But he is not usually remembered for these achievements. Instead, his name conjures up images of the bizarre animal experiments he performed: In the 1970s, he transplanted an entire monkey head onto another monkey's body. And, for a short time, the severed head lived.
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Image used with permission of Jim Fields |
Organ transplant is commonplace now, but the technology and knowledge to perform this type of surgery was only developed in the last century. The first successful kidney transplant was performed in 1954 between identical twins, drastically reducing the risk of rejection by the recipient's immune system. The first successful liver and heart transplants occurred in 1967. Success in this context is a relative term -- the person who received the first successful heart transplant lived only 18 days after the operation.
These early transplants raised all kinds of scientific questions. How long can an organ stay functional outside the body? Can all organs be transplanted?
Bioethicists Will Gaylin and Dan Callahan, who co-founded bioethics think tank, The Hastings Center, in 1969, remember talk of brain transplantation when organ transplant technology was developing. "It used to be kind of a joke," says Callahan. "If you transplant my brain into somebody else's head, who would that person be? Is a person the brain or the body?"
When Fields made his documentary in 2007, he flew out to Cleveland to speak to White. Not only was White open to discussing his work, but he also showed off his old lab, abandoned but intact, even after attempted attacks by animal rights activists. "It was like [Miss] Havisham's wedding room in [Charles] Dickens's Great Expectations," says Fields. "That brain in the jar was just there, and all that beautiful old equipment. It was amazing."
A few days later, White nonchalantly mentioned some old footage from the lab. As it was his own work, "to him it wasn't that interesting...wasn't that big a deal," says Fields. But it is a big deal to many who view it. The footage of the transplant -- the placement of the A-monkey's head onto the B-monkey's body -- features the monkey awaking from its anesthesia as researchers poke and prod it, testing its reactions. At one point the transplanted head fiercely bites down on a stick, a show of aggression.
The footage is horrifying enough to modern sensibilities to warrant a warning at the beginning of the documentary. Fields doubted the success of the film as he was working on it, but decided to finish, assuming that at least a few people would be interested. The showing of the documentary at the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival proved otherwise. "They were just repulsed!" Fields says of the initial audience reaction. "It was like the end of Springtime for Hitler. I thought that nobody was going to want to see it anymore."
But later in the film, the viewer gets a real sense of White, the man: a religious man who struggled with the theological implications of his work, a man who was targeted by animal rights activists as a result of his government-funded research, a man who helped increase science's understanding of brain metabolism and cooling, insights crucial to the success of modern brain surgery.
"Real mad scientists...are not lone wolves like in the movies," says Fields. "They're doing things that are sanctioned in their time and place, in society, that are only considered by later values to be wrong."
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Image used with permission of Jim Fields |
While Callahan doubts that White would have been allowed to do this research today, he notes that he likely received approval from a number of organizations in his day. But does that context of permission make his actions ethical? "I don't think you can go back and prejudge generations of people," says Gaylin, "but by the time he was doing his research, there were a significant number of people talking about medical ethics in an advanced form."
So which is it? Was White a researcher outside the boundaries of bioethics or a man doing right by the standards of his time? "I think we can see him as part of a generation of somewhat naive and arrogant researchers," says Gaylin. "Do I blame him? I think I would certainly judge him in the sense of saying this was not the most sensitive guy... We have to question all the time our responsibility to research subjects, including animals."
Watch Jim Fields's documentary, A: Head B:Body, on Vimeo.
Correction 2/25: The original version of this article mistakenly indicated that the Hastings Center was a part of Yale University. The mistake has been corrected, and The Scientist regrets the error.
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[Comment posted 2011-02-25 17:36:11]
[Comment posted 2011-02-25 15:01:34]
I'd like to point out that White was inspired by the work done before him by Vladimir Demikhov.
LINK
White was the first who made head transplant in monkey, but Demikhov was the first who made it on dogs in early 1950s. They both should be credited for this work indeed.
[Comment posted 2011-02-25 13:09:51]
This is quite appropriate when describing scientific discovery. I totally see a place for the most insensitive of people. It is their lack of filters that can deliver a spectrum of spectacular and infamous results.
I have trouble with bioethicists who may have a lack of understanding of certain personalities in science and the minds needed to create a complete body of work. Should one limit genius, and what are the potential ramifications? Did the head transplant work obtain medical knowledge necessary for later surgical techniques that have become standard of care? What would have happened if that particular research avenue was never traveled down? Would preventing that preliminary work, however distasteful to some, have led to countless morbidity and mortality? I'm sorry Doctor Gaylin, with people like Robert White, your comment "You can't just say, 'If you let me do this, maybe something good will come out of it.'" doesn't cut it in my book.