Interestingly, in "The Island" Dr. Merrick pitched investors on growing brainless clones, but actually kept the brains in, because it worked better (and gave him a labor supply).
The problem here isn't the idea, it's that absolutely no one has done any useful precursor research.
Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich when spinal cord injuries prognosis is still lifelong paralysis.
And if I were to extend that thought a little further: we're more likely to develop useful and less invasive rejuvenation technology then to try and do surgical body transplants because the technology you'd need to fix spinal cord injury - which is mandatory - would have a lot more overlap and applicability to in situ tissue repair anyway.
Cloning works rather well now. Here are six polo ponies, Cuartetera 01 through 06, all clones of a famous polo pony.[1] Their owner has been winning world class polo matches on these mares. They're strong and healthy and very real.
Surprisingly, and perhaps fortunately, because of some boring biological details I won't expand on, cloning humans is harder than cloning horses or sheeps.
Is there any danger of transplanting organs into you that have genes which signal not to develop a brain? Would those genes potentially affect your actual brain?
I enjoyed reading a Young Adult Sci-Fi novel with this premise called The House of the Scorpion[0]. The main character is a clone who's owner is a powerful enough drug lord to get away with not having his organ clones' brains crippled at birth like all the others are.
I don't think this idea could work. There's this common misconception that our brains control our bodies, like how software can control hardware. The fact is that our brains are intrinsically connected to the rest of our body: via the central nervous system, sensory, and motor neurons. You can't just swap out our brains. It's integrated with the rest of our body in a fundamental way. If you cloned someone, the neuronal connections between the CNS and organs would not be the same, because these interconnections develop over a lifetime and are not predetermined at birth.
It also feels super unethical to me. Reminds me of "Never let me go" by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Consider also that even reattaching nerves that are supposed to be there is not exactly a walk in the park. Look into finger reattachment surgery and post operation care. Think pain, tingling, a year or more of physiotherapy.. and that's in the best case that it actually works and you don't end up with a "dead" finger. Now, imagine that for your whole body.
Yeah... Non-sentient monkey "organ sacks" as a replacement for animal testing sounds great, but those organs aren't going to function or even develop the same without a brain. At best, I think this could only be another step to filter out unsafe compounds between testing on cells and testing on whole animals. Potentially with misleading results, I imagine.
If the clone's muscles have been electrically stimulated whilst it grows, you could imagine a small device at the base of the brain stem that records which signals produce which physical responses.
If a similar device on the brain stem of the brain donor maps out their signal-response relationships, you could presumably build a translation layer that sits between the donor brain and clone body.
I agree that this probably wouldn't work though. This is more like science fiction than a serious suggestion.
Yeah, it's a lot of if's and billions of dollars for what MIGHT be a free lunch when it comes to organ replacements.
Seems like a smarter idea would be to spend that money on growing organs in a tank. There are tens or hundreds of millions of otherwise healthy people in need of a donor kidney or two, and if the body didn't reject them in the process that would be platinum sprinkles on a gold sandwich.
These type of research seems to always assume that we are a ghost in a machine: the brain is what really matters, and the body is nothing more than a suit. The mind-body problem fascinates me, and I'm skeptical of anyone who held any position with certainty.
The only thing thats certain is that the debate on the mind-body problem is going to be no longer just philosophical/theological, but a practical problem with real world implication. Its exciting and terrifying that we may soon have empirical data refuting or supporting dualism.
"a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive"
"A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain. "
That looks like hardware firmware vs. software. The clone would come with the firmware. Giving that the brain ages too, one can later want for the lower level brain parts to be refreshed too - i.e. amigdala, lower level visual cortex, etc - to come with the clone on top of the firmware.
For getting spare parts one would have expected that growing individual organs would come first, yet it may happen that growing them all together as such "brainless" body may be simpler.
Ethics-wise i think we're going into pretty nightmarish scenarios - as mentioned in the article women will be used as surrogates, and thus a multi-billionaire today can already clone himself, CRISP-in brain suppression (we'd like to hope that they would do it), and get such a body-clone as a source of parts.
If it’s truly brainless then I don’t see a major ethical problem. But I also don’t see people being allowed to do this because it’s much too far past the “yuck” threshold. It’s gross and disturbing even if technically it is ethical.
I also think it would be way harder to do this than it sounds. The body would not develop properly past the fetal stage without some kind of artificial stimulation.
Printing organs is probably both more likely to work and more likely to be accepted.
Every time I hear about a tech firm trying to implement some dystopian/nightmarish sci-vision, I think of Tobias from Arrested Development saing '...but it might work for us.'
I'm mentally reading all of the quotes from this guy in the voice of Walter from Fringe.
The thing about this research is that it's A) completely unhinged, and B) if it pans out it's going to be yet another path for people to accumulate wealth for the rest of their lives. Also if it works eventually the world will come to be ruled by the severely brain-damaged clones of whichever billionaires survived this process, or their children.
>Also if it works eventually the world will come to be ruled by the severely brain-damaged clones of whichever billionaires survived this process, or their children.
Or come to be ruled by the trillionaire who invented/controlled the process that had all the other billionaires give him their money to buy a few more years.
I am assuming the proposal is to knockout the gene Lim1, which in other animals, creates a brainless phenotype. You won't be able to swap a brain into this headless body (assuming it can fully develop), but this approach could be used for medical research and potentially solve the problem of organ donors, assuming it is ethical
Also, just because Lem1 creates a headless mouse doesn't mean it will do the same in Humans. But I suppose that's what the primate testing will reveal
as usual the big lies are right in the header, "stealthy", ooooo! la la and then the bizare notion that a full sized human chasis will just, appear all buff and ready for harvesting, no the only ones who are mindless are the few rich and desperate enough throw a couple hundred million at something that will almost certainly get shut down if for nothing else, the ethics of
gestating brainldead (there will most definitly be a brain) clones.
This would never be available to anyone except the parasitic billionaire class. If every other issue be resolved I see no reason we should allow this. Anyone who can afford a billion for a spare human needs higher taxes
We could probably grow a normal clone of you now and add the brain damage manually and have adult organs in 18 years. If you have 100B why would you not want to spend a trivial portion ensuring that you make it to 100 instead of 80 especially since this makes 200 or 2000 more likely.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 64.0 ms ] threadDiscussing replacement bodies is pretty rich when spinal cord injuries prognosis is still lifelong paralysis.
And if I were to extend that thought a little further: we're more likely to develop useful and less invasive rejuvenation technology then to try and do surgical body transplants because the technology you'd need to fix spinal cord injury - which is mandatory - would have a lot more overlap and applicability to in situ tissue repair anyway.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-he...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion
I don't remember there being anything about growing replacement clones, but it would make sense given the other tech in the story.
It also feels super unethical to me. Reminds me of "Never let me go" by Kazuo Ishiguro.
If a similar device on the brain stem of the brain donor maps out their signal-response relationships, you could presumably build a translation layer that sits between the donor brain and clone body.
I agree that this probably wouldn't work though. This is more like science fiction than a serious suggestion.
Seems like a smarter idea would be to spend that money on growing organs in a tank. There are tens or hundreds of millions of otherwise healthy people in need of a donor kidney or two, and if the body didn't reject them in the process that would be platinum sprinkles on a gold sandwich.
The only thing thats certain is that the debate on the mind-body problem is going to be no longer just philosophical/theological, but a practical problem with real world implication. Its exciting and terrifying that we may soon have empirical data refuting or supporting dualism.
"a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive"
"A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain. "
That looks like hardware firmware vs. software. The clone would come with the firmware. Giving that the brain ages too, one can later want for the lower level brain parts to be refreshed too - i.e. amigdala, lower level visual cortex, etc - to come with the clone on top of the firmware.
For getting spare parts one would have expected that growing individual organs would come first, yet it may happen that growing them all together as such "brainless" body may be simpler.
Ethics-wise i think we're going into pretty nightmarish scenarios - as mentioned in the article women will be used as surrogates, and thus a multi-billionaire today can already clone himself, CRISP-in brain suppression (we'd like to hope that they would do it), and get such a body-clone as a source of parts.
One would hope that even the billionaires would feel a little squeamish cutting up a mini-me replica of themselves just to replace body parts.
Presumably they'd also have to be incredibly narcissistic to consider themselves worth more than a younger clone of themselves.
I also think it would be way harder to do this than it sounds. The body would not develop properly past the fetal stage without some kind of artificial stimulation.
Printing organs is probably both more likely to work and more likely to be accepted.
The thing about this research is that it's A) completely unhinged, and B) if it pans out it's going to be yet another path for people to accumulate wealth for the rest of their lives. Also if it works eventually the world will come to be ruled by the severely brain-damaged clones of whichever billionaires survived this process, or their children.
Behold the future of meat.
Or come to be ruled by the trillionaire who invented/controlled the process that had all the other billionaires give him their money to buy a few more years.
Perhaps they could call the product, "Beyond Meat"...Oh, wait.
Also, just because Lem1 creates a headless mouse doesn't mean it will do the same in Humans. But I suppose that's what the primate testing will reveal