Brain transplant: legal and medical ramifications?

[Loopydude]

I want an extra brain. Put it next to my liver, with a titanium enclosure in lieu of a skull.

[Der_Trihs]

@Fish

I wouldn’t call that a foregone conclusion: look at the Terry Schiavo case. All indications were that her brain was pretty much flatline on the EEG, yet her parents vehemently insisted she was still alive and herself, despite what the brain scans said.

They tried and lost, and alienated a lot of people into the bargain.

@Fish

I happen to agree that the brain is where the consciousness is, but there are those would fight that concept in court vehemently, aren’t there? Off the top of my head, wouldn’t some religious organization have a stake in the separation of the concepts of “brain” and “soul?” I mean, defining a unique identity by the presence of absence of an EEG reading would have consequences for abortion law, would it not?

Which is why they tried to keep Schiavo “alive”, and why they failed. Taking the identy = soul view goes against seperation of church and state, would screw up any number of laws, and is simply unworkable since you can’t detect a soul.

[Fish]

They tried and lost, but not on the grounds of “brain = consciousness.” I thought they lost on the grounds that they had no right to overrule the husband’s decision as Schiavo’s legal guarantor or guardian. I bring up the Schiavo case because there are people who believe that point of view but, to my limited knowledge, brain = consciousness hasn’t been legally decided. All I know is that brain death = write out death certificate. To put it another way, I don’t think there’s been a reason to legally separate between the brain which forms an intent to commit a crime, and the hands which the brain commanded to commit the crime, because until this hypothetical transplant, I can’t imagine a reason to separate them.

But we’re not concerned so much with brain = consciousness as we are with brain = identity. At the moment the courts are content to let identity = fingerprints and DNA and so on. Wouldn’t that give creditors some grounds on which to claim that body and blood and fingerprints = identity, therefore the brain/patient owes the body’s debts?

[Mangetout]

@Fish

Yeah, but writing a story like “we did a brain transplant and the patient lived but they’re in a permanent state of asensory paralysis because the brain is incompatible” isn’t science fiction, man. It’d make a pretty dull story.

C’mon! where’s your imagination; such a person would have to learn to see, learn to feel, learn to touch, all over again, like a newborn infant, but without the same developmental capacity a newborn has. There’s gotta be story potential in that.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Fish

…I wouldn’t call that a foregone conclusion: look at the Terry Schiavo case. All indications were that her brain was pretty much flatline on the EEG, yet her parents vehemently insisted she was still alive and herself, despite what the brain scans said…

I don’t think that Terry Schiavo’s parents, or the “philosopher-kings of the Florida legislature” (as Dave Barry described them, IIRC) acted “pretty logically.” Der Trihs’s approach is reasonable and based on scientific fact… so naturally it will have little appeal to the Religious Right or conservative policymakers.

[Fish]

@Mangetout

C’mon! where’s your imagination; such a person would have to learn to see, learn to feel, learn to touch, all over again, like a newborn infant, but without the same developmental capacity a newborn has. There’s gotta be story potential in that.

I don’t see the same kind of potential in the micro-vision story of focusing on how one person, individually, deals with a bunch of inexplicable biological incompatibilities, compared to how society at large deals with the potential of new technology.

When Asimov wrote a story about a robot, he didn’t write a story about one man sitting at a desk trying out different positronic configurations until he got it to work right; he wrote the story assuming robots did work, and trying to show what changes this might bring to society.

Maybe there is some potential in that story — but that’s not the story I want to tell.