Why all this effort to save the body, when all you really need to save is the brain? That’s the seat of your consciousness, after all. If your body gives out, you could just implant your brain into a new one, cloned from your cells and kept in cold storage until it’s needed. The problem is that our delicate cerebral nerve tissue doesn’t do well after it’s been scarred by surgery. Paraplegics and quadraplegics only have some nerve damage; a brain transferred to a new body would mean all of its connections are severed and reattached. A more achievable goal is to only transplant the sections of the brain that maintain memory, consciousness, and “identity.” A person would wake up in a new body with full control of their motor functions. At the University of Pittsburgh, over a dozen stroke victims have regained control of paralyzed limbs by receiving injections of brain cells — and not even from their own bodies. This means that the brain might be resilient enough to endure some kind of transplantation.
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