Successul monkey head transplant in 1970

Robert White performed over 10,000 surgical operations and authored more than 900 publications on clinical neurosurgery, medical ethics, and health care. He received honorary doctorates from John Carroll University (Doctor of Science, 1979), Cleveland State University (Doctor of Science, 1980), Walsh University (Doctor of Humane Letters, 1996), and University of St. Thomas (Doctor of Sciences, 1998).

White had ten children with his wife, Patricia Murray, a nurse whom he met at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital while completing his surgical internship and residency. A devout Roman Catholic, White was a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He attended mass regularly and prayed before performing surgeries. White died at his home in Geneva on September 16, 2010, aged 84, after suffering from diabetes and prostate cancer.

He nicknamed himself Humble Bob. White founded Metro's neurosurgery department. Many people know him for being the leading target for protesters who called him "Dr. Butcher" and described his experiments as "epitomizing the crude, cruel vivisection industry" For 40 years White was a neurological surgery professor at Case Western Reserve University medical school. He was one of the best known neurosurgeons in the United States notably for his head transplant experiments on rhesus monkeys.

In 1970 after a long series of preliminary experiments, White performed a transplant of one monkey head onto the body of another monkey. Because the surgery included severing the spine at the neck, the subjects were all paralyzed from the neck down. However, because the cranial nerves within the brain were still in tact and nourished by the circulatory system from the new body, the monkeys could still hear, smell, taste, eat, and follow objects with its eyes. Ultimately immuno-rejection caused the monkeys to die after 9 days

Dr. Jerry Silver, an expert in regrowing severed nerves, called White's experiments on monkey «fairly barbaric»

During the 1990s, White planned to perform the same operation on humans and practiced on corpses at the mortuary.