The monkey’s eyelids fluttered after 18 hours under anesthesia. Two medical teams were left anxious. Doctors, nurses and a troop of assistants held their breath waiting for a signal that the delicate operation – in fact, two delicate operations – had been a success.
Holding a pair of tweezers, Cleveland brain surgeon Robert White gently pricked the animal’s nose. With a flash of apparent recognition, the monkey, a medium-sized primate known as a macaque, broke his jaws as if trying to bite the doctor.
Surgical theater erupted in cheers.
White had done it: the first primate head transplant in the world. He had attached the living, conscious head of one macaque to the vital and respiratory body of another, creating a single “new” animal.
“Dangerous, fistful, and very unhappy,” White summed up the patient’s behavior in 1970. With good reason. The healthy old creature was paralyzed from the neck and only had hours to live.
“The monkeys didn’t like Dr. White, and they really kept him,” Brandy Schillace, author of “Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher” (Simon & Schuster), told The Post. It was a common factor. in the five macabre head transplants that White performed, and confirmed, at least for him, that the brain is the vessel of personality, the literal seat of the soul.
In his new book, Schillace explores White’s career as a pioneering surgeon and researcher who, however, never achieved his ultimate goal: to perform the operation of letting a human soul, hidden in his own brain, live. after his original body failed.
“It was a perfume, but now it’s an empty bottle,” he said in 1967 as he rocked an isolated brain in his palm. “But the fragrance is still there.”
By then, White’s surgical experiments had already led to techniques that preserved function in injured brains and spines, giving neurosurgeons time to do their rescue work. The approach, known as hypothermic perfusion, is still used in traumatized patients and in cardiac arrest.
But for 40 years, until his death in 2010, White nurtured hopes of performing his monkey surgery (which he preferred to call a body transplant) on humans. In the late 1990s, he had even found a couple of potential patients: Craig Vetovitz, a quadriplegic whose failed organs limited his life, and a dead man to act as a full-body donor.
Unfortunately for White, the fondness for advertising gave the gifted surgeon a smell of charlatanism. A humiliating Halloween appearance on the “Hard Copy” press program aired White and Vetovitz as “Dr. Frankenstein and his monster volunteer.”
“I was frustrated that people couldn’t overcome the shock factor,” Schillace said. “If you go around, it just annoys people.”
On the other hand, “from time to time I went out in public with the words‘ Dr. Frankenstein appeared in his medical bag, ”he added. “So I had these dual personalities.”
In addition, White was a devout Catholic and father of ten who developed friendships with two popes. Both Paul VI and John Paul II asked him to participate in Vatican bioethics boards that faced the thorny dilemmas of modern medicine, including the question of when exactly life ends.
“White felt like he was part of God’s team,” Schillace said. “He told me, ‘The guide behind my hand when I operate is from God.’ And I was always very convinced that he was doing the right thing.”
But he never got a papal blessing for his plan to prolong a person’s life by grafting his head on the dead body of another human being. Vetovitz surgery did not pass either. White was unable to raise the $ 4 million needed, and his show probably cost him both the funds and hospital approval.
“White considered human life, and for White, that meant the brain, it’s worth saving at any cost,” Schillace said. “But there is a can, and there is. Today we can do a head transplant. But should we do it? And who decides?
“That’s the question I posed myself with,” he said. “Because medical technology often exceeds our ability to understand its consequences.”