Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

The lowest hanging fruit for cancer cures is regenerative cloning. When your body develops cancer, get a head transplant onto a monoclonal, antigenless (ABO, HLA, etc.) body grown in a lab. The only cancers it doesn't solve are of the brain, blood, and head.

Of course we haven't built any of this technology because it's "icky". But we need to get over ourselves. Our bodies are biological machines. Cloning can be done ethically by decephalization genetically or surgically during development, then artificial innervation, life support, and hormonal development. Grow them in pig uteruses at industrial scale.

This approach also solves heart disease, kidney disease, and pretty much everything else.

You get a new heart, set of lungs, thymus... It'd likely increase lifespans dramatically.

You could choose your height, build, gender...

Once it's 20-30 years old and accepted tech, we'd probably even develop transgenic lines with fluorescent hair, increased endurance, magnetoreception, ...

Cancer is hundreds of different molecular breakdowns of different cell types. Changes to adhesion, proliferation, signalling, etc. Lots of different problems. And if we "fix it", we're doing nothing to repair the genes of the cells that directly led to cancer. They'll still be sitting on the precipice of developing it again.

Replace the body.

Growing the replacement body and getting general acceptance is probably channeling itself, but seems easy compared to connecting the “plumbing and wiring” from the head to the body. How close are we to doing this?

Insanely far away if we never start.

I think this eventuality is a little odd, but it is worth at least doing some meta-analysis to see if different parts of medicine would be the best to pursue. E.g. we currently focus a lot on palliative care, accepting that death is inevitable. We need to change that expectation if we're ever going to get life extension technology.

I don't think we can join nerves well enough at the moment. Seems like a problem we'd need to solve first.

This is the theme of a Greg Egan short (is there a scenario that guy hasn't come up with? Truly an SF beast). The body is grown at an accelerated rate with a relatively "dumb" brain. The brain has the capacity to carry out normal bodily functions and not much else. After a year, the original brain is transplanted into the body.

That said, this is more like "very-hard-to-reach golden fruit", not low-hanging fruit.

Until we fully understand the human body, down to the level that we can decode thought by observing brainwaves, we don’t really know that bodies are biological machines. For all we know the body could be a form of antenna for energy/physics we don’t yet perceive or understand. It’s important not to assume our current understanding of science defines reality. It’s our best estimate.

1) Modern machine learning models like GPT-3 exhibit properties of human-like intelligence despite using no magic. Occam's razor would tell you that human intelligence is also due to the enormous number of neurons and their connections.

2) This hacker news article is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30350261

If we're going to compare human beings to radios, I'd say it's far more likely that some part of the body is the case of the radio while the radio is contained within it. If the body is acase for the radio it makes no difference if you swap it out.

I'm willing to accept that my brain is an antenna for consciousness from another dimension but I find it hard to swallow that my toe nails are as well.

Primarily the brain, absolutely. I’ve read the illusion of conscious will and similar books. They struck me as overconfident drivel. We do not understand the universe on a macro or micro scale, and there are just to many oddities for me to dive head first into contemporary explanations of consciousness presented as “fact” by narrow minded “experts”. A physical computer view of the brain could just as easily be an antenna, and damage to either could still cause the observed issues from brain damage, psychological disorders, etc.

A great example to dive into is the phenomenon of crystal polymorphism; specifically, how the primary crystalline form of a chemical changes simultaneously at labs on the other side of the world with no cross contamination. It’s a huge problem for pharmaceutical companies, but the interesting part is that there is no rational explanation for the phenomenon presented by modern science.

Science is based on observable fact, but where humans go off the rails is making the assumption that everything is observable, that observations are sufficiently precise, or by dismissing new ideas out of the narcissism of being an “expert” in a competing theory. It’s a theme that repeats over and over again throughout history.

I think it is entirely possible consciousness could be a related to a force we do not understand or even perceive, similar to crystal polymorphism.

Can you even grow the entire human body in less time than it takes for it to grow naturally, e.g. some 18 years?

Maybe not but it only takes 2 years to reach 1/2 adult height. That hardly seems the worst problem - better to (temporarily) be a midget than dead, surely?

But you wouldn't be a midget. You'd be a 2 year old toddler body with an adult head.

Right, better than a midget because you'd be growing rapidly.

Definitely better than being dead.

I've wondered the same thing so I looked it up.

The giraffe gestational period is approx. 15-22months and their newborns are approximately 180cm tall and 68kg.

I wasn't able to figure out what the actual bottle neck in growth rate was, but best I could figure it had something to do with the normal surface-area/volume thing and how it affects nutrient diffusion across the placenta.

If you look at Ancencelphy[0] and the development in artificial wombs[1] you can see that most of this work is simple engineering problems with the nerve reattachment being the only R&D stumbling block that remains.

I honestly think that we could solve this problem in less than 10 years if we approached it as it were a moonshot or a mRNA covid vaccine.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly [1]https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-successfully-g...

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