R3 Bio pitched “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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.
To be clear I think this type of work crosses a lot of ethical boundaries. But entire fields like gynecological surgery were the result of a person with no ethics doing horrific things to people without consent. Most early vaccine testing was done on orphans and the mentally handicapped.
This is ultimately what happens when the people who were cheered for "move fast and break things" start to get older and come face to face with the one thing money can't buy.
Biology isn't something you can reverse engineer in its entirety with anything like the technology we have now.
Nothing except a possibly unmanageable level of complexity. We don’t even really understand how LLMs do what they do.
Perhaps we can build an AI model that has an understanding of humans down to the level of detail being contemplated here, but that won’t mean we will understand that.
And even with that understanding, it doesn’t mean it’ll be possible to build a fully functioning human body without the equivalent of a brain. It’s likely to be more like a person in a vegetative state - they have a brain and measurable brain function, but no higher cognitive functions that we can detect.
If you can indeed just cross ethical boundaries, then sure, but mostly we've managed to purge the Josef Mengele's from societies with the technology to make this kind of thing feasible. The real world is at least not yet The X-Files where shadowy doctors in secret quasi-government consortiums can do basically anything to living humans in the name of discovery.
"Eventually" does a lot of work in your statement in that I completely agree, provided humanity lasts long enough. Give us another ten millenia and I have no doubt damn near every sci-fi scenario ever dreamed up that doesn't require superluminal travel will probably be doable. But that means nothing at all to something trying to launch a business in this century.
I agree, and I think we both agree that while it is conceptually possible to reverse engineer most of human biology to the point of eventually understanding how all selection pressures explain the information in the human genome, from your sentence I conclude also that we probably agree that we are far from that position as of today.
> To think otherwise is to acknowledge some sort of higher power that holds a special non-organic ingredient in the mix.
It's not so much a magical ingredient, more than not possessing a manual of the universe, nor guarantees about the distribution of all activities and how humans with specific genomes experience different selection pressures. Our genome only accumulates an effective response for a full history of usual (and now novel) selection pressures, not a description nor the formula describing the dependence on all parameters in the face of selection pressures.
But what I believe the previous commenter refers to is not the question if we ever asymptotically approach this ideal model of selection pressures, but rather that conventional research has already long taught us that healthy body organs require an active life: without exercise the muscles would atrophy like bed-ridden people suffer, and similar for all kinds activities ideally in a mix that is representative of the real distribution of selective pressures.
> To be clear I think this type of work crosses a lot of ethical boundaries. But entire fields like gynecological surgery were the result of a person with no ethics doing horrific things to people without consent. Most early vaccine testing was done on orphans and the mentally handicapped.
Can you kindly link me up with references on the non-consensual gynecological surgeries? I happen to be very interested in the dark origins of medicine in general (since one could argue that healthcare is impossible to socialize, whenever we alleviate the afflictions of genetically inclined sufferers -randomly distributed in all populations- then we simultaneously lift the selection pressure, inducing more of such sufferers in the next generation. One doesn't have to be a Nazi to point that out, and unlike a Nazi (who intervene by castration, genocide, etc.) a scientific moral stance is to simply not intervene: neither oppress nor help.
By what right do we alleviate each type of suffering in a few socialized-healthcare generations at the cost of inducing more suffering in many more future generations to come?
He also developed several important surgical techniques and operated on cancer patients at a time when that was considered an absolute waste of time and resources, and that latter thing caused him to lose his position at the hospital he had founded, after which he started the first cancer hospital.
Some anacephalic babies survive for months, even years and function mentally: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2226647/Nickolas-Co...
I am very sceptical that you could create a clone with enough of a brain to survive and guarantee the clone will have no awareness.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-he...
I wonder how much gene expression differs in clones of particular species raised in similar environments, I would expect the amount of difference between genetically identical individuals to differ by species, but I have no idea by how much, and how would humans rate on this measure.
In much the same way as you can spot similarities in two people who are even quite distantly related, you can often tell which animals are related just by looking. My neighbour had a pony that she got when she was quite little and who died something like ten years ago. All her daughters and grand-daughters look just like her.
All the unpredictable and chaotic environmental influence is, being uncontrolled and unknowable-- effectively random.
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.
If you take a smoker and transplant their brain into a healthy non-smoker body, would that decrease their likelihood of continuing to smoke?
What about an obese person into a slender body? Or a man/woman into the opposite sex's body, assuming the rejection issue was dealt with? How much will change about a person based on what body they are in, and how much can you change without changing the person, and how much about a person can you change just by changing the body they find themselves in?
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.
Reconnecting spinal nerves does not look impossible. But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new body for them.
In general, the idea of producing a body that lacks the brain but has everything else intact is very rational. Its doubtless creepiness may wane with time.
I still expect that growing particular tissues and whole organs (like liver, or kidneys, or bone) will end up being a faster route to cloned organ replacement. In particular, a body takes like 20 years to grow to the "finished" state, and a separate organ could grow much faster.
As an old (at least decades) concept towards solving this, there could be a translation interface layer between the part of the brainstem still attached to the brain, and the body into which it's going.
Aside from the technical challenges, it'd probably best have its translation vocabulary built from recorded signals of the primary body. ie recordings of actual daily movement, taken prior to surgery
Well the first step would be to understand how to undo the damage caused by freezing. We’re arguably further away from this than we are from any other part of the process. We might never be able to do this, freezing might just be too lossy.
I think what is much more intractable is actually massive amounts of axons you'd need to reconnect, and you'd need extremely good classification to connect the right axons from host body and brain together. I think the only way to do it is to coax the new body/brain combo into self-repair.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/jadensadventures/images/0/...
I'm old enough that I remember when artificial hearts and heart transplants were considered creepy. Now they're considered heroic and vital life-saving treatments.
Wait I saw a film like that once...
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
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.
I don't remember there being anything about growing replacement clones, but it would make sense given the other tech in the story.
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.
"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.
>Presumably they'd also have to be incredibly narcissistic
aren't most of them ?