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.
You don't think that the idea could work based on our current understandings. I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves. To think otherwise is to acknowledge some sort of higher power that holds a special non-organic ingredient in the mix.
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.
Reverse engineering complex biological systems is like reverse engineering an LLM. Everythings depends upon and i fluences everything else. There are no clean modular segments, it's spaghetti all the way down.
Biology isn't something you can reverse engineer in its entirety with anything like the technology we have now.
> I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.
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.
The first vaccine by Pasteur was on a child named Joseph Meister, with the explicit consent if his parents. Generally, the two greatest medical minds of that time (and also, great rivals), Pasteur and Koch, followed the Hippocratic oath (except for themselves).
Not so much "magical," but this kind of comes across like tell me you never studied lab biology without telling me. It's very difficult to cut open all but the most trivial organisms without killing them and there isn't any other way to observe living systems while they're still alive. Observing them while dead doesn't give you near enough information to reverse engineer anything. We've had to solve for the cutting open without killing to be able to do things like open heart surgery, but it currently requires a team of people who trained for at least a decade and consent from the subject who generally isn't going to give that unless their life is already at stake.
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 do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I swear to god like 75% of the population thinks hollywood and sci-fi media is reality or just a few years away. People just don't know how anything works and thinks we can wave our hands and do anything. Yeah we most definitely are living in the future, but even sci-fi movies, atleast the good ones, have hard limitations to their current technology.
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.'
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't some of the wiring/compute needed to operate your limbs in the spinal cord? So, even if you replace the brain, you actually need the whole spinal cord too in order for the whole system to integrate properly?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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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.
> I do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.
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 do not believe that there is anything magical about humans that prevents us from eventually reverse engineering ourselves.
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?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-he...
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.
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion
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.
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.