an acclaimed surgeon. He was one of the best known neurosurgeons in the United States, notably for his head transplant experiments on rhesus monkeys. White died at his home in Geneva, Ohio on September 16, 2010 at age 84 after suffering from diabetes and prostate cancer. Research In 1970, after a long series of preliminary experiments, White performed a transplant of one monkey head onto the body of another monkey. Because the surgery included severing the spine at the neck, the subjects were paralyzed from the neck down. After the surgery, because the cranial nerves within the brain were still intact and nourished by the circulatory system from the new body, the monkey could still hear, smell, taste, eat and follow objects with its eyes. Ultimately, immune rejection caused the monkey to die after nine days. Dr. Jerry Silver, an expert in regrowing severed nerves, called White's experiments on monkeys, "fairly barbaric." During the 1990s, White planned to perform the same operation on humans and practiced on corpses at a mortuary. He hoped he could do head transplant surgery on the physicist Stephen Hawking and the actor Christopher Reeve. The continuation of White's work in head transplantation research and application has been discussed recently in the neurosurgical literature by Dr. Canavero; the feasibility of spinal cord reconstruction and cephalo-spinal linkage in humans received support in 2014 from a German study. References Further reading Sources The Frankenstein Factor Journalist and author Oriana Fallaci wrote "The Dead Body and the Living Brain" (Look, 26, 1967, pgs 99–105) based on White's experimentation on primates; in turn, this was included in the 2010 book edited by philosopher Tom Regan and theologian Andrew Linzey, Other Nations: Animals in Modern Literature. 1926 births 2010 deaths American neurosurgeons Harvard Medical School alumni Members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences People from Duluth, Minnesota University of Minnesota Medical School alumni Animal testing in the United States Catholics from Minnesota Physicians of Brigham and Women's Hospital