Get to know time-traveling ladies’ man Jack Mason and his Saga with Kindle Unlimited- FREE for 30 days! That’s right; you can read Kindle editions of the Saga’s first two books, The Rough English Equivalent and The Quintessence Of Quick, by joining Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. It’s $9.99 a month to subscribe, but there’s a free trial period of 30 days, so you could read both books during the free trial! If you don’t have a Kindle, there are many free viewers available for download, including Amazon’s own Kindle apps. Then you’ll be set for the debut of the Saga’s third, book, Time To Climb, that’s due out in November for holiday gift-buying. Read Amazon’s Saga reviews on my Amazon page, http://www.amazon.com/Stan-Hayes/e/B002BLJPSE/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1434819592&sr=1-2-ent

Jack Mason returns from the fifth millennium with startling effect to various periods in the past, including his 20th-century boyhood and Roman-occupied Galilee. In the year 4328, the world is so advanced scientifically, technologically and sociologically as to be incomprehensible to 20th-century humanity, to say nothing of people in the era of Jesus’ birth. The 21st century, however, anticipates a few of the things that futurists predict; the most jaw-dropping breakthrough so far is the attempted transplantation of a human head to a new body. So, in the interest of further understanding of Jack's world, where we're certainly headed, sooner or later…

From New Scientist:

A radical plan for transplanting a head onto someone else’s body is set to be announced. But is such ethically sensitive surgery even feasible?

It's heady stuff. The world's first attempt to transplant a human head will be launched this year at a surgical conference in the US. The move is a call to arms to get interested parties together to work towards the surgery.

The idea was first proposed in 2013 by Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. He wants to use the surgery to extend the lives of people whose muscles and nerves have degenerated or whose organs are riddled with cancer. Now he claims the major hurdles, such as fusing the spinal cord and preventing the body's immune system from rejecting the head, are surmountable, and the surgery could be ready as early as 2017.

Canavero plans to announce the project at the annual conference of the American Academy of Neurological and Orthopaedic Surgeons (AANOS) in Annapolis, Maryland, in June. Is society ready for such momentous surgery? And does the science even stand up?

The first attempt at a head transplant was carried out on a dog by Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov in 1954. A puppy's head and forelegs were transplanted onto the back of a larger dog. Demikhov conducted several further attempts but the dogs only survived between two and six days.

The first successful head transplant, in which one head was replaced by another, was carried out in 1970. A team led by Robert White at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another. They didn't attempt to join the spinal cords, though, so the monkey couldn't move its body, but it was able to breathe with artificial assistance. The monkey lived for nine days until its immune system rejected the head. Although few head transplants have been carried out since, many of the surgical procedures involved have progressed. "I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible," says Canavero.

This month, he published a summary of the technique he believes will allow doctors to transplant a head onto a new body (Surgical Neurology International, doi.org/2c7). It involves cooling the recipient's head and the donor body to extend the time their cells can survive without oxygen. The tissue around the neck is dissected and the major blood vessels are linked using tiny tubes, before the spinal cords of each person are cut. Cleanly severing the cords is key, says Canavero.

The recipient's head is then moved onto the donor body and the two ends of the spinal cord – which resemble two densely packed bundles of spaghetti – are fused together. To achieve this, Canavero intends to flush the area with a chemical called polyethylene glycol, and follow up with several hours of injections of the same stuff. Just like hot water makes dry spaghetti stick together, polyethylene glycol encourages the fat in cell membranes to mesh.

Next, the muscles and blood supply would be sutured and the recipient kept in a coma for three or four weeks to prevent movement. Implanted electrodes would provide regular electrical stimulation to the spinal cord, because research suggests this can strengthen new nerve connections.

When the recipient wakes up, Canavero predicts they would be able to move and feel their face and would speak with the same voice. He says that physiotherapy would enable the person to walk within a year. Several people have already volunteered to get a new body, he says.

The trickiest part will be getting the spinal cords to fuse. Polyethylene glycol has been shown to prompt the growth of spinal cord nerves in animals, and Canavero intends to use brain-dead organ donors to test the technique. However, others are sceptical that this would be enough. "There is no evidence that the connectivity of cord and brain would lead to useful sentient or motor function following head transplantation," says Richard Borgens, director of the Center for Paralysis Research at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

If polyethylene glycol doesn't work, there are other options Canavero could try. Injecting stem cells or olfactory ensheathing cells – self-regenerating cells that connect the lining of the nose to the brain – into the spinal cord, or creating a bridge over the spinal gap using stomach membranes have shown promise in helping people walk again after spinal injury. Although unproven, Canavero says the chemical approach is the simplest and least invasive.

But what about the prospect of the immune system rejecting the alien tissue? Robert White's monkey died because its head was rejected by its new body. William Mathews, chairman of the AANOS, says he doesn't think this would be a major problem today. He says that because we can use drugs to manage the acceptance of large amounts of tissue, such as a leg or a combined heart and lung transplant, the immune response to a head transplant should be manageable. "The system we have for preventing immune rejection and the principles behind it are well established."

Canavero isn't alone in his quest to investigate head transplants. Xiao-Ping Ren of Harbin Medical University in China recently showed that it is possible to perform a basic head transplant in a mouse (CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics, doi.org/2d5). Ren will attempt to replicate Canavero's protocol in the next few months in mice, and monkeys.

The essence of you

Another hurdle will be finding a country to approve such a transplant. Canavero would like to do the experiment in the US, but believes it might be easier to get approval somewhere in Europe. "The real stumbling block is the ethics," he says. "Should this surgery be done at all? There are obviously going to be many people who disagree with it."

Patricia Scripko, a neurologist and bioethicist at the Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System in California, says that many of the ethical implications related to the surgery depend on how you define human life. "I believe that what is specifically human is held within the higher cortex. If you modify that, then you are not the same human and you should question whether it is ethical. In this case, you're not altering the cortex." However, she adds that many cultures would not approve of the surgery because of their belief in a human soul that is not confined to the brain.

As with many unprecedented procedures, there may also be concerns about a slippery slope. In this case, it would be whether this would eventually lead to people swapping bodies for cosmetic reasons. However, Scripko – who doesn't believe the surgery will ever happen – doesn't think this applies here. "If a head transplant were ever to take place, it would be very rare. It's not going to happen because someone says 'I'm getting older, I'm arthritic, maybe I should get a body that works better and looks better'."

Unsurprisingly, the surgical community is also wary of embracing the idea. Many surgeons contacted by New Scientist refused to comment on the proposed project, or said it sounded "too outlandish" to be a serious consideration.

Living to the ripe old age of 100 would be a lofty ambition for anyone from mid-20th-century Bisque, (they say BIS-kew) GA. It’s a drop in the bucket for high-living, thrill-prone Jack. Inconceivable changes in both his body and his mind go on for centuries, as the saga of his incredibly long life unfolds. The pace picks up fast as he leaves the Navy to revive FlxAir, his air charter business, buying a Lear Jet, the first successful business jet to hit the market. Its predecessor, a Grumman Albatross, sits idle, along with Pete and Linda, Jack's FlxAir partners, in a fourth-millennium UFO, arranged for by his own fifth-millennium self. Let's call him “Elder Jack;” his motivation to revisit his early life is to stop his partners’ murders, planned as part of the "cleanup" of witnesses of any aspect of the JFK assassination. How long this collaboration of the two Jacks will go on remains to be seen. Now, young Jack must put Linda, Lulu and Clare Boothe Luce, on hold as he comes to grips with FlxAir and the Lear Jet.

For my Facebook friends, particularly those who haven't yet visited the Jack Mason Saga fan page, ttps://www.facebook.com/TheJackMasonSaga,

please drop by and LIKE the page for me. In return, I'll keep you "in the loop" as I pursue Jack's exploits across the printed page, with the publication later this year of the Saga’s third novel, the working title of which I've recently changed to Time to Climb. This notes the Lear Jet's ability to get to altitude, rivaling the jet fighters of the day. My just-updated webpage, www.stanhayes.com, has a lot more about Jack and his array of remarkable friends- and enemies. Come join me; I'm looking forward to entertaining you!

Have a great day-

Leaving the Navy in 1964, Jack re-launches FlxAir, moribund after the supposed fatal crash* of the company's Grumman Albatross with a brand-new executive jet, The Lear Jet. The aircraft’s design emerged from the basic structure of a new Swiss fighter aircraft, the P-16. Bill Lear and his team saw it as a good starting point for the development of a business jet. The wing, with its distinctive tip fuel tanks and landing gear, was little changed from that of the fighter prototypes. On February 7, 1963, assembly of the first Lear Jet began. The Lear Jet 23 was a six- to eight-seater, and first flew on October 7, 1963, the first production model was delivered in October 1964. Jack, learning, while still in the Navy, of the Lear Jet as he looked through Aviation Week Magazine, secured the second production model for FlxAir...

As you can well imagine, Jack'll be flying high in Time to Climb. Join me in the Jack Mason Saga. You'll be in for the ride of your life... and of Jack's!

*The Albatross's "non-crash" was fatal to three of President Kennedy's assassins. Pilot Pete Weller shot them in retaliation for the apparent killing of his co-pilot, Linda Green. Jack, in fifth-millennium time-travel mode, resuscitated her and directed Pete to take up a heading for a third-millennium UFO awaiting them just off the South Carolina coast, where they'll await a safe time, after the orgy of assassination witness homicides is over, to return to Earth.

He becomes increasingly unwilling, then virtually unable, to take life, in its relative evanescence, seriously.  This is, of course, much easier to carry off with lots of money in the bank, but not every rich man is up to it.  Moses is essentially fearless.  In his perpetual quest for liberty, however, he’s frustrated in his love of women; his mother, Lídia, Sarah and Serena, enlightened through his liaison with Maxine, and, finally, fulfilled, in her way, by Linda.  He’s learned, from his only-child boyhood, the utility of always examining his options as he defines them before making important decisions.  His leitmotif, in fact, is “What are my options?”  During the years 1946-56, he transfers this predisposition to Jack.

Moses’ parents came to the US in 1905; his father married Sarah Dressler, a first-generation Irish girl of Jewish parents, while at the University of Dublin.  They settled in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park; Moses was born April 17, 1908.  Dr. Wessel worked at NYU, first as an instructor in the Philosophy department, then as a tenured professor.  Moses, who had become an excellent amateur boxer, joined the Navy at 19 after a lackluster freshman year at NYU.  He served a four-year enlistment from 1928 to 1932, becoming an Aviation Machinist’s Mate “striker” and continuing to box in Navy competition.  Toward the end of his enlistment, while a Seaman serving at Guantánamo Bay, he became involved in an affair with Lídia Tanner, a beautiful Cuban girl and the wife of the Chief Petty Officer for whom he worked.  When Chief Tanner learned about the affair, he arranged for false charges of larceny to be filed against Moses.  He was court-martialed, and found not guilty.  The process, however, soured Moses on the Navy, and he didn’t reenlist.  He returned to his parents’ home full of hostility, for both the Navy and the US, and, after a couple of professional fights as a light heavyweight in depression-era New York, decided to head for Germany, where he also had citizenship. 

He arrived in Germany in the winter of 1932, as Hitler and the National Socialists were taking control of the state.  While working in his uncle’s tailor shop, he met an aide of Erhard Milch, the Secretary of State at the Air Ministry.  Milch oversaw, among other things, the development of pilots in the sub-rosa Black Luftwaffe.  The aide, in the light of Moses’ experience in aviation maintenance, arranged to have him interviewed as a candidate for flight training.  He underwent flight training in Russia and Italy, and was commissioned as a Fliegeringenieur.

Completing his training in 1933, he was assigned to a fighter wing based near Frankfurt.  His squadron was equipped with Heinkel 51 biplanes.  At the opening of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, his squadron was ordered to a base near Seville to provide cover for the Junker 52 transports that would bring Franco’s Nationalist troops from Morocco to the mainland. 

In the fall of 1936, during takeoff on a maintenance test flight over Seville, Moses’ plane’s engine exploded, and he crashed.  His right leg was badly broken.  Dieter Brück, an Abwehr (Military Intelligence) agent who chanced to be returning to the airfield via a nearby road, pulled him from the wreckage before it exploded.  He was returned to Berlin for surgery on his leg.  His acquaintance with Dieter Brück in Spain led to his being recruited by the Abwehr to return to the US as a covert agent. 

In early 1937, the Abwehr resident agent in New York requested assistance in carrying out his mission against East coast defense contractors.  Because of his background in aviation, his fluent American English, and his ability to reenter the US legally on his own passport, Moses was recruited for the post, and was in New York by mid-March.  He assisted the resident, Emil Kramer, for four years in a variety of espionage assignments.  In July, 1941 he was ordered, in the seriously ill Kramer’s stead, to the German Embassy in Washington.  The Chargé de Affaires gave him $3 million, in $100 bills packed in 2 large suitcases, which was part of $5 million that had been sent from Germany to Washington for use in a plot to defeat FDR in the 1940 election.  He was to take the money to Kramer, who would use it to pay off an IRA group for assassinating Winston Churchill.  The assassination was to take place during Churchill’s meeting with FDR in Newfoundland in August. 

Having become increasingly disenchanted with Nazism, he decides to abscond with the money.  On arriving at Washington’s Union Station, he boards a train to Baltimore, sitting out the war there using pre-prepared credentials identifying him as Moses Kubielski, a motion picture projectionist.  While there, he meets Sarah Green, an alcoholic librarian, who introduces him to literature, notably Faulkner and Hemingway.  Their affair, stormy and doomed, continues until Moses’ departure in 1946; he pays for Linda, Sarah’s daughter, to go to Johns Hopkins.  He had decided to return to Cuba and live in Havana, where he was headed when his car broke down in Bisque.  His infatuation with Serena Mason and Bisque led to his staying, and prospering, there. 

The unexpected appearance in Bisque of Dieter Brück (alias Paul Pulaski), his old friend from the Abwehr, opens the door to yet another adventure to this well-worn thrill junkie.  Brück, now a KGB agent assigned to penetrate the nearby Savannah River nuclear plant, hints that he wants Moses to help him defect.  Even if he weren’t inclined to help Brück, he knows that his past is now vulnerable to exposure.  He must leave, and so must Brück, if only to preserve his legacy to Jack.  Besides, as he says to Jack, “I’ve been a merchant long enough.” 

Moses responds to the opportunities that are thrust upon him.  He’s a remarkable human being, possessing hard-won wisdom and a tenacious capacity for love.  His Bisque experiences change him, but asymmetrically.  In spite of his parental-like love for Jack, he is, at bottom, an irrepressible adventure addict- individualistic, self-centered, prone to vice and attracted by danger.  He’s courageous, pragmatic- much more responsive to the demands and needs of his immediate circumstances than to those of any overarching moral code.  After all is said and done, irrepressibility carries the day- “Viva Yo.”

I’ve posted a couple of insights on the Saga's main character, John Henry (Jack) Mason, and since then I've received enough e-mails, curious about Jack and his world, that I’ve decided to recap the background of other key characters, the listed ages as of 1956, beginning with Jack's mother, the redoubtable Serena (Ríni) Mason:

Age 43, the former Serena Redding, Bisque High class of ‘31; Jack’s mother- a pisser (much like her mother, the late Rose Redding) and aspiring sculptress.  She met Larry Mason in New York at Columbia, where they were both in school.  Beautiful, proud and headstrong, she refused to stay with Larry in Los Alamos.  She returned to Bisque with with young Jack in 1944, and, her father having offered her the Bisque Hotel to manage, chose to live there as well.  She’s still an aspiring artist, sculpting on the roof and writing poetry.  Like one of her idols, Amelia Earhart, she often dresses in men’s clothes and never wears makeup.  She’s highly sexed, bordering on nymphomania like her mother, has no plans to “put on the marriage yoke” again.  She wants to return to New York and the arts when Jack’s grown; she may, or may not, have the talent to justify her expectations...

Those futurists who thought about it at all predicted its coming much earlier, but the first viable “Free Soul” turned out to be a long time coming. Converting human consciousness to a massless force field capable of time travel and other god-like capabilities doesn’t happen until the fifth millennium (A.D. 4231). The soul in question's the organic-storage-resident person of wealthy investor, aviator, connoisseur of women and philanthropist John Henry (Jack) Mason. Why did it take so long, given many other rapid developments in the physical sciences, beginning with the discovery of the atomic nucleus in the 20th century? Suffice it to say that this application of quantum physics turned out to be a harder nut to crack than anyone suspected.

I'm betting that few people today associate “soul” with anything outside religion. Belief in an afterlife's a cornerstone of most, if not all, religious faiths. Simply stated, most share Hamlet’s anticipation of “…shuffling off this mortal coil” to their reward in the Great Beyond. Turns out they're probably right, but various physicists’ recent subatomic particle research indicates that there's a great deal more to it than clerics address in their Sabbath speeches to the faithful. Specifically, they see the soul as it exists within a living body as a manifestation of consciousness itself.

Doctors Stuart Hameroff and Deepak Chopra, in their article, The “Quantum Soul”: A Scientific Hypothesis, make a convincing case for the feasibility of a soul free of bodily constraints. The article’s abstract states: “The concept of consciousness existing outside the body (e.g. near-death and out-of body experiences, NDE/OBEs, or after death, indicative of a ‘soul’) is a staple of religious traditions, but shunned by conventional science because of an apparent lack of rational explanation. However, conventional science based entirely on classical physics cannot account for normal in-the-brain consciousness.

The Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ model (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) is a quantum approach to consciousness, connecting brain processes (microtubule quantum computations inside neurons) to fluctuations in fundamental spacetime geometry, the fine scale structure of the universe. Recent evidence for significant quantum coherence in warm biological systems, scale-free dynamics and end-of-life brain activity support the notion of a quantum basis for consciousness which could conceivably exist independent of biology in various scalar planes in spacetime geometry. Sir Roger Penrose does not necessarily endorse such proposals which relate to his ideas in physics. Based on Orch OR (however), we offer a scientific hypothesis for a ‘quantum soul’.”

Well, that's a bit of heavy sledding, but given the enormity of the authors' conclusion, it's about as succinct a summary as can be made. Note that the Sir Roger Penrose of the above paragraph is a highly respected British physicist who's the co-holder, with Stephen Hawking, of the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics for “…have(ing) greatly enlarged our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe.” The "soul hypothesis," in other words, is supported by an impressive collection of first-order minds. And Jack Mason’s soul is its first personification!

Join me in the multi-millennial Jack Mason Saga, as we follow an exceptional small-town Georgia boy through several iterations of post-humanity to a condition regularly confused with godhood as he visits times past! The Saga’s third book, Angels Four Five, will be released in time for Christmas gift buying, but in the meantime, it'd be a good idea to start at the beginning and see how Jack finds himself in line for immortality, The Rough English Equivalent and The Quintessence of Quick will catch you up on how he gets to the threshold…