Who wants to live forever?

In the mid-1960s, a neurosurgeon named Robert White began experimenting with "isolated brain preparations": a living brain taken out of one animal, hooked up to another animal's circulatory system.

[...]

Could there come a day when people whose bodies are succumbing to fatal diseases will simply get a new body and add decades to their lives--albeit, to quote White, as a head on a pillow? There could. Not only that, but with progress in repairing spinal nerves, surgeons may one day be able to reattach spinal nerves, meaning these heads could get up off their pillows and begin to move and control their new bodies. There's no reason to think it couldn't happen one day.

And few reasons to think it will. Insurance companies are unlikely to ever cover such an expensive operation, which would put this particular form of life extension out of reach of anyone but the very rich. ...

From Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach