c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Christine Gudorf is professor of religious studies at Florida International University. Her most recent book is”Body, Sex and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Social Ethics.”)

UNDATED _ Some of the most advanced medical techniques bring up the most basic ethical questions.

In the last few months a number of news media have published articles about an American neurosurgeon at Case Western Reserve University who has developed a blood-cooling system that would preserve the brain in a living head long enough for the head to be connected to a donor body: whole body transplants. The technique has been successfully performed on monkeys.

At the moment the technique, aimed quadraplegics whose torso organs are dying, has limited application since it is not yet possible to restore severed spinal cords.

The new technique presents a number of new questions and magnifies some existing questions. One disturbing possibility is that if and when it becomes possible for surgeons to restore severed spinal cords, the technique will undoubtedly command millions from rich people afraid to die. It would theoretically be possible to trade in an”old”body every 20 or 30 years _ the ultimate cosmetic surgery.

From a religious perspective, this is, of course, obscene.

Allowing access to life-extending techniques based on wealth would not only violate every standard of justice, but there would be terrible ecological consequences to a technique preventing individuals from dying in a biosphere needing many fewer humans in order to survive.

Religious spiritualities all over the world would suggest there is something pathological about a fear of death so intense as to justify these lengths. The aging of the brain itself should stand as a symbol of human finitude.

Clearly there is room for debating the ethical wisdom of developing this technique.

But perhaps the most interesting questions are not about ethics, but about identity. When a person receives a donated heart, kidney or liver, or even all three, he or she may initially feel some unease about incorporating a part of another person, though I suspect much of this unease comes from knowledge of donor sacrifice, whether the donor is dead or alive. A few transplant patients have reported experiencing awareness of some kind of alien presence following transplant.

I imagine that a person who receives an entire new body would have a great deal more ambiguity about self-identity. As in present organ transplants, there is no medical reason why the donated torso would have to have the same sex or race or religion as the recipient head.

I cannot begin to fathom the effect on me of waking from surgery to find that my 50-year-old white female head was now attached to the body of a 20-year-old black male basketball player.

What impact would such a change have, not only on how I thought of myself, but on the relationships that define for me who I am? What would it do to my 31-year-old marriage? Would I still feel Catholic? Still feel at home with my French-German family? What would it do to the sense of identity and bodily holiness of an Orthodox Jewish female to wake up in an uncircumcised male body?

We have told ourselves in the West that our personhood is in our heads, in our brains. Most religious people have come to accept this”scientific”understanding of the brain rather than earlier understandings of the heart or the lungs (breath) or even the stomach as the seat of the person. But the fact that it makes sense to understand brain death as personal death does not necessarily mean personhood resides solely in the brain. It certainly does not mean that personhood _ individuality _ is formed without reference to more generalized body experiences.

At some level we intuit this when faced with the prospect of torso transplants.

When my husband’s office staff discussed the technique over lunch last week, they split down the middle. Half felt the technique should not be developed at all, and half felt it should, but cross-sex torso transplants should be forbidden. Cross-race, cross religion, cross-size, cross-age _ all of these were OK. But not cross-sex.

Most interesting in the discussion was the way in which people who considered themselves”non-religious”found themselves, when faced with the possibilities in this technique, talking of their souls and the integrity of these souls.

Religion is not dead in this secular society. But isn’t it interesting that it is sex that so frequently stirs it up?

DEA END GUDORF