Robert Joseph White (January 21, 1926 – September 16, 2010) was an American neurosurgeon and bioethicist best known for his work on hypothermia and his experiments with head transplants on mammals, including living monkeys.
[4] White had ten children with his wife, Patricia Murray, a nurse he met at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital while completing his surgical internship and residency.
[2] Throughout his career, White performed over 10,000 surgical operations and authored more than 900 publications on clinical neurosurgery, medical ethics and health care.
"[7] For 40 years, White was a neurological surgery professor at Case Western Reserve University medical school, a well-liked teacher and an acclaimed surgeon.
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.
[10] The continuation of White's work in head transplantation research and application has been discussed recently in the neurosurgical literature by Italian neurosurgeonSergio Canavero;[11] the feasibility of spinal cord reconstruction and cephalo-spinal linkage in humans received support in 2014 from a German study.