Frog skin cells turned themselves into living machines
sciencenews.org
sciencenews.org
Also, I think this is the first paper on this topic: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853
Cells are no different than the stored programs concept that kicked off modern computing. They're machines that encode and run themselves. They manufacture useful resources: insulin, antibodies, heart tissue, etc. The same applies at the organismal level.
Once we get into regenerative cloning, we'll have an unlimited supply of blood for transfusions, organs for those needing transplants, and a research test bed that is orders of magnitude better than the methods we use today.
What I'm getting at is that we'll eventually create monoclonal brainless humans. Turn off brain development or surgically remove the brain during early development. Without a brain, these thoughtless bodies are not persons and are 100% ethical resources to use for the betterment of mankind. We'd be growing plant versions of higher level human tissues, and that unlocks so much new potential.
You'd probably birth them in chimeric pig uteruses until something wholly artificial is developed. You keep alive artificially through mechanical innervation and "life support". This requires a lot of research and development, but we're not that far off.
Different lines could be developed for studying certain cancers. When you can reproduce cancer and study it repeatedly at the organismal level, you can develop novel strategies for detection and clearance. We could make so much more progress.
The "transplant" lines would lack HLA markers that cause tissue rejection, making their tissues safe for transplant into anyone. Nobody would need to take life-altering immunosuppressants ever again.
We could probably start replacing thymuses and other tissues that deplete over time, potentially regenerating youth in humans and extending lifespan dramatically.
Biology is an evolved machine. We should start treating it as such. Then we'll truly be advanced.
Is this not slightly dubious or debatable? One might consider their heart to be their center, or the seat of their soul. I do think there is a lot of opportunity along these lines. Our ethics haven't quite evolved enough for me to not wince at that paragraph though. Not saying we can't get there, of course
Even in a jurisdiction where abortion is legal, these above considerations cannot be considered to be clarified. Abortion represents a certain stance about the tradeoff between the rights of mothers regarding their bodies and of the fetus's right to live. The former completely disappears if the brainless clone is grown in a vat. It is replaced by the original's desire for health and a long life.
This is a silly argument. Not reproducing during every ovulation and spermatogenesis cycle does the same.
Likewise in your argument, cutting someone that is braindead from life support could be depriving them.
Persons come about through learning and experience. Cells alone aren't persons.
This is actually, sort of, the point of view of many Christian organizations: sexuality is to be used for procreation only.
> Likewise in your argument, cutting someone that is braindead from life support could be depriving them.
The question is always about in which situations it is ethical to decide about the existence of another person. I'm quite optimistic humans won't ever achieve a consensus about this. Which is good - it means that we stay aware of those questions.
Sorry about high-roading here - my point was that also in this case the ethic questions are not trivial because facilitating brainlessness is an active act during a similar phase of a human's existence as abortion. Because of this, I'm positive that jurisdictions allowing abortion will eventually allow growing brainless humans.
Am more familiar with the Catholic view: https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/...
The idea that we're just machines, if plumbed to its depths, can only lead one to self-destruction. Sure, most people never go that far in contemplating the consequences of such a view, instinctively knowing the danger that lurks there, but it still poisons their lives to some degree.
But we don't actually know that all we are is machines. There definitely is a mechanical aspect to us and to the world, which science is tasked with discovering and describing, but what we know is very little and so many of the answers we find only raise a multitude of new questions. Also worth checking out is Stephen Hawking's stance on the impossibility of finding a TOE on the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything
Without a brain, running an entire body would Require a replacement to that brain, so what you are suggesting is unlikely to be very useful.
Rather, we are already creating scaffolding for individual organs, and we already have technologies that continue to develop that allow us to test against actual human tissues, such that the end-game you point to of 'in situ' testing already is and will continue to be accomplished.
Rather than wasting time and energy attempting to clone an entire human (with all the potential ethical and moral considerations), it is Far easier to simply clone organs, which then allows for direct build/replace scenarios on an 'as needed' basis, And with the full agreement of the source/destination.
Further, as we learn more and more about all the detailed methods and ways that various subsystems, grow, develop, operate, and interact, we can simply create more and more detailed simulations of Any human (or any other creature for that matter) to distinguish proper vs improper function, and investigate and even optimize potential solutions Far more quickly and effectively than spending precious time and other resources.
That is why computational capabilities are and will likely remain our focus moving forward, rather than the arguably cruder and generally Much slower approach which you outlined.
For reference, given the incredibly complex and integrated nature of almost Any living creature, a body without a brain or even without a fully functioning And developed brain would (especially in creatures as complex as humans), in addition to the issues that I already outlined above (along with those raised by others), Also tend to respond Far differently to a fully functional human, thus being of rather limited utility, regardless.
We haven't even reached consensus on aborting a fetus a day afer its heart tissue has differentiated...
This makes all these theories seems far-fetched.
We can keep babies born at 22 weeks alive with extensive prenatal care, and the technology continues to improve.
We can keep braindead people on life support.
It'll be easier to clone a whole human and remove the brain early in development (or genetically stop it from developing) than it would be to clone any organ or tissue in isolation without all the developmental biology, tissue scaffolding, etc.
Since the goal is no longer doing "prenatal care that results in quality of life", you can just iterate over and over until you improve survival duration.
You can grow the fetuses in pigs to iterate quickly and cheaply and probably run batch sizes in the thousands.
This is less ex nihilo than you think, and more like horticulture.
“Evolved” meaning a tinkered, duct-taped, convoluted, purposeless, billion-year old Rube Goldberg abomination of a machine. Any analogy with a man-made device will, at best, be incomplete.
What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg
The term comes from the genus of the frog:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_clawed_frog
It joins the list of things that we argue about whether it is alive:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-life-its-vast-diversi...
I've made a post in this thread about the extent to which we should take this manner of research.