Head Transplantation

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Okay, your body got screw in a nasty accident, yet your brain is just fine. Now, you'll be looking life as tetraplegia, ie. stuck in a wheelchair... and that's if you survive. Wait... a minute, there's a way to fix that, just get a new body. No need to worry, the doctors have figured out how to the spinal cord, so you can walk and live on again. Neat... right?

Okay, so in real-life, the idea of a head transplant is a far way off, at least in humans. Yet, that hasn't stopped those from trying, and works have been showing the idea of operation, with mixed results. A brain transplant could call this, after all, you are transferring a brain from one body to another, similar to a head transplant. This is often a classic in Mad Scientist works, though it has gotten positive feedback in recent years. Of course, even if a transplant is possible, there're a lot of problems due to ethics as one body can save the lives of up to 8 people.

Examples of Head Transplantation include:

Anime and Manga

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has Dio Brando had his head transplanted on the body of Jonathan Joestar.

Comic Books

• Marvel has Arthur Nagan, who had his head transplanted onto a gorilla's body.

Fan Works

• In the Spice Girls AURPF, Just Taken, one of Melanie's neighbors, Linn, had gone under such after a serious accident. Her brain was transplanted into the body of a wolf. Yet, Linn is still treated like she was.

Film

• The Thing with Two Heads has a plot about a dying white man being gained his request for his head grafted on a new body. Despite the man's blatant prejudice, his head was grafted onto the body of a black prisoner, who opts to be a test subject in exchange for a pardon.
• In Mars Attacks!, Nathalie Lake and Professor Kessler both find their heads in places where they shouldn't belong, thanks to the Martians -- Nathalie and her dog exchange bodies, and Kessler's head simply goes solo.
• The Brain That Wouldn't Die explains about a scientist's keeping his girlfriend's head alive so he can transplant onto a body.
• Frankenhooker, a grief-stricken former medical student goes on a killing spree to assemble body parts to create one for his fiancee after a freak lawnmower accident decapitates her.

Video Games

• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: Set has a pet cat-monkey hybrid, Shoshana, he created by transplanting the cat's head onto a monkey's body in order her life from cancer. Unfortunately for the Nazis, this also works on humans. When BJ is decapitated by Irene Engel, he gets a genetically engineered body, along with a device known as 'halo' to ensure it. It works.
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 has brain transplants as part of the game.
• In a Halloween Team Fortress 2 comic, the Medic, with some assistance from the Engineer, transplanted the living brain of a mugger into a jack-o-lantern. The criminal can only remain alive if his brain isn't remove from the Halloween decoration.

Western Animation

• In the second The Simpsons, 'Treehouse of Horror, Mr. Brain has his head attached to Homer's body after a freak accident with a robot.
• In the episode "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" from Futurama, Fry has his head transplanted on Amy's body after an accident nearly kills him.

Real Life

• Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet-era Russian scientist, is known for (among other accomplishments) his dog head transplant experiments in the 1950s.
• Inspired by Demikhov, Dr. Robert White successfully transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another in 1970; although paralyzed from the neck down because of the transplant, the resulting hybrid survived nine days before immune rejection killed it. While it lived, though, the monkey could still hear, smell, taste, eat and follow objects with its eyes. During the 1990s, White planned to perform the same operation on humans and practiced on corpses at a mortuary. It was hoped he could do head transplant surgery on physicist Stephen Hawking and actor Christopher Reeve. Although his work has been dismissed as "barbaric", it has led to serious discussion of the feasibility of spinal cord reconstruction and cephalo-spinal linkage in humans as recently as 2014.