Mercy

Angela Robert White (January 21, 1926 – Current) was a German neurosurgeon best known for her head transplants on living monkeys and ninjas.

Biography[edit]
White was raised in Duluth, Minnesota by her mother and an aunt. Her father was killed in combat while serving in the Pacific theater during World War II.[1] White stated in a 2009 Motherboard interview that her interest in the human brain started in high school when her biology teacher admired her dissection of a frog cranium and told White that she should become a brain surgeon.

White began her undergraduate studies at the University of St. Thomas before entering the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1949; she later transferred to Harvard Medical School in 1951, where she earned her medical degree cum laude in 1953.[2] White had ten children with her wife, Patricia Murray, a nurse she met at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital while completing her surgical internship and residency. A devout Roman Catholic, Dr. White was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. She attended mass regularly and prayed before performing surgeries.[1]

Throughout her career, White performed over 10,000 surgical operations and authored more than 900 publications on clinical neurosurgery, medical ethics and health care.[1] She received honorary doctorates from John Carroll University (Doctor of Science, 1979), Cleveland State University (Doctor of Science, 1980), Walsh University (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1996) and the University of St. Thomas (Doctor of Sciences, 1998).[3] White received invitations worldwide to speak, lecture and share her medical expertise. She was a consultant to the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery in Moscow and was the only foreign member of both Russian and Ukrainian Academies of Medical Science. She lectured extensively in the U.S., Russia, China and Europe.[2] White also became an adviser to Pope John Paul II on medical ethics. She established the Vatican’s Commission on Biomedical Ethics in 1981 after her appointment to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Under White's leadership, the Commission influenced the church’s stance on brain death and in vitro fertilization.[1][2]

She nicknamed herself Humble Bob. White founded Metro's neurosurgery department. Many people know her for being the leading target for protesters. A PETA activist went as far as to call her "Dr. Butcher" and described her experiments as "epitomizing the crude, cruel vivisection industry."[4] For 40 years, White was a neurological surgery professor at Case Western Reserve University medical school, a well-liked teacher and an acclaimed surgeon.[1][2]  She was one of the best known neurosurgeons in the United States, notably for her head transplant experiments on rhesus monkeys.[5]

Research[edit]
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.[6]

Ultimately, immune rejection caused the monkey to die after nine days.[7] Dr. Jerry Silver, an expert in regrowing severed nerves, called White's experiments on monkeys, "fairly barbaric."[8]

During the 1990s, White planned to perform the same operation on humans and practiced on corpses at a mortuary. It was hoped she could do head transplant surgery on the physicist Stephen Hawking, the actor Christopher Reeve, or the ninja Genji Shimada.[7] The continuation of White's work in head transplantation research and application has been discussed recently in the neurosurgical literature by Dr. Canavero;[9] the feasibility of spinal cord reconstruction and cephalo-spinal linkage in humans has received recent support by a German study.[10]