Say I had a setup that was like a external Jarvick-7 (first generation heart-pump)linked to a dyalisis blood filter, piped into an areated reservour of blood, (like an aquarium fulla blood with an areator), and all conditions were sterile.
And then we cut some jackass’ head off, and IMMEDIATELY plugged and sealed the carotid and jugular to the fish tank system.
So, you have a sealed, sterile system of oxygenated blood to a head, that is not leaking, within like 2 seconds and shit, of the head gettin’ chopped off.
I read somewhere that if you shout the name of someone whom has just had their head cut off, their eyes will look at you.
Add an IV of glucose, and I could keep someone’s head alive on the mantle, right?
I don’t think this would work. Bronchioles ( the part of your lung that oxigenates your blood) are a lot more complicated than that. As far as I know there is no current replacement for them.
You’d need to support cellular respiration as well, so you’d need glucose in the blood as well as oxygen. You’d also need a replacement for the kidneys as well (I’m… pretty sure) so that’s a dialysis machine on top of the heart or heart/lung machine you already have. I don’t know about replacing all liver function, but if you don’t remove and replace red blood cells your oxygen transport breaks down and if you don’t remove and replace white blood cells your head-inna-jar is becomes severely immunocompromised, so you need either fake bone marrow or periodic transfusions of the blood of the living.
These last two involved switching heads - grafting heads onto different bodies - but the “new” bodies (new to the head) served only to pump blood and stuff, the neurological microsurgery is not yet possible to connect the nerves to the brain and spinal cord that would allow control of the body (otherwise we could have cured Christopher Reeve’s paralysis).
So really, the question of “can we keep a severed head alive” has already been answered - it seems to be YES. The next advancement, to use an artificial life support apparatus instead of a freshly decapitated body, would seem to be surmountable…
The lungs are famous for putting oxygen into the blood. People tend to forget how important it is that they also remove the carbon dioxide.
BUT all this, and what other posters have said, is for LONG TERM survival. If the only thing we cared about was maintaining consciousness for twenty seconds or so – just enough time to prove consciousness via a morse-code message via moving the eyes – that would put the OP in a whole new light.
The human body does a heck of a lot more than just supply glucose, oxygenate blood and filter out urea. There is no way that an artificial life support system is going to supply suitable neurotransmitter precursors and regulatory hormones to keep the brain alive and functioning for anything more than a limited period of time - I’m guessing hours at most.
According to Brukhonenko’s and Tchetchuline’s two papers [1, 2], a typical experiment, from beginning to end, took about 7 to 9 hours, most of which was spent separating the head from the body, obtaining the lungs and vasculature of a second dog, and connecting vessels to the autojector. The final 2 to 3 hours were devoted to taking physiological and behavioral measurements from the isolated head itself. (I assume the dog was terminated sometime shortly thereafter.)
[1] Brukhonenko and Tchetchuline. Expériences avec la tête isolée du chien. I. Technique et conditions des experiénces. Journal de Physiol. et de Pathol. Génér. 29(1): 31-45 (March, 1929).
[2] Brukhonenko and Tchetchuline. Expériences avec la tête isolée du chien. II. Résultats des experiénces. Journal de Physiol. et de Pathol. Génér. 29(1): 64-79 (March, 1929).
This article [PDF], though it deals with the possibility of keeping removed brains alive and conscious, rather than whole heads, is very much to the point.
The short version of the article’s answer is, no, it can’t be done.
