The monkey’s eyelids fluttered after 18 hours under anesthesia. Two medical teams fearfully admitted. Doctors, nurses, and a troop of assistants held their breath, waiting for a sign that the delicate operation – actually two delicate operations – had been a success.
With forceps in his hand, Cleveland brain surgeon Robert White gently tapped the animal’s nose. With a flash of clear recognition, the monkey, a medium-sized primate known as a macaque, clapped its jaw as if trying to bite the doctor.
The surgical theater erupted with cheers.
White had done it: the world’s first primate head transplant. He had attached the conscious, living head of one macaque to the breathing, vital body of another, creating a single “new” animal.
“Dangerous, combative and very unhappy,” White summarized his patient’s behavior in 1970. Justly. The previously healthy creature was now paralyzed from the neck down and had only a few hours to live.
“The monkeys didn’t like Dr. White, and they really kept it,” Brandy Schillace, author of “Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher” (Simon & Schuster), told The Post. the macabre head transplants White performed – affirming, at least for him, that the brain is the vessel of the personality, the literal seat of the soul.
In her new book, Schillace explores White’s career as a pioneering surgeon and researcher who nevertheless never achieved his ultimate goal: to perform the operation whereby a human soul, encapsulated in its own brain, would live on after its original body collapsed.
“It was perfume, but now it’s an empty bottle,” he said in 1967, rocking an isolated brain in the palm of his hand. “But the smell is still there.”
By then, White’s surgical experiments had already led to techniques that preserve the function of damaged brains and spines, giving neurosurgeons time to do their life-saving work. The approach, known as hypothermic perfusion, is still used in trauma patients and those in cardiac arrest.
But for 40 years, until his death in 2010, White cherished the hope of performing his monkey surgery – which he preferred to call a body transplant – on humans. In fact, by the late 1990s, he’d found a few potential patients: Craig Vetovitz, a quadriplegic whose failing organs were limiting his lifespan, and a brain-dead man to serve as a whole-body donor.
Unfortunately for White, a penchant for publicity gave the gifted surgeon a whiff of quackery. A humiliating Halloween appearance on the tabloid show “Hard Copy” casts White and Vetovitz as “Dr. Frankenstein and His Willing Monster.”
“He was frustrated that people couldn’t overcome the shock factor,” said Schillace. “If you take heads off, it just upsets people.”
On the other hand, “He would occasionally go out in public with the words’ Dr. Frankenstein “decorated with his medical bag,” she added. “So he had these dual personalities.”
In addition, White was a devout Catholic and a father of 10 who made friendships with two popes. Both Paul VI and John Paul II asked him to serve on the Vatican’s bioethical administrations that grappled with the thorny dilemmas of modern medicine – including when exactly life ends.
“White felt he was on God’s team,” said Schillace. He would say, ‘The guidance behind my hand when I operate is from God.’ And he was always very convinced that he was doing the right thing. ”
But he never received a papal blessing for his plan to extend one person’s life by grafting his head onto another human’s brain-dead body. Vetovitz’s surgery didn’t happen either. White was unable to raise the necessary $ 4 million, and his showmanship likely cost him both the money and the hospital’s approval.
“White felt that human life – and for White that meant the brain – is worth saving at all costs,” said Schillace. ‘But there is a possibility, and there is a must. We can do a head transplant today. But should we? And who decides?
“That’s the question I kept coming up with,” she said. “Because medical technology often exceeds our ability to understand its consequences.”