Interview: Robert White, MD PhD
JR: So I wanted to ask you about something you just said. You said that your experience with these operations made you believe that maybe the soul is in the brain.
RW: Well, I’ve wondered about that. You know it seemed to me that that death of the body, death of the whole being, can be made on the basis of a single organ being destroyed – irreversibly destroyed – that’s the brain. That’s brain death. So if someone comes in on a helicopter and he’s run his motorcycle and his head into a wall, well they chop him up and take all his organs out of him. Well, in this case all you have to do is save the body and hook it up to a tetraplegic’s head and take away his body which is reaching the end-stage of function.
JR: Yeah, but I’m wondering, sort of philosophically, I know that you’re a devout Catholic and that you’ve been an advisor to more than one Pope, and I’m wondering if the sort of confrontation you’ve had in surgery and the laboratory with the idea the brain really is everything that we are, if that’s ever…
RW: Well you know, I do tend to think that way, and I can remember when we were first successful with the brain transplant, and then finally with the head transplant – the sucker woke up and did everything a pugnacious monkey would do – I kept wondering, we’re transplanting the soul. I mean every time you turn around, another part of the human body, bones, ligaments, and of course, skin, you name it, it’s being transplanted, and the whole basic fact is, what’s left?
JR: The brain, I guess.
RW: I mean, does the soul travel if you get my kidney, or my hand? That stuff is just a power-pack for our brains. Everything that we know…everything we know that we’ve built, or created, is because of our brains. The great music, the great writing, the math, the great sciences, all this sort of stuff – the great discoveries, blah, blah, blah [laughs]. The whole business about what we know about the universe, what we know about us, it’s all on the brain, for God’s sake. It’s got nothing to do with your finger.
JR: So, has it ever been difficult for you to reconcile that…
RW: No, it doesn’t bother me one bit.
JR: Ok, you see that as compatible with your faith.
RW: Well, it’s compatible with mine. The other thing is that I get in trouble, because according to Christian belief, particularly Catholic belief, you’re dead when the soul leaves the body, right? Yeah. Well, I’ve gone on record as saying that I believe that should be changed: it’s when the soul leaves the brain. We’re always taking pieces of your body out, right? I mean come on! To get back to what you were talking about originally, there’s no question that you could put the human brain on a mechanical system – in fact, we’ve designed it – to keep it alive just like a monkey brain.
JR: Right.
RW: Alright then, well then going back to what you wrote [in your email], yes, we could keep the human head alive – we’re beginning to sound more like Frankenstein or somebody else – the bottom line is that if they had a procedure where they could take the body, fix it, sew the spinal cord back together again so the guy could walk, but he needed a period of time to keep the brain alive, you could do it., Yeah, you could do it.
As a matter of fact, one of the great tragedies of this war is that so many young people are getting traumatic brain injuries. We need to have a system, which is hydraulic in nature, that is easily adaptable right at the wound area, right at the battlefield edge, that will cool the brain. Because if you do that, then these people by the time they reach at least some sort of hospital they can be treated properly. But the brain dies in 3-5 minutes!JR: So I just wanted to ask you about maybe two more things if we have time. The first is your relationship with scientists from the Soviet Union. Even as early as the 60s, you had made trips to the Soviet Union, is that right?
RW: Yeah.
JR: I’m wondering how that initial contact was made.
RW: Well, the Russians – well, Russia was not Russia, it was the USSR as you point out at that time. And their scientists and their major leaders were all a bunch of atheists and they wanted to live for ever, and they became very [laughs] interested in my experiments in keeping the brain alive with cooling and keeping the brain alive on machinery. Then there was this group in Moscow that was putting together two-headed dogs.
JR: Demikhov, right?
RW: Yeah! Good, you know his name. You know there is a book translated of his experiments. The book is written by Demikhov; it’s been translated into English, and it shows a few photographs but a lot of drawings. The only trouble is he faked his drawing of the dog. What he did was he showed a head being attached to the body and he used the head of a puppy on the body of a mastiff. Whereas in reality, when you look at the pictures, and the movie which I have, you can see – well I’ve seen the animals in Moscow – what he does, and it’s a fantastic operation, what he did it for I could never figure out, but what he does, he cuts the puppy’s body really through the chest, so the upper limbs are still attachable and still workable.
There’s a new documentary that’s been put together that shows my work, unfortunately focusing on the head transplant, and it goes together with an episode on the Russian work. It shows the Demikhov dogs and the other stuff. Demikhov was an incredible experimental surgeon – he’s long since dead – but I never had any idea nor could he honestly tell me, why the hell he was putting a half a puppy on the chest of the dog. Dog-to-dog…I never could figure it out.
JR: And you went to the Moscow Institute of the Brain as well?
RW: Well, I wanted to go look at Lenin’s brain, and since I’d operated, taken care of all these stupid Russians, I figured they owed me something. [chuckles]
JR: Wait, so you operated on patients when you were there?
RW: Oh, sure, I did everything, I mean who do you think you’re talking to? I mean haven’t you read anything? [laughs] No, I mean when I first went to Russia they were all really interested in re-animation as they still are, and they was a great guy by the name of Academician Negovsky who was the big shot in reviving people. And I got caught up in those circuits, but in time I was discovered as a neurosurgeon, and I found myself coming and lecturing on neurosurgical topics, I found myself operating on them.
JR: How about that.
RW: Well you know, I could get out of town before they died. I did a lot of surgery in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.
JR: Let me ask, did they want to re-animate Lenin?
RW: No, no, no, that’s another serious mistake. [Some people had] the idea that the Russians were very much interested in finding ways of reanimating people who were truly dead, and that they also wanted to see if they could create another race by manipulation of the brain – so they could put gorilla brains in men’s bodies or something like this. All the stuff that we were doing had some relation to what they wanted to do. But it turned out that the story of the Russians wanting to create a sort of work class or military class of chimeric individuals was not true. One of the things that the Russians were a little behind on is tissue immunology, dealing with rejection. They have a real problem there, and that’s why the whole field of organ transplantation has not moved on.
I just wrote an article about operating in China. Yeah, I had to get around these days, and so I had to go to China, and spend some time there, especially operating, and [trails off] … no, my life has been very dull. [chuckles] I’ll tell you, one thing you don’t want to do is grow old: do not grow old, I totally disadvise it.JR: Ok, cause I was considering it, but...
RW: No, no, no…do everything possible to stay young, and just remember this: once you’ve done something and the time is past, well you can’t go back, you know. At least not at this time, but maybe you can invent some sort of time machine…
JR: Well, that’s not really my field… So the first time you went to the USSR, did they invite you because of your publications?
RW: Well, the experiments, the very experiments you’re talking about – all the isolated brain stuff and cooling, that was what they were interested in. I don’t think I’d even done the head transplant yet, because I think I went there in ‘66 the first time. It was cold those days, the cold war was on.
JR: So did you talk politics with them?
RW: Well, I told them quite frankly – I mean the invitations probably even arrived much earlier than that, probably in ‘63, certainly by ‘64. I just told them that in my opinion, if any incident occurred in which I felt threatened or unhappy, I wanted to make sure that we had an agreement that arrangements would be made to send me home right away.
But I was treated beautifully…My God, I spent so much time at the Bolshoi, and I think I even became an expert on ballet, I couldn’t get out of that damn place. And the restaurants! They had great restaurants, even back in the cold war days. I mean we may have our rich and our poor here, but my God, if you belonged to the upper class there you lived very, very well. But in any case, it was interesting – I think I went there about 35 times.
