Customer Reviews

If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive...Discorporation and U.S. Patent 4,666,425

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This well produced and very modestly priced hard cover bookwas written to generate controversy. Anticipating possible disruptionto his personal life, its author adopted a pseudonym (or "polinym" --hence the name of the publisher). However, this was in vain. Premeditated efforts to generate controversy are apparently regarded as less than newsworthy.

The book explains why he spent a good amount of time and money to obtain a patent for an invention that he had no intention to practice. It may be the only one ever to be filed by an inventor using a pseudonym and is entitled "Device for Perfusing an Animal Head." The patent is reprinted in its entirety as Appendix D and, indeed, claims, e.g.:

1. A device for maintaining metabolic activity in a mammalian head which has been severed from its body at its neck, comprising the following components...
4. A method... wherein the component which can remove waste products from the blood is selected from the group consisting of....

Patents sometime generate controversy, e.g., the "live, human-made micro-organism" declared by the Supreme Court to constitute patentable subject matter in Diamond v. Charkrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980). However, as noted above, this one was filed for the sole purpose of encouraging early public attention to an incipient technology --or incipient technologies generally.

Notwithstanding his narrow point of departure, the author deals broadly with the social control of science and technology and explores ways in which society can keep some measure of control without losing the benefits of modern science and technology -- particularly those of medicine.

If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive... was written for a broad audience.

If you're willing to think hard about scary stuff that might actually happen in the future, this is a fascinating book. The author is an engineer, lawyer, and patent attorney. He doesn't advocate it, or oppose it. Instead, he lays out the facts in clear English, and does his best to analyze and explore the possible long-term social, legal, and ethical implications. The last third of the book gets into entirely different subjects, all focused on the impacts of science, engineering and technology on civilization and society. He's obviously very intelligent and well-read, and despite the bizarre title, he clearly wants what's best for society, and he wants researchers to think about what their work will do to society, before they do it in secret and then announce it. It's a challenging but fascinating book.

This is the book!! Everyone out there who has been looking for a way to keep pets and even loved ones around MUST read this. I admit, I had quite a bit of trouble keeping my brothers head alive, but my dog was pretty simple! I would suggest starting with something simple and working up to maybe a homeless person before you make a big goof like I did with my brother, Jean-Claude.

You have GOT to try this!!

I was feeling really blue until a chanced across this book in my neighbor's bedroom. After only ten pages, I says "Tobias, here's a project worth your time.!" I loved this book and so will you (and your kids - it gave my nephew a great idea for his science fair). So if your intrests lay in severed heads, pets, or pets with severed heads, you'll wanna check this out.

Never read the book. Just wanted to let everyone know about the wikipedia entry, Head transplant, which discusses this entire issue, including the history of Head transplants.

In 1998 Charles Krauthammer of Time magazine wrote of the potential medical future of head transplanting with cloning:

At the University of Texas and at the University of Bath. During the past four years, one group created headless mice; the other, headless tadpoles. Why then create them?...Take the mouse-frog technology, apply it to humans, combine it with cloning, and you are become a god: with a single cell taken from, say, your finger, you produce a headless replica of yourself, a mutant twin, arguably lifeless, that becomes your own personal, precisely tissue-matched organ farm...

Clone a headless double of yourself, 18-20 years before you die, and on your death bed, transplant your old head to the new cloned body. Immortality.

It's a MUST for every bookshelf