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By Ryan Purcell Gummy bear head transplant, courtesy of flickr user Ella Phillips In a widely circulated Boston Globe editorial this summer, Steven Pinker told bioethicists to “get out of the way” of scientific progress. There is abundant human suffering in the world today, he said, and the last thing we need is a bunch of hand wringing to slow down efforts to attenuate or even eliminate it. The prospect of head transplantation, however, has the potential to make us all a bit more appreciative of our local bioethicists. Even if there were not any technical issues (of which, there are of course plenty ), coming to terms with the muddier personal and societal issues inherent in a procedure such as this could take quite a while. Nevertheless, Dr. Sergio Canavero is not planning to wait around and wants to perform a human head transplantation by the end of 2017. Are we ready? Dr. Jordan Amadio , an Emory neurosurgery resident and co-founder of Neurolaunch , led a discussion on the topi...

by Karen Rommelfanger I recently sat on a panel discussion for an early screening of the movie Self/less . I'm quoted (mostly correctly) with my name (mostly) spelled correctly here . In Self/less , an aging business tycoon with a terminal illess (played by Ben Kingsley ) pays to "shed" his skin for a new, younger, fitter body (played by Ryan Reynolds ). See trailer above. The film, despite the futuristic theme, revisits mundane themes of the Faustian tradeoff or a deal with a devil, ultimately conveying the message that the costs, even for the rich, are too high when trying to cheat death. The title of the movie implies that for the greater good the selfless thing to do is to just die as nature intended. While the film would surely be categorized as science fiction, there are entrepreneurs quite dedicated to making such a possibility a reality. For example, the 2045 Initiative promises, for the starting price tag of $3 million, that your brain can be downloaded and that...