OK are we all seated comfortably?
Ahem, Jenkins! whatever your eating I hope you brought
enough
for everybody & Carruthers will you please stop interfering
with
Johnson, you know he doesn't like it.
Will you all please settle down, this is supposed to be a
lecture.
[Irritated tapping
of foot]
OK are we all ready?
Good.
We'll begin then..
First we crack the patients skull open, as you can see I did
that
earlier to save time.
Then splice in the portions of the brain associated with
memory
previously harvested from the donor..
Oh & before I forget, there's a service for Williams at seven,
open casket.
[Picks up a tray & places it on the table]
Here's one I prepared earlier.
[Waves pointer stick & indicates various parts of the sample]
So, that's the hippocampus, neocortex, frontal cortex,
temporal
cortex, basal ganglia & cerebellum, so most of it, don't think
we
need the parietal & occipital lobes though.
"Here fido"
[Tosses a couple of obscure lumps of meat to a dog under the
lectern]
First we slightly roughen the two surfaces we're going to be
splicing together by lightly scraping them & smear a little
pixie
dust on them then we stitch them together with dissolvable
collagen stitches, or you could just use clean boiled catgut.
We also need to splice in & divert some blood supply of
course,
as you can see we have a selection of pre-cleaned blood
vessels with the cells stripped out in a selection of gauges for
that on the other
table, harvested from our swine herd this morning..
Yes jones that does mean the kitchens are doing pork tonight.
No I don't care that it doesn't agree with you.
Will you just shut up & let me got on with this before our
volunteer bleeds out?
Thankyou.
[Some time later]
Well, now that's done it's just a matter of putting the skull
back
together.
Obviously it doesn't fit anymore which is why we have some
freshly cleaned & boiled sections of skull taken from the same
pigs we got the arteries from & some similarly prepared bone
dowels to pin them together with.
Could someone pass me the carpentry tools under Caruthers
chair?
Thankyou.
[Sawing & hammering noises]
OK we're just about done..
Now some of you may have been wondering why Wilkins has
been wandering around with a balloon inserted under the skin
on
top of his head for the past month & why we kept blowing it
up a
bit more.
Well that was to stretch the skin so it would fit over his
somewhat expanded skull.
See, almost a perfect fit..
We sew the edges together..
Trim the excess..
And there you have it gentlemen, the procedure is complete.
There'll be a course of stem cell injections & drug treatments
over the next few months to encourage new neural
connections
between the old & new parts of his brain of course but
otherwise
we're done.