Brain Transplants

Currently, this lies beyond medical ability, but it is likely only a matter of decades: to transplant a human brain into an equine body. Medical difficulties aside, it should be emphasised that most wouldbe equines are naturally horse-lovers, and the one price they WON'T pay is for a healthy horse to be expended so that they can realise their dream, therefore the source of the donor body must be taken into account. Possibly, as has been suggested in human-to-human brain transplants, the body of a mentally-aberrant subject could be used. Mental illness does occur in horses, sometimes to an extent where the animal must be destroyed. Alternatively, maybe a brain-dead animal could be "clone-grown" in a laboratory. This latter option would also allow the provision of a more sympathetic body: the introduction of human genes and hormones would ease the alien brain's acceptance. Japanese scientists are working on such a technology for the purpose of organ transplants. This has been done in mice. See Jan 1997 Scientific American magazine. A succesful transplant would (beyond the obvious problem of alien tissue rejection - this is already at least partially solved: "transgenic" animals have been bred with human genetic properties) require millions upon millions of functional nerve grafts at a microscopic level, in such a controlled fashion as to provide appropriate link-ups between corresponding nerves in brain and body. Another pioneering team are making progress in this field, where nerves actually weld themselves together without the need for microsurgery. The differing size of human and equine brains is not a problem: a horse has ample skull capacity for a human brain. There is also some evidence to suggest that a brain can be compressed into a far smaller volume than it would naturally assume, and still remain fully functional. Another possibility would be encasing the human brain in a protective artificial shell with its own life-support. This complete shell would then be implanted in the equine skull, or, more likely, the entire skull would be artificial and the brain case would be an integral part of it. This would sidestep the problem of rejection - it would also make the brain much easier to salvage if something went wrong. Continuing this trend, making the entire equine body from synthetic materials -in essence an equine cyborg- might be the best solution, avoiding the need for a host body, and providing much greater control over nerve hook-ups.

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