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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.
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.
Anecephaly is a thing. Though those babies don't survive much past birth.
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.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-he...
It's interesting to see how the spots on these horses look different. I thought it was chimerism like in cows, but apparently it's extremely rare in horses, but still there are epigenetic factors in play.
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.
Surprisingly, and perhaps fortunately, because of some boring biological details I won't expand on, cloning humans is harder than cloning horses or sheeps.
Well there are cloned humans now…
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 neurons in the brain and body will inevitably learn connectivity patterns to best take advantage of neural signals from the other. Which is kind of an interesting wrinkle to the mind body problem: the brain likely has more capability to remap circuits than the body. So, if you implant a brain into a body... The implanted brain changes more to match the implanted body than vice versa.
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.
> Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich
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.
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.
It’s good to know that the ethical line is some amount of human brain cells. Not too much, not too little. The perfect, ethical amount.
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?
Depends on how they work. Many genes that are active during early development are entirely silenced throughout adulthood, or otherwise have no effect.
The short version is yes! This would be a significant concern.
Sounds a bit like "The Island" movie from 2005.
Which in turn is a remake of Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979).
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).
I was about to post the same thing. Except here someone wants that minus brain? good luck. I recently saw someone watching The Island on the airplane recently and remembered being reasonably well entertained by that movie. Obi-wan was sure having fun riding a motorcycle in it.
Spares (1996, HarperCollins) – ISBN 978-0002246569
Michael Marshall Smith
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.
There is some shared juju these people and the wellness influencer crowd in Brentwood are smoking
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.
I agree with your sentiment, but that being said as someone who has lived a while now, what we do have is a lot crazier than I ever expected.
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.
This is all giving me Altered Carbon vibes.
Bene Tleilax, Axlotl Tank.
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.
Behold the future of meat.
>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 read that while listening to the soundtrack for Fringe.
This website is almost impossible to read. Pop-ups, "see also" blocks, lots of distractions. I wonder if the creators ever tried actually using it.
Sounds like Altered Carbon (tv series).
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.
it isn't brainless :
"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.
It’s one of those ideas that sounds utterly bonkers and will probably come true even if in a limited way. Why not have a fresh heart ready?
We've had brainless clones for a while already. Governments are full of them. Are we sure we need more?
I'll start believing in brainless clones once I see tech that protects bodies of people with neural damage from wasting away due to lack of movement.
Better biomimicry is a growth area in robotics but a brainless human just isn't possible.