Off with their head! (And onto a new You! Slightly used.)

[tacticslion]

Originally Posted by Nique

Any kind of surgical extremeity transplant may eventually be technically possible, but it will almost certainly be considered useless in light of better options - If you can effectively connect a head to a body, it follows that you understand the nature of that connection in such a way so as to artificially produce it (e.g. keeping the head alive through artificial prosthetics, etc).

I think, at least. I'm trying to think about this logically but honestly I am just talking out of my as s.

That's one of the things that's so odd about the whole thing. I mean, ultimately, why? What's the big deal?

Either we're going to be able to fix it, or we're not, so what's the benefit to being able to surgically transplant heads?

I suppose (this is coming to mind as I write this), that it may be "preferable" in a few cases - say, where one body is dying for reasons (perhaps an uneven distribution of telomeres, or something, in the lower body, while the head/brain is fine; hence an aged lower body, but an effectively "younger" upper body) and and one head is "dead" for some reason (major blunt-force trauma?), but I'd have to imagine that such situations are so passingly rare as to be exceedingly unlikely.

Hm... it's possible that those in the trans community might get some utility out of this, now that I'm thinking about it, though again, there are a huge host of ethical issues going along with that which would have to be considered first.

I could see the preference to flesh over, say, artificial prosthetics... but, again, the ethics are so... out there.

Hm.

(Also, the viability of such a surgery... seems... unlikely.)