- How did you end up with the team?
- I was recruited because of the microsurgery research I'd been doing.
- When was this?
- About ten years before my transplant.
- Why were you chosen as the first?
- Well, since we all dreamed of receiving the procedure, we wanted to start with team members. I was seventy, one of the oldest, and I wasn't very close to my original family. About the time we had mastered the operation on chimps, I had the luck of being diagnosed with stomach cancer. I was the obvious choice.
- Were you nervous going into it?
- [laughs] Yeah, very much. Scared. But my main emotion was excitement.
- Was the procedure much different back then?
- The main difference was the eyes. I kept my original eyes. Otherwise it was the same for the most part. They completely disassembled my skull. They severed my spine at the top vertebrae. They pulled my brain and eyes out and fit them into my new body.
- Whose body had that been?
- A kid. Sixteen. He had been in a car accident and brought to a hospital we were monitoring. His cranial cavity was a good fit and he was diagnosed as braindead, so we pulled him and used him. They buried my old body, along with his brain, in his grave.
- What was your first memory after the procedure?
- Waking up foggy headed. I thought they had aborted the operation, but then I looked down and saw new hands lying on my stomach. It's a crazy feeling. You know how amputees say how they can still feel whatever has been cut off?
- Phantom limbs.
- Right. I had a similar experience. My brain was still using my old body's map, so I sensed my body as being one of a chubby six-foot-tall seventy-year-old. When I got up and tried to walk in my new scrawny shorter body, I couldn't stand straight and I became nauseous. Of course looking at myself in the mirror was disconcerting. But I quickly forgot my old body and my brain quickly acclimated and each day was less awkward. Within weeks I was a healthy sixteen-year-old. It was the greatest feeling I've ever had. I was given a new life. After years losing the impossible fight against age, after years of constantly becoming weaker and uglier, sicker and sicker, after years of feeling my end get closer and closer, I got to leave old age behind and start again. I got youth again. The ecstasy of that is indescribable.
- What were some of the first things you did?
- I ran. I ran and I let the sun burn my young skin and I savored all I could with my new tastebuds. I had an around-the-clock smile and I was the envy of everyone on the project.
- How did they view you? How did they treat you?
- They were great. They all knew it was me, the same old me. They teased me and they looked at me as the novelty I was, but they were also proud and happy for me.
- And you stayed on at the project?
- Absolutely! The government had given me a new name and identification and I could have left if I had wanted to, but I loved the project and felt indebted to it. We had found the fountain of youth and I was proof of it. I wouldn't have dreamt of leaving, especially when all our work was coming to fruition.