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from an external source. This was a far more complicated procedure than simply lopping off the top of the skull and lifting out the gray matter, because the arteries supplying blood to the brain had to remain intact. White had to carve away the tissue of the face—the skin, nerves, muscle, and cartilage—until all that remained was the skull attached to the body by the thread of the arteries. Only then did he crack open the skull and reveal the brain. It took hours. As he worked, he puffed on a pipe and chatted about current affairs, as though he were chiseling away at a piece of wood instead of a living creature.
    The brain sat motionless on the stand, a gray mass of tissue. Only by its electrical activity—the blips of an EEG trace—could one tell it was alive and thinking. After a couple of hours, having done what he set out to do, White switched off its blood supply. It took three minutes for the brain to die.
    The next step was to find out whether a brain could survive being transplanted into another living creature. White achieved this goal on June 3, 1964. He removed the brain of a dog and placed it under the neck skin of another dog, where the brain remained alive, floating in darkness, for days. Unfortunately for the dog that played host, it was no smarter for having a second brain. In fact, the extra brain was literally nothing more than a pain in the neck.
    The final step in White’s research program was a full head transplant. Six more years of preparation were necessary, but on March 14, 1970, White did it. In a carefully choreographed operation requiring a large team of assistants, he separated a monkey’s head from its body and reattached the head to a new body. After a few hours the monkey woke up to its new reality. White wrote that it “gave evidence of its awareness of the external environment by accepting and attempting to chew or swallow food placed in its mouth. The eyes tracked the movement of individuals and objects brought into their visual fields.” When White placed his finger in the monkey’s mouth, the monkey bit it. Evidently, it wasn’t a happy monkey.
    It’s hard to imagine an experience more disorienting than waking up and discovering you have a new body, but it could have been worse for the monkey. White could have placed the head on the body the wrong way around. He noted that, because of the way the two bodies were positioned in the lab, it would have been far easier for him to do this, but for the monkey’s sake, he didn’t. As if it really mattered to the monkey at that point.
    The monkey couldn’t get up and walk around or swing from trees. Although the head was attached to a new body, it 8 couldn’t control that body in any way. The spinal cord remained severed. The monkey was now a quadriplegic. In essence, the new body was merely a pump supplying blood to the head. From a surgical point of view, it was an impressive piece of work. But it seems a mercy that the monkey survived only a day and a half before succumbing to complications from the surgery.
    White had achieved his goal, but at a personal cost. Instead of hailing him as a national hero, the public was appalled by his work. Funding for his experiments gradually dried up. But White was hardly one to back down. Instead, he played his role of a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein to the hilt. He freely admitted during interviews that he was a fan of the Frankenstein movies. He once showed up on a children’s TV program toting a Dr. Frankenstein’s doctor bag. He even publicly lobbied for the need to take his work to the next level—a human head transplant. He argued that if doctors were willing to replace a patient’s heart, why not replace the entire body? Surgically, it was possible. And if the patient was already a quadriplegic, it wouldn’t significantly alter his lifestyle. He toured with Craig Vetovitz, a near-quadriplegic who volunteered to be his first head-transplant patient.
    White admitted there was a long