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Medicine and the Scientific Revolution

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Over the course of human civilization, science has made great strides. With each new discovery, we have been exposed to findings no one could have ever imagined, as well as revolutionize science and the way we observe everyday life. From the time Galileo made several observations on his telescope and was placed on house arrest until his last days for said findings (Kirschner 2015). Skipping several centuries in 1943, Oswald Avery discovered that DNA was the genetic material of the chromosome (Kirschner 2015). For several generations, men and women have devoted a lifetime to learning about specific fields of study in order to educate their fellow citizens, and defy limits that have been set by their predecessors. Many different surgeries were limited by the technology of its time several hundred years ago, but as years passed and technology became more advanced, today we are capable of anything from heart surgery to brain surgery. With these limits being continuously pushed, Italian neuroscientist Sergio Canavero argues that a head transplant is now within the realm of possibility. As mentioned, surgeries that are performed today would have been impossible to achieve 100 years ago. An open heart surgery would not have been feasible due to the short amount of time that doctors would have to perform the surgery. While head transplants have been the subject of many sci-fi movies, Canavero believes that the complications that would have faced such a procedure no longer exist, with modern medicine and technology. Being the first of its kind, a volunteer was selected for this procedure which is estimated to cost about $13,000,000. This procedure would be able to help and ultimately cure a broad amount of diseases such as muscular atrophy to quadriplegia (Howard 2015). He went on to discuss that the biggest hurdle that deterred anyone from attempting a head transplant was the reattachment of the spinal column. Canavero believes that by making

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