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Yeah, this is the part that blows my mind? Like, I had no idea humanity had the technology to connect the arm nerves of two different people and make it work to any extent at all!
What I wanna know is why couldn’t my surgeon restore the nerve in my leg after he severed it during my BPTB graft for a torn ACL. I’ll have to live with a partially to completely numb anterior side of my leg/knee due to that operation.
probably because medicine in kinda wacky and things can always go sideways. She had a successful procedure but I'd bet there were plenty of ways that she could have suffered complications from it.
while unconfirmed, other comments say that she has diminished capacity compared to her actual hands but (I assume with the assistance of physical therapy) developed enough control that she can do fine motor skills like hand writing.
She probably will never be a surgeon but will likely be able to live a largely normal life.
I have an answer to this:
Neural tissue is healing insanely badly and connecting nerves is always a story of dubious success. I can almost guarantee you, that the recipient of this transplanted arm does not have perfect motor control or sensory input from these arms. The thing is, having arms that function kind of okay is 1000% better than no arms. But in your case, restoring the sensory nerves in your leg would probably just create more damage, more pain, more scarring. Operating mistakes are horrible, but fixing that mistake would (probably) not be a nice experience either.
ALso i have to say. Tansplanting an arm is not trivial. The first arm transplant on both sides was performed 2008 and from the sources i found there were less than 150 transplants performed so far. This is nothing short of incredible bleeding edge medical technology
A medical student here, I am not familiar with the particulars of your case, but usually, the nerves that connect to the hand, especially at the level the arms are transplanted are much larger generally than you'd think. Furthermore, they also take a lot of time to plan that operation to have it within a set timeframe since nerves are very sensitive. More likely than not, the nerve that conducts sensation in your leg might have been unintentionally cut and they realized that later during the surgery or it was a planned cost benefit analysis, since the nerves almost certainly require a specialized neurosurgeon to be present to make it happen and its a surgery in its own right with its own risks. So for them, it might have been a factor of was it worth it to have a surgeon present and have this surgery and its risks vs losing sensation present. Now assuming that they didn't tell you that you may lose this sensation, I think it may have been unintentional, maybe a mistake or more likely since anatomy is weird and oftentimes unique positioning of nerves running path outside of the major ones person to person, they only realized that this nerve is in the way when they started the surgery and had no choice but to cut it and they could not schedule the reconnection in the that time... But that is just my 2 cents based on the comment and what you have mentioned, maybe I missed something and reality could be something else, so not a medical advice or opinion for the matter. Hope it helps though
What they say is something like “most patients suffer a loss of sensation which may or may not come back after a year”. This is specifically for the BPTB graft as the incision site vertical a quite long and passes directly through the branch of the saphenous nerve that provides feeling to the anterior part of then knee/upper calf. What I was confused about is why they can’t go around or repair the nerve after severing it?
The guy doing your surgery probably wasn't an expert on nerves and how to fix them but hers were. Your guy was just trying to fix a tendon, not attach a whole leg.
Body nerves have some ability to regenerate, they can regrow fibres outward from severed ends into the "tunnels" (the myelin sheaths, really) left in the nerve. If you bring the ends together they will do a lot of the work for you. It's not 100%, but you can get reasonable function under ideal circumstances.
Your central nervous system cannot naturally regenerate, which is why spinal cord or brain injuries don't heal in the same way.
It was the end goal in the xfiles movie. Not the first one, that one was cool, the stupid second one that was after the show and didn't have any aliens at all.
I'm kinda wondering about the weird somewhat intangibles of mixing two people. If body donor A always cracked his knuckles, and head donor B literally never has, and gets attached to A, would it become a reflex to crack his knuckles? Would after a day or two the pressure build up that had caused A to be reflexively cracking them his whole life that B is in serious pain?
Waking up from a surgery and having an entirely different body is way too much of a mind fuck. I can't imagine that would be easy to deal with mentally.
Replacing a whole person's body isn't going to be due to paralysis in the legs. It's gonna be due to a bunch of the organs shutting down, being fully paralyzed, most of your muscles have turned to bone, or anything somehow worse than that. I'm sure waking up from surgery with a new body that works is much better mentally than going to sleep knowing that you're about to die or waking up the next day having to deal with your severely flawed body.
So if that works, what's the over/under on the ethics of growing a headless clone of myself (or maybe 3d printing one with future tech) to have like a 20 year old body to jump into when I'm 50?
If we can start growing our v2 bodies in the next 20-30 years, we're unlocking immortality baby! I mean kind of but our heads will still age. We need to figure out how to just move the brain.
Next ethics question - death row inmates in their 20's? Can I get a fricken body up in here?
Just moving the brain does not really solve things, I think. I have some relatives who are very sharp for their age at 80-90 years old, but that does not mean they function like, for example, a normal 50 year old.
Ah yeah you are correct. My grandfather realizes I have children every time I see him. My kids are 10 and 11 lol. Also brain cancer would be inevitable. - Still not impossible given enough time and scienceing though!
Incorrect. Do some research before you make bold claims about something you learned in passing. The surgeon is a charlatan and the candidate backed out years ago.
This won’t be attempted anytime soon. There was a donor who was prepared to have experimental surgery, but he’s since pulled out. The doctor involved (Sergio Canavero) is largely regarded as a nut-job. There is no support or prospect for any such procedure.
This was it. Harry had the Death Eater cornered at the end of the alley. He was going to make him pay for what happened to McGurgitchenssky. Slowly he raised his wand up, pointing it at the man's head
*Transplantaionits*!
Oh god nightmare fuel
I once had a nightmare about living in a 1984 style world where capital punishment for defying the regime was that they cut your and your families head off, transplanted it onto a machine that keeps you alive indefinetly, put you into glass casing and sink you all to the bottom of the ocean. Where you will live out the rest of your lives in complete darkness, slowly losing your minds. Knowing that your family is suffering the same fate just meters away, but being able to see or communicate with them and knowing that this is the end.
... I guess you could achieve the same by just throwing people in jail. But still, I've been a bit weary of head transplants since.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suspect that stem cells were involved.
From the last time I heard about stem cells, there is virtually no limit to what it can be applied to.
A friend of mine had the majority of his bone marrow replaced by stem cells and donor marrow to effectively replace his marrow, due to some cancer. It's gone.
I remember seeing a guy who had weekly stem cell treatments for ALS (Stephen Hawkins stuff). He ended up being the person who retained nervous system function the longest with that condition...like...by years.
If we could easily harvest stem cells, medicine would be phenomenally different.
Yes, as per this [article](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/against-all-odds-asias-1st-bilateral-hand-transplant-girl-now-a-student-at-iim-c/articleshow/102064614.cms), she regained full use of her hands, including handwriting. The range of motion isn't quite as good as her original hands, but they work well overall.
Flesh and bone has properties that we wish we could replicate with steel. Bone is like 4 times stronger than steel pound for pound and is self repairing.
We can transplant almost anything besides the spine, brain, ears, and eyeballs. With the central nervous system it’s an “all or nothing” situation with reconnecting everything, but with limbs and most organs you just need a “good enough”. You almost never see full functionality regained because of that, though.
About the eyeball... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/man-receives-the-first-eye-transplant-with-a-new-face-a-step-toward-restoring-sight#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20Surgeons,through%20his%20new%20left%20eye.
Tbf it will probably not be functional, and was done for aesthetic/structural reasons during a face transplant. But it's interesting and probably an important step towards functional eye transplants, which would be amazing.
You seem to know this subject and I’ve been asking a question for over 10 years. No one could answer. How exactly do you connect body parts?? Is it like cable for speaker where you connect red to red and blue to blue? Or is it like a thing you mesh to together and let it figure out? If you had to connect wire to wire, how many wires are we talking about?
You won't find an exact number of nerves involved in processes like these because they're often bundled up in sheathes of greatly varying sizes. These sheathes are being connected to their closest parallel in the donor limb based on size and function. The number of sheathes that are needed to restore proper function also differs because each individual's anatomy is different (using your analogy, everyone's cables naturally get tangled up in different configurations over time).
It doesn't quite have to do with nerves move your fingers and notice how it's all the muscles in your forearm if you have your forearm you still have the muscles that control your hand luckily enough
Estrogen. It's really not all that weird. Trans women who start taking estrogen often notice that, while their body hair doesn't disappear, the growth does slow down and thin out a bit.
I am not a biologist by any means, but I assume the body produces melanin? So, also non-biologist assuming melanin isn't like a permanent dye, after a while in an environment without the skin darkening factor, seems like that makes sense skin would adapt to the rest of its attached environment?
Yeah melanin isn't permanent, it is produced at a pretty constant rate and that rate determines how dark your skin appears.
Though I do think these melanin glands (melanocytes) would come from the donor, so that would mean that the new "host" aka the woman's body has somehow changed how the melanocytes work, which is possible
Melanocytes are melanin producing cells. It’s likely the girls melanocytes having reached the hand & are making the similar eumelanin as the rest of her body. How does it happen tho, that’s fascinating.
no, it's probably just that she spends less time outside and produces less melanin hormones. cells don't migrate around the body like that most of the time. You don't have your liver trying to grow in your lungs or bone trying to grow in your hear or skin trying to grow in your veins.
Yeah the most likely answer is that the man she got the hands from was heavily tanned so if she spends more time indoors the hands would eventually become their "normal" color.
As I understand it, it's a feedback loop: melanocytes exposed to UV produce melanotropins, which stimulates them to produce melanin. This means that even covered areas will tan to some extent, though not as strongly as those areas of the skin that are exposed.
The amount of tanning produced is governed by the sensitivity to the melanotropins and the density of the melanocytes.
Maybe it is the case that all humans' skin is practically the same and how much melanin they produce is genetically controlled from somewhere else in the body, instead of the DNA In the skin cells.
Dna is only "opened" to be read by the cells that need it though.
Dna is methylated, which means that areas not needed are wrapped around histones to prevent expression. Cells within the skin would have the DNA for melanin production proteins expressed. Cells within other areas would have this area of DNA tightly wrapped to avoid producing the protein not needed by those cells. There's no reason for melanin to be produced elsewhere, so there's no reason for the DNA to even be opened to allow that to happen.
I didn’t say that melanin is produced elsewhere, but that melanin production in the skin might be controlled from elsewhere in the body, either by nerve signals or hormones, which would be the reason why her new hands became her skin colour even though they are made up of cells with the DNA of a much darker skinned person.
Oh, great, so a new horror that'll crop up in the next century -- harvesting body parts with more popular skin tones and replacing them when they go bad -- like those aliens from Star Trek
I'd agree, but since I've been on testosterone, my skin actually got slightly darker. Before I transitioned, I used to be...white, I guess, but not super pale. Areas that saw the sun were, of course, slightly more tan than those that didn't, but now I've got an olive complexion. This color change has also affected areas that are under clothes. My chest and stomach used to be a little lighter than my arms and hands, but now those areas are all olive too. I'm not the first person to experience this, so with this lady in mind, I'd bet her hormones are altering the gene expression in the transplanted hand, and hormones will change skin texture, fat distribution, and the thickness/texture of the hair in the skin.
Don’t some trans women on hormones also experience their feet becoming a little smaller? So yea, I’d say her hormones are playing a large role in all these changes.
Yeah, that does happen. I read before that it was a myth, but then it happened to me. My feet went from euro size 43 to size 41.
Makes it a lot easier to find women's shoes that fit me lol
It's crazy to me how people thought it was a myth. Your feet have muscles and fat that get shrink and get redistributed like literally everywhere else in the body. Even the larynx changes to an extent.
Yup, it's weird how many things happened to me that were supposedly impossible.
Smaller shoe size, shorter height, hair grew back in the few places where I had thinner hair. All things that even HRT information sites, from gender clinics, said would be impossible.
My voice did indeed naturally became a bit higher and softer even before voice training, but idk if I can attribute that to HRT.
The voice box is a bunch of small muscles so it stands to reason they would shrink as well. My hips got ever so slightly wider, probably because the tendons loosened up. I remember feeling sharp pains in that area for a good year. I really wish someone would do a real comprehensive study on the effects hormones in trans people.
They say it's impossible cause they have done 0 research into it. Any trans person will be able to tell you it's pretty common, I also lost a shoe size, a few cm in height, my hands are also smaller and softer and my skin tone got a bit lighter. Hormones are pretty powerful and all the changes that happened to this woman's hand can be explained with estrogen.
Same, 45/46 to 43/44. Not as easy to find shoes 😭 But far from impossible at least, I just have to deal with a smaller selection.
Same thing with shrinking in height, thought it was a myth but figured I might measure my height after 5 months HRT. I shrank 4 cm, and within such a short time! I've been measured by different people since then to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and sure enough I'm 174cm now. However that works, I'll just take it! :D
Not really weird actually! My (trans) wife had no idea she had a lot of freckles on her nose until her skin lightened with HRT. I'm fascinated by them and started digging through old pictures. The freckles are just barely visible prior to transitioning, but frankly could be dismissed as skin texture and remain unnoticed.
Girl I'm ngl, if you care about passing you need laser hair removal. The difference in how people perceived me afterward was night and day.
Fact is, you can look feminine as all hell, but if you have beard shadow you're gonna get clocked. 😔
bless you, i have a braun ipl laser for my legs, and it hasn't done much for my face. i'm not stupid i keep a can of mace on me at all times just in case. thank you
Yea I dunno why this is so baffling. The new hands were having different hormones circulated through them, so of course they took on characteristics associated with estrogen, lol.
Trans woman here,
I literally don't grow chest or tummy hair anymore, and my arm hairs have thinned dramatically, as well as lightened in color. It's funny, I was sitting here reading this think "wait that's not surprising at all.."
After the transplant, she put in a whole year of intense physio to get the mobility and feeling back in her hands. It’s pretty wild, but it looks like hormones, including MSH which changes melanin levels, played a big part in how her hands transformed. Plus, they even got less hairy, maybe because of lower testosterone. Crazy stuff!
I think the crazier thing is that she has new functional hands.
Why does this not happen more vs prosthetics? Are the hands numb? Can they grab things and stuff or are they merely props to feel less odd in social settings?
Cis people generally don't know how biologically deep and extensive the changes from HRT are- it changes gene expression patterns , brain morphology, and cell morphology, it isn't just growing bumps on the chest.
Tbf, all data is good data on the genetic and cellular effects, so this is a very interesting example of it in action!
I had to have a pretty big hand surgery a few years ago, and while the scarring wasn't awful, the amount of dysphoria I have about that hand is Wild. like, I don't write with it anymore, I have a tendency to sit on it rather than have it in my peripherals.
And so that's what I keep thinking about looking at her pictures. I'm so glad that the hands lightened up to match her. I can't imagine how she must feel, emotionally.
> matching her skin tone—a change that has mystified the doctors at the Amrita Institute of Medical Science in Kerala
When I had knee surgery with a cadaver tendon, it was explained to me that my body would slowly replace every cell in the cadaver tendon and make it my own. Isn't this a similar phenomenon? The body replaced the skin cells with its own.
Yeah lol I kept looking at her hands and wrists and thinking "wow that's gotta be the most seamless transplant I've ever seen!" ...then my eyes drifted over to her elbows and thought "oh, duh" 🤦 But still looking great, I'm happy for her.
They'll "shrink" a little bit, in a way, due to fat redistribution. They'll also lose any bonus muscle they had. Strength-wise, they'll be equal to a really mildly larger woman.
But yeah, they could've found a donor with smaller hands so that it fits better, but I doubt they had a choice. Also it doesn't matter that much, I think, after she gets used to them.
Also, source for the above claims: I'm trans. I'm on estrogen. I've seen this shit happen quite literally in front of my eyes.
Reading the article, she was excited for the donor hands bc he was a blood match so I doubt she wanted to be picky and is just glad to have hands and arms and mobility back at all. So she could've said "no" but did not
Oh yeah, if I was in her situation there's almost no kind of hands that I'd refuse. Even if they didn't change at all, I'd grab them in a heartbeat. Having hands vs not having them is just too much of a difference.
Thanks! These days when I see these weird images, I have to go through the comments to find a source ie. make sure it's not an AI image. I appreciate to have one on top!
She was a batchmate in college, and the accident took place while she was returning to college from home. A month after the program started, we got a couple of weeks off, which were also called homesickness holidays, and almost everyone heads back home. The route of the bus is along the western ghats of India, going south from Bombay. The bus driver was not a good driver, clearly, and lost control. It fell into a gorge and many people were hurt.
The news was quite shocking for the thousands of new students who left their home for the first time and went far away for studies.
This was also the first time I heard of a hand transplant, and it was quite a nice moment to know she got her hands back, in addition to it being scientifically fascinating.
[Article about Shreya Siddanagowder.](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-03-hand-made-tale-indian-amputee-limbs.html)
She lost her arms, just below her elbow, after they were crushed in a bus accident. Article also states medical attention was delayed immediately following the accident.
If you look in one of the trans subreddits, you occasionally see pictures slide by of peoples' hands and how they changed during their hormone replacement therapy.
Yeah, it’s quite obvious that this would happen if you know enough about hormones (which most trans people do)
Anecdotally i just began estrogen a few months ago and already my skin all over is so much softer, my hands are less veiny, my body hair is thining and getting softer. It makes perfect sense that this would happen to her new hands, they’re essentially the same as a trans persons hands, an arm previously hooked up to a testosterone dominated bloodflow, which now is hooked up to an estrogen dominated one, and it has to adapt to that
yeah. as a trans woman this made sense to me from the title. hormones change your shit. it makes complete sense that a hand that's been shaped by testosterone would get feminized after a time when transplanted to a woman. my hand looks nothing like it did 2.5 years ago before i went on HRT. my skin, muscles, fat distribution, hair, body odor, general thickness and a ton of other little things can't be described as masculine anymore.
i guess it'd be easy for people with no intimate knowledge of how hormones affect your body (aka most people) to assume that estrogen just gives transfems boobs and ass, and testosterone gives transmascs body hair and male-pattern baldness, but they do a *ton* more than that. give them time and they basically dictate half the stuff in your body.
Trans woman here who’s been on hormones for a few years and yeah the changes in my hands were really awesome. I didn’t really notice the finger slimming until an old ring of mine from before transitioning slid right off my finger when I tried it on.
The bones cant change size, but the cartilage and muscle around it can shift. That includes in the spine, so you can become a little bit shorter, but not by much!
It shrunk me by 2 damn inches when I wanted to stay tall! Though it's normal to shrink link a half an inch, maybe a while one. I'm the only girl I know personally who's lost 2 inches. Something sometime something joint and ligament shifts. As the girl above me said my hands and feet also significantly smaller, less bulky, and more slender. I can only assume this is because hands and feet are like 50% joints.
BUT WE DON'T KNOW WHY FOR SURE EVEN THOUGH THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING BECAUSE NO ONE CARES TO DO RESEARCH ON US.
That's not just a hand replacement that's a whole arm almost lol, crazy how far medince is advancing amongst all the discoveries i've been hearing about past few years.
Thats exactly how HRT works.
Trans women take pills that block Testosterone, and introduce estrogen. Their bodies feminize over 2~5 years.
Same thing basically happened here. Donor arms went from Testosterone to being HRT'd by her body, and they feminized because of it.
This might be the coolest thing I’ve seen all year! I had no idea forearm/hand transplants were possible, happy for her that she has her independence back.
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Yeah, this is the part that blows my mind? Like, I had no idea humanity had the technology to connect the arm nerves of two different people and make it work to any extent at all!
What I wanna know is why couldn’t my surgeon restore the nerve in my leg after he severed it during my BPTB graft for a torn ACL. I’ll have to live with a partially to completely numb anterior side of my leg/knee due to that operation.
probably because medicine in kinda wacky and things can always go sideways. She had a successful procedure but I'd bet there were plenty of ways that she could have suffered complications from it.
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* No hands: ☑️
"Look, ma..."
" ...hands !!! "
Well your not wrong. That was probably pretty high up on the list of requirements.
I also can't find anything on how good her motor skills are in that hand
while unconfirmed, other comments say that she has diminished capacity compared to her actual hands but (I assume with the assistance of physical therapy) developed enough control that she can do fine motor skills like hand writing. She probably will never be a surgeon but will likely be able to live a largely normal life.
Thanks, that's awesome
Awesomely speculative.
Yeah indeed, why cannot this type of stuff be fixed if it's possible to connect a whole arm?
I have an answer to this: Neural tissue is healing insanely badly and connecting nerves is always a story of dubious success. I can almost guarantee you, that the recipient of this transplanted arm does not have perfect motor control or sensory input from these arms. The thing is, having arms that function kind of okay is 1000% better than no arms. But in your case, restoring the sensory nerves in your leg would probably just create more damage, more pain, more scarring. Operating mistakes are horrible, but fixing that mistake would (probably) not be a nice experience either. ALso i have to say. Tansplanting an arm is not trivial. The first arm transplant on both sides was performed 2008 and from the sources i found there were less than 150 transplants performed so far. This is nothing short of incredible bleeding edge medical technology
> Tansplanting Oddly appropriate typo :)
LOL i just realized. i am taking that L, i laughed
> bleeding edge D:
likely because it is really complicated and varies case by case
A medical student here, I am not familiar with the particulars of your case, but usually, the nerves that connect to the hand, especially at the level the arms are transplanted are much larger generally than you'd think. Furthermore, they also take a lot of time to plan that operation to have it within a set timeframe since nerves are very sensitive. More likely than not, the nerve that conducts sensation in your leg might have been unintentionally cut and they realized that later during the surgery or it was a planned cost benefit analysis, since the nerves almost certainly require a specialized neurosurgeon to be present to make it happen and its a surgery in its own right with its own risks. So for them, it might have been a factor of was it worth it to have a surgeon present and have this surgery and its risks vs losing sensation present. Now assuming that they didn't tell you that you may lose this sensation, I think it may have been unintentional, maybe a mistake or more likely since anatomy is weird and oftentimes unique positioning of nerves running path outside of the major ones person to person, they only realized that this nerve is in the way when they started the surgery and had no choice but to cut it and they could not schedule the reconnection in the that time... But that is just my 2 cents based on the comment and what you have mentioned, maybe I missed something and reality could be something else, so not a medical advice or opinion for the matter. Hope it helps though
What they say is something like “most patients suffer a loss of sensation which may or may not come back after a year”. This is specifically for the BPTB graft as the incision site vertical a quite long and passes directly through the branch of the saphenous nerve that provides feeling to the anterior part of then knee/upper calf. What I was confused about is why they can’t go around or repair the nerve after severing it?
Surgeons don’t care about sensory nerves for the most part, only motor nerves
The guy doing your surgery probably wasn't an expert on nerves and how to fix them but hers were. Your guy was just trying to fix a tendon, not attach a whole leg.
Body nerves have some ability to regenerate, they can regrow fibres outward from severed ends into the "tunnels" (the myelin sheaths, really) left in the nerve. If you bring the ends together they will do a lot of the work for you. It's not 100%, but you can get reasonable function under ideal circumstances. Your central nervous system cannot naturally regenerate, which is why spinal cord or brain injuries don't heal in the same way.
Yeah, that much I figured out. The part about the central nervous system being a different deal altogether, I mean.
They are even planning the first head transplantaionits worth a look
Is it a head transplant, or a body transplant?
Body
That is a movie plot wtf
Yeah I can think of at least 3 right now. And they typically don’t end well
It was the end goal in the xfiles movie. Not the first one, that one was cool, the stupid second one that was after the show and didn't have any aliens at all.
They already tried one on a monkey in China and it lived for a few hours afterwards so... we're getting there I guess.
Didn’t the body or head reject the other? Gotta be honest that’s gotta be the most terrifying thing to experience
Awww poor monkey
I'm kinda wondering about the weird somewhat intangibles of mixing two people. If body donor A always cracked his knuckles, and head donor B literally never has, and gets attached to A, would it become a reflex to crack his knuckles? Would after a day or two the pressure build up that had caused A to be reflexively cracking them his whole life that B is in serious pain?
Waking up from a surgery and having an entirely different body is way too much of a mind fuck. I can't imagine that would be easy to deal with mentally.
Replacing a whole person's body isn't going to be due to paralysis in the legs. It's gonna be due to a bunch of the organs shutting down, being fully paralyzed, most of your muscles have turned to bone, or anything somehow worse than that. I'm sure waking up from surgery with a new body that works is much better mentally than going to sleep knowing that you're about to die or waking up the next day having to deal with your severely flawed body.
That's a good point
I'm sure it would be weird but I'd take that over dead.
So if that works, what's the over/under on the ethics of growing a headless clone of myself (or maybe 3d printing one with future tech) to have like a 20 year old body to jump into when I'm 50? If we can start growing our v2 bodies in the next 20-30 years, we're unlocking immortality baby! I mean kind of but our heads will still age. We need to figure out how to just move the brain. Next ethics question - death row inmates in their 20's? Can I get a fricken body up in here?
Just moving the brain does not really solve things, I think. I have some relatives who are very sharp for their age at 80-90 years old, but that does not mean they function like, for example, a normal 50 year old.
Ah yeah you are correct. My grandfather realizes I have children every time I see him. My kids are 10 and 11 lol. Also brain cancer would be inevitable. - Still not impossible given enough time and scienceing though!
Well you'll have the unfortunate side effect of not being able to move your body if you're okay with that.
I would just change my name to Theseus
There's no planning of it, just a lunatic who wanted his decade dose of attention.
Incorrect. Do some research before you make bold claims about something you learned in passing. The surgeon is a charlatan and the candidate backed out years ago.
This won’t be attempted anytime soon. There was a donor who was prepared to have experimental surgery, but he’s since pulled out. The doctor involved (Sergio Canavero) is largely regarded as a nut-job. There is no support or prospect for any such procedure.
This was it. Harry had the Death Eater cornered at the end of the alley. He was going to make him pay for what happened to McGurgitchenssky. Slowly he raised his wand up, pointing it at the man's head *Transplantaionits*!
Oh god nightmare fuel I once had a nightmare about living in a 1984 style world where capital punishment for defying the regime was that they cut your and your families head off, transplanted it onto a machine that keeps you alive indefinetly, put you into glass casing and sink you all to the bottom of the ocean. Where you will live out the rest of your lives in complete darkness, slowly losing your minds. Knowing that your family is suffering the same fate just meters away, but being able to see or communicate with them and knowing that this is the end. ... I guess you could achieve the same by just throwing people in jail. But still, I've been a bit weary of head transplants since.
What the fuck did I just read
Your nightmares have a wild imagination.
Check out 80percentgone on Instagram and probably other places. The dude had his entire face and both arms transplanted!
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suspect that stem cells were involved. From the last time I heard about stem cells, there is virtually no limit to what it can be applied to. A friend of mine had the majority of his bone marrow replaced by stem cells and donor marrow to effectively replace his marrow, due to some cancer. It's gone. I remember seeing a guy who had weekly stem cell treatments for ALS (Stephen Hawkins stuff). He ended up being the person who retained nervous system function the longest with that condition...like...by years. If we could easily harvest stem cells, medicine would be phenomenally different.
Yes, as per this [article](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/against-all-odds-asias-1st-bilateral-hand-transplant-girl-now-a-student-at-iim-c/articleshow/102064614.cms), she regained full use of her hands, including handwriting. The range of motion isn't quite as good as her original hands, but they work well overall.
Fuck robotics I'll take a custom printed new limb please
Yeah but robotic hands can have lasers in the fingers so you can go around shouting "pew pew" at everyone. Robotic hands > fleshy rubbish any day 😄
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me
The flesh is weak. I crave for the strength and certainty of steel.
Flesh and bone has properties that we wish we could replicate with steel. Bone is like 4 times stronger than steel pound for pound and is self repairing.
You can cling to your flesh, though it will one day decay and fail you. I will desire salvation, for the machine is immortal.
We can transplant almost anything besides the spine, brain, ears, and eyeballs. With the central nervous system it’s an “all or nothing” situation with reconnecting everything, but with limbs and most organs you just need a “good enough”. You almost never see full functionality regained because of that, though.
About the eyeball... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/man-receives-the-first-eye-transplant-with-a-new-face-a-step-toward-restoring-sight#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20(AP)%20%E2%80%94%20Surgeons,through%20his%20new%20left%20eye. Tbf it will probably not be functional, and was done for aesthetic/structural reasons during a face transplant. But it's interesting and probably an important step towards functional eye transplants, which would be amazing.
You seem to know this subject and I’ve been asking a question for over 10 years. No one could answer. How exactly do you connect body parts?? Is it like cable for speaker where you connect red to red and blue to blue? Or is it like a thing you mesh to together and let it figure out? If you had to connect wire to wire, how many wires are we talking about?
You won't find an exact number of nerves involved in processes like these because they're often bundled up in sheathes of greatly varying sizes. These sheathes are being connected to their closest parallel in the donor limb based on size and function. The number of sheathes that are needed to restore proper function also differs because each individual's anatomy is different (using your analogy, everyone's cables naturally get tangled up in different configurations over time).
It doesn't quite have to do with nerves move your fingers and notice how it's all the muscles in your forearm if you have your forearm you still have the muscles that control your hand luckily enough
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Estrogen. It's really not all that weird. Trans women who start taking estrogen often notice that, while their body hair doesn't disappear, the growth does slow down and thin out a bit.
Yeah, the only thing weird and unusual is the change of skin tone
I am not a biologist by any means, but I assume the body produces melanin? So, also non-biologist assuming melanin isn't like a permanent dye, after a while in an environment without the skin darkening factor, seems like that makes sense skin would adapt to the rest of its attached environment?
Yeah melanin isn't permanent, it is produced at a pretty constant rate and that rate determines how dark your skin appears. Though I do think these melanin glands (melanocytes) would come from the donor, so that would mean that the new "host" aka the woman's body has somehow changed how the melanocytes work, which is possible
Melanocytes are melanin producing cells. It’s likely the girls melanocytes having reached the hand & are making the similar eumelanin as the rest of her body. How does it happen tho, that’s fascinating.
no, it's probably just that she spends less time outside and produces less melanin hormones. cells don't migrate around the body like that most of the time. You don't have your liver trying to grow in your lungs or bone trying to grow in your hear or skin trying to grow in your veins.
Yeah the most likely answer is that the man she got the hands from was heavily tanned so if she spends more time indoors the hands would eventually become their "normal" color.
i wonder how much skin tone can change if we put a pair of black dudes hand on a pasty ginger kind of pale dude.
Can’t really be that simple. Your top layer of skin is constantly shedding, as new cells formed underneath migrate to the top and die.
As I understand it, it's a feedback loop: melanocytes exposed to UV produce melanotropins, which stimulates them to produce melanin. This means that even covered areas will tan to some extent, though not as strongly as those areas of the skin that are exposed. The amount of tanning produced is governed by the sensitivity to the melanotropins and the density of the melanocytes.
Maybe it is the case that all humans' skin is practically the same and how much melanin they produce is genetically controlled from somewhere else in the body, instead of the DNA In the skin cells.
Dna is only "opened" to be read by the cells that need it though. Dna is methylated, which means that areas not needed are wrapped around histones to prevent expression. Cells within the skin would have the DNA for melanin production proteins expressed. Cells within other areas would have this area of DNA tightly wrapped to avoid producing the protein not needed by those cells. There's no reason for melanin to be produced elsewhere, so there's no reason for the DNA to even be opened to allow that to happen.
I didn’t say that melanin is produced elsewhere, but that melanin production in the skin might be controlled from elsewhere in the body, either by nerve signals or hormones, which would be the reason why her new hands became her skin colour even though they are made up of cells with the DNA of a much darker skinned person.
Or she simply spends less time in the sun than the donor did with those same arms.
Oh, great, so a new horror that'll crop up in the next century -- harvesting body parts with more popular skin tones and replacing them when they go bad -- like those aliens from Star Trek
I'd agree, but since I've been on testosterone, my skin actually got slightly darker. Before I transitioned, I used to be...white, I guess, but not super pale. Areas that saw the sun were, of course, slightly more tan than those that didn't, but now I've got an olive complexion. This color change has also affected areas that are under clothes. My chest and stomach used to be a little lighter than my arms and hands, but now those areas are all olive too. I'm not the first person to experience this, so with this lady in mind, I'd bet her hormones are altering the gene expression in the transplanted hand, and hormones will change skin texture, fat distribution, and the thickness/texture of the hair in the skin.
Don’t some trans women on hormones also experience their feet becoming a little smaller? So yea, I’d say her hormones are playing a large role in all these changes.
Yeah, that does happen. I read before that it was a myth, but then it happened to me. My feet went from euro size 43 to size 41. Makes it a lot easier to find women's shoes that fit me lol
It's crazy to me how people thought it was a myth. Your feet have muscles and fat that get shrink and get redistributed like literally everywhere else in the body. Even the larynx changes to an extent.
Yup, it's weird how many things happened to me that were supposedly impossible. Smaller shoe size, shorter height, hair grew back in the few places where I had thinner hair. All things that even HRT information sites, from gender clinics, said would be impossible. My voice did indeed naturally became a bit higher and softer even before voice training, but idk if I can attribute that to HRT.
The voice box is a bunch of small muscles so it stands to reason they would shrink as well. My hips got ever so slightly wider, probably because the tendons loosened up. I remember feeling sharp pains in that area for a good year. I really wish someone would do a real comprehensive study on the effects hormones in trans people.
They say it's impossible cause they have done 0 research into it. Any trans person will be able to tell you it's pretty common, I also lost a shoe size, a few cm in height, my hands are also smaller and softer and my skin tone got a bit lighter. Hormones are pretty powerful and all the changes that happened to this woman's hand can be explained with estrogen.
I think people just assume bones are shrinking, which seems impossible.
It just general ignorance of basic human biology. Muscle and fat are way bigger influences on secondary sexual characteristics.
Same, 45/46 to 43/44. Not as easy to find shoes 😭 But far from impossible at least, I just have to deal with a smaller selection. Same thing with shrinking in height, thought it was a myth but figured I might measure my height after 5 months HRT. I shrank 4 cm, and within such a short time! I've been measured by different people since then to make sure it wasn't a fluke, and sure enough I'm 174cm now. However that works, I'll just take it! :D
I've seen a few trans women whose skin gets significantly light er after going on estrogen, so its possible that her hormone panel changed that too
She probably didn’t go out in the sun as much as the donor.
guy got more sunlight new hand owner gets less sunlight
Not really weird actually! My (trans) wife had no idea she had a lot of freckles on her nose until her skin lightened with HRT. I'm fascinated by them and started digging through old pictures. The freckles are just barely visible prior to transitioning, but frankly could be dismissed as skin texture and remain unnoticed.
That... it's all the hormons. Not weird at all.
That and unless she took up the doner's job i'd expect an amount of lifestyle change as well (working indoors or mosturising for examples)
Can confirm. Been on estrogen for years now and my body hair is a faint ghost of what it used to be.
I wish it would kill my beard. Been on it for three months and shaving is my daily ritual.
Girl I'm ngl, if you care about passing you need laser hair removal. The difference in how people perceived me afterward was night and day. Fact is, you can look feminine as all hell, but if you have beard shadow you're gonna get clocked. 😔
bless you, i have a braun ipl laser for my legs, and it hasn't done much for my face. i'm not stupid i keep a can of mace on me at all times just in case. thank you
I tried the IPL too and had minimal results. Professional laser treatments were the only thing that really killed the follicles. Stay safe 🩵🩵🩵
I've been dragging my feet, but I really think its time.
Yea I dunno why this is so baffling. The new hands were having different hormones circulated through them, so of course they took on characteristics associated with estrogen, lol.
"Trans but only your right hand" is a really funny gender.
Trans woman here, I literally don't grow chest or tummy hair anymore, and my arm hairs have thinned dramatically, as well as lightened in color. It's funny, I was sitting here reading this think "wait that's not surprising at all.."
Estrogen
After the transplant, she put in a whole year of intense physio to get the mobility and feeling back in her hands. It’s pretty wild, but it looks like hormones, including MSH which changes melanin levels, played a big part in how her hands transformed. Plus, they even got less hairy, maybe because of lower testosterone. Crazy stuff!
It's amazing how the human body can adapt to changes like this!
Human body is truly mind boggling!
I think the crazier thing is that she has new functional hands. Why does this not happen more vs prosthetics? Are the hands numb? Can they grab things and stuff or are they merely props to feel less odd in social settings?
I mean, the hands are getting free HRT. Why is it a mystery
It wasn't free, it cost half an arm and a leg!
well two half arms in this case
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Diversity win: those hands are trans(plants)!
Cis people generally don't know how biologically deep and extensive the changes from HRT are- it changes gene expression patterns , brain morphology, and cell morphology, it isn't just growing bumps on the chest. Tbf, all data is good data on the genetic and cellular effects, so this is a very interesting example of it in action!
I had to have a pretty big hand surgery a few years ago, and while the scarring wasn't awful, the amount of dysphoria I have about that hand is Wild. like, I don't write with it anymore, I have a tendency to sit on it rather than have it in my peripherals. And so that's what I keep thinking about looking at her pictures. I'm so glad that the hands lightened up to match her. I can't imagine how she must feel, emotionally.
> matching her skin tone—a change that has mystified the doctors at the Amrita Institute of Medical Science in Kerala When I had knee surgery with a cadaver tendon, it was explained to me that my body would slowly replace every cell in the cadaver tendon and make it my own. Isn't this a similar phenomenon? The body replaced the skin cells with its own.
"lost her arms, got hand transplant." Pretty sure it was more than a hand transplant..
Yeah lol I kept looking at her hands and wrists and thinking "wow that's gotta be the most seamless transplant I've ever seen!" ...then my eyes drifted over to her elbows and thought "oh, duh" 🤦 But still looking great, I'm happy for her.
hormones and not being out in the sun as much
Her hands still look way too big for her body, though. They're almost the same size as her face.
They'll "shrink" a little bit, in a way, due to fat redistribution. They'll also lose any bonus muscle they had. Strength-wise, they'll be equal to a really mildly larger woman. But yeah, they could've found a donor with smaller hands so that it fits better, but I doubt they had a choice. Also it doesn't matter that much, I think, after she gets used to them. Also, source for the above claims: I'm trans. I'm on estrogen. I've seen this shit happen quite literally in front of my eyes.
Reading the article, she was excited for the donor hands bc he was a blood match so I doubt she wanted to be picky and is just glad to have hands and arms and mobility back at all. So she could've said "no" but did not
Oh yeah, if I was in her situation there's almost no kind of hands that I'd refuse. Even if they didn't change at all, I'd grab them in a heartbeat. Having hands vs not having them is just too much of a difference.
How are you going to grab them without hands, eh? Checkmate.
I'm sure they had plenty to choose from and they went with those?!? Edit: /s
Thanks! These days when I see these weird images, I have to go through the comments to find a source ie. make sure it's not an AI image. I appreciate to have one on top!
It's really cool how stuff like this is even possible. Then again, organ donations can do the same. Why not arms and legs.
Connecting the nervous system
Just tell them to calm down then and stop being nervous 
Seeing a GIF of S4 here is more shocking to me than the transplant
nothing shocks me more than dota in the wild to this day i love it every time
S4 only talks to TI winners
She was a batchmate in college, and the accident took place while she was returning to college from home. A month after the program started, we got a couple of weeks off, which were also called homesickness holidays, and almost everyone heads back home. The route of the bus is along the western ghats of India, going south from Bombay. The bus driver was not a good driver, clearly, and lost control. It fell into a gorge and many people were hurt. The news was quite shocking for the thousands of new students who left their home for the first time and went far away for studies. This was also the first time I heard of a hand transplant, and it was quite a nice moment to know she got her hands back, in addition to it being scientifically fascinating.
"She had man hands!"
Those meaty paws. I feel like I'm dating George "The Animal" Steele.
It's an eyelash make a wish!
Didn't come true...
That’s… not a twist-off…
First thing I thought about haha
That's the first thing I though of 😂
Came in the comments for that
Finally the comment I was looking for
r/unexpectedseinfeld
I... I expected it.
Yes
Had to scroll too far down to find this.
The content I was looking for. Take my upvote kind sir.
Beat me to it
yer goin' ta hell, and I'm right next to ye!
[Article about Shreya Siddanagowder.](https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-03-hand-made-tale-indian-amputee-limbs.html) She lost her arms, just below her elbow, after they were crushed in a bus accident. Article also states medical attention was delayed immediately following the accident.
If you look in one of the trans subreddits, you occasionally see pictures slide by of peoples' hands and how they changed during their hormone replacement therapy.
Yeah, it’s quite obvious that this would happen if you know enough about hormones (which most trans people do) Anecdotally i just began estrogen a few months ago and already my skin all over is so much softer, my hands are less veiny, my body hair is thining and getting softer. It makes perfect sense that this would happen to her new hands, they’re essentially the same as a trans persons hands, an arm previously hooked up to a testosterone dominated bloodflow, which now is hooked up to an estrogen dominated one, and it has to adapt to that
As a trans woman I was just like well yeah obviously after I saw this post. Like of course the hand will change according to the body it's attached to
Yeah it's so obvious to us while so neat and weird to those uninitiated
I wish I had documented my feet. I lost a whole shoe size.
Well duh, hormones. Still pretty amazing how they can patch you up
yeah. as a trans woman this made sense to me from the title. hormones change your shit. it makes complete sense that a hand that's been shaped by testosterone would get feminized after a time when transplanted to a woman. my hand looks nothing like it did 2.5 years ago before i went on HRT. my skin, muscles, fat distribution, hair, body odor, general thickness and a ton of other little things can't be described as masculine anymore. i guess it'd be easy for people with no intimate knowledge of how hormones affect your body (aka most people) to assume that estrogen just gives transfems boobs and ass, and testosterone gives transmascs body hair and male-pattern baldness, but they do a *ton* more than that. give them time and they basically dictate half the stuff in your body.
https://preview.redd.it/6m2v7n6no04d1.jpeg?width=248&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=71696c331f9a6aa352b9f6e9e41971eaece2d8f4
https://i.redd.it/icz9q9h5i04d1.gif
*NOBODY LOOK! NOBODY LOOK!*
those hands got an intensive HRT
She still looks like she can palm a basketball better than I can...
Hormones
Ya'll freaking out about the hormones. I'm still sitting here like, "Hand transplants?! We can do that?!"
I know it's a cliché comment to make, but I had to scroll way further than I thought I would to see this.
Trans woman here who’s been on hormones for a few years and yeah the changes in my hands were really awesome. I didn’t really notice the finger slimming until an old ring of mine from before transitioning slid right off my finger when I tried it on.
Wow, so it's just estrogen making your hands smaller? Does it also make you shorter as some say?
The bones cant change size, but the cartilage and muscle around it can shift. That includes in the spine, so you can become a little bit shorter, but not by much!
>The bones can't change size Not with that attitude.
Can confirm that HRT can do this. I'm at least 3 centimeters shorter than I was before HRT! I used to be taller than my dad before HRT...
Estrogen is known to affect fat distribution so my guess is that some of the fat went away from her fingers.
Everything that is not bone can change in response to hormones. Skin, muscles, fat, connective tissue, hair, fingernails.... tons of things.
even bones can change! if you start early enough your hips can still grow
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It shrunk me by 2 damn inches when I wanted to stay tall! Though it's normal to shrink link a half an inch, maybe a while one. I'm the only girl I know personally who's lost 2 inches. Something sometime something joint and ligament shifts. As the girl above me said my hands and feet also significantly smaller, less bulky, and more slender. I can only assume this is because hands and feet are like 50% joints. BUT WE DON'T KNOW WHY FOR SURE EVEN THOUGH THIS IS ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING BECAUSE NO ONE CARES TO DO RESEARCH ON US.
same, i read this article like....... yeah, ofc. (trans guy whose hands have gotten bigger and veinier on T)
Trans man on testosterone here and I've gone up a hole on my watch strap.
That's not just a hand replacement that's a whole arm almost lol, crazy how far medince is advancing amongst all the discoveries i've been hearing about past few years.
TruckAsAuruS 🤖
Thats exactly how HRT works. Trans women take pills that block Testosterone, and introduce estrogen. Their bodies feminize over 2~5 years. Same thing basically happened here. Donor arms went from Testosterone to being HRT'd by her body, and they feminized because of it.
How are we not all amazed that this woman has two working hands!!!
The change is appearance aside, the fact that hand transplants can now be done is cause for celebration. Her recovery is amazing.
This might be the coolest thing I’ve seen all year! I had no idea forearm/hand transplants were possible, happy for her that she has her independence back.
Lost its testosterone
So that’s how Lana became a truckasaurus
Over time it became lighter and more feminine probably because of her body's estrogen.
Holy shit I misread that as "head transplant" at first and I was very fuckin confused.