As shocking as the video is, BrainBridge is in some ways overly conventional in its thinking. If you want to keep your brain going, why must it be on a human body? You might instead keep the head alive on a heart lung machine—with an Elon Musk neural implant to let it surf the internet, for as long as it lives. Or consider how doctors hoping to solve the organ shortage have started putting hearts and kidneys from genetically-engineered pigs into patients. If you don’t mind having a tail and four legs, maybe your head could be placed onto a pig’s body.
Let’s take it a step farther. Why does the body “donor” have to be dead at all? Anatomically, it’s possible to have two heads. There are conjoined twins who share one body. If your spouse was diagnosed with a fatal cancer, you would surely welcome his or her head next to yours, if it allowed their mind to live on. After all, the concept of a ‘living donor’ is widely accepted in transplant medicine already and married couples are often said to be joined at the hip. Why not at the neck, too?
If the video is an attempt to take the public’s temperature and gauge reactions, it’s been successful. Since it was posted, thousands of commenters have explored the moral dilemmas posed by the procedure. For instance, if someone becomes brain-dead, say in a motorcycle accident, surgeons can use their heart, liver and kidneys to save multiple other people. Would it be ethical to use a body to help only one person?
“The most common question is ‘Where do you get the bodies from?’, ” says Al-Ghaili. The BrainBridge website answers this question by stating it will source “ethically-grown” unconscious bodies from EctoLife, the artificial womb company that is Al-Ghaili’s previous fiction. He also suggests people undergoing euthanasia because of chronic pain, or even psychiatric problems, could provide an additional supply of brain-dead bodies.
For the most part, the public seems to hate the idea. On Facebook, a pastor, Matthew. W. Tucker, called the concept “disgusting, immoral, unnecessary, pagan, demonic and outright idiotic, they have no idea what they are doing.” A poster from the Middle East apologized for the video, joking that its creator “is one of our psychiatric patients who escaped last night. We urge the public to go about [their] business as everything is under control.”
Al-Ghaili is monitoring the feedback with interest and some concern. “The negativity is huge, to be honest,” he says. “But behind that are the ones who are sending emails. These are people who want to invest, or who are expressing their personal health challenges. These are the ones who matter.”
He says if suitable job applicants appear, the backers of BrainBridge are prepared to fund a small technical feasibility study to see if their idea has legs.