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"Finite belief can never do justice to Truth in any direction. Finite belief limits all things, and would compress Mind, which is infinite, beneath a skull bone."
- 280:9-11, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy (Courtesy Nami Wilson)

Woman's death now homicide

Riverside (California) - A coroner has reclassified as homicide the death of an elderly woman whose head was surgically removed and frozen in hopes that she could some day be brought back to life with a new body.

"We're saying this was an 83-year-old lady that was ill and pushed over the edge by the use of a drug," - Dan Cupido, supervising deputy coroner

Dora Kent's death in December at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation laboratory in Riverside has been under investigation since January. Deputy district attorney Curt Huinman said unspecified charges could be filed.

The woman's original death certificate indicated she died from pneumonia in the absence of a doctor, which prompted the coroner's office to investigate whether she was alive or dead when the procedure to remove her head began.

Authorities seeking to force Alcor to produce the frozen head have been blocked by an injunction.

Cupido said the coroner's office had made its ruling after an autopsy was performed on the woman's headless body. It had based its findings on the opinion of toxicologists and a pathologist contracted by Riverside County.

-NZPA-AP

Wellington, Evening Post, 26 February 1988

(Dr Moneim A. Fadali)

Skull-juggery

If ever I should lose my head
What cranium would I get instead
Were I to pester Dr White
For a replacement overnight?

Could I, perhaps, by any chance,
Book some cerebrum in advance
From White's laboratory shop
In some most advantageous swop?

Remember ere Mirabeau died
The great head-chopper almost cried
Since he could not bequest, he said,
His revolutionary head.

What head of what great head of State
Could I select for a fresh pate?
I'll call it off: I'm too attached
To the dull skull to which I'm matched.

Liam Brophy

Musical Heads

An article by Larry Thompson in The Washington Post (Feb. 14, 1988) entitled The Eerie World of Living Heads describing Dr Robert White's experiments at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, OH, provides a good overview of the work of this prominent experimenter and his colleagues.

"As the anesthesia wore off, the Rhesus monkey opened its eyes and slowly scanned its aseptic surroundings... There was nothing below the head. The body of the monkey with the open eyes had been surgically removed and the head mounted on a support. The plastic tubing was the head's lifeline carrying blood drawn from the body of another monkey."

A 1979 article in The Guardian quoted in Naked Empress (http://www.nzavs.org.nz/materials/naked.html), page 158, observed:

"Under conditions of extreme pain or mortal fear an intact animal will faint or become comatose through loss of blood supply to the brain. But this release from pain and fear is not available to the heads fed by machines or donors. The pump goes on whatever the brain's sensation and whatever the level of pain."

Last May Patrick Kelly, a St Louis attorney, was granted a patent (No. 4,666,425) under the name of "Chet Fleming", that describes a machine for keeping severed heads, human or other species, alive. White has offered to build a system for keeping human heads alive if someone will just donate $5 million.

Thompson points out that the $125,000 price tag for deep freezing of human bodies has caused some cryonic facilities to

"have taken to icing just the head for later grafting onto new bodies in the future. Perhaps someone among the hardy few who are willing to be frozen would be willing to try something more immediate."

Dr Irving Kopin of the National Institute of Neurology, Communicative Disorders and Stroke allows that

"It seems cruel and bizarre to keep an animal or person alive with just its head (but) we do see some odd scientific things that come to reality."

Dr White foresees head transplants becoming as common in the 21st century as heart transplants are today.

(Civitas New York)