe of nurses held their breath, waiting for a sign that the delicate operation – in fact, two delicate operations – was successful.
Holding a pair of tweezers, Cleveland’s brain surgeon Robert White tapped the animal’s nose. With a flash of apparent recognition, the monkey, a medium-sized primate known as a macaque, broke its jaws as if trying to bite the doctor.
The surgical theater broke out in cheers.
White had done it: the first primate head transplant in the world. He had attached the conscious and living head of one macaque to the respiratory, vital body of another, creating a single “new” animal.
“Dangerous, contentious and very unhappy,” White summed up his patient’s behavior in 1970. For good reason. The old healthy being was now paralyzed from the neck down and had only a few hours to live.
“The monkeys didn’t like Dr. White and they even kept it,” said Brandy Schillace, author of “Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher ”(Simon & Schuster), he told The Post. It was a common factor in all five white macabre head transplants performed – and it confirmed, at least for him, that the brain is the vessel of personality, the literal seat of the soul.
In her new book, Schillace explores White’s career as an innovative surgeon and researcher who, however, never achieved his ultimate goal: performing the operation that would allow a human soul, locked in its own brain, to live after its body. initially failed.
“It was perfume, but now it’s an empty bottle,” he said in 1967, wrapping an isolated brain in his palm. “But the perfume is still there.”
By then, White’s surgical experiments had already led to techniques that preserve function in the injured brain and spine, giving neurosurgeons time to do their life-saving work. The approach, known as hypothermic infusion, is still used today in trauma patients and those in cardiac arrest.
But for 40 years, until his death in 2010, White cared about hoping to perform the monkey operation – which he preferred to call a body transplant – in humans. By the end of the 1990s, he had even found a couple of potential patients: Craig Vetovitz, a tetrapllegic whose deficient organs limited his life, and a dying man to serve as a whole-body donor.
Unfortunately for White, the love of advertising gave the gifted surgeon a scent of charlatanry. A humiliating Halloween appearance on the tabloid show “Hard Copy” cast White and Vetovitz as “Dr. Frankenstein and his willing monster. ”
“He was frustrated that people couldn’t get over the shock,” Schillace said. “If you go around, it upsets people.”
On the other hand, “Occasionally he went out in public with the words ‘Dr. Frankenstein wrote on his medical bag,'” she added. “So he had these double personalities.”
Moreover, White was a devout Catholic and a father of 10 who developed friendships with two popes. Both Paul VI and John Paul II asked him to participate in Vatican bioethics panels that faced the thorny dilemmas of modern medicine – including the question of exactly when life ends.
“White felt part of God’s team,” Schillace said. “He would say, ‘The guidance behind my hand when I operate is God’s.’ And he was always very convinced that he was doing the right thing. ”
But he never received a papal blessing for his plan to prolong a person’s life by grafting his head on the dead body of another human being’s brain. Vetovitz’s operation didn’t happen either. White failed to raise the $ 4 million needed, and his show probably cost him both the funds and the hospital’s approval.
“White felt that human life – and, for White, that meant the brain – was worth saving at almost any cost,” Schillace said. “It simply came to our notice then. We can do a head transplant today. But should I? And who decides?
“That’s the question I’ve always been up against,” she said. “Because medical technology often exceeds our ability to understand its consequences.”