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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just randomness; it is environmental influence. A simple example being a lack of food in the environment affecting size and developmental health.
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?
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.
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.
Sedentary patients have tons of health trouble from lying in bed constantly, I'm not sure if its possible to grow a healthy human that doesn't move about.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
Haha. As far as I’ve heard the frozen head companies have a pretty terrible track record. The odds of them keeping the heads frozen continuously for 100 years are not good.
Reconnection does not look impossible. But it will be extremely hard.
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.
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.
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
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.'
Gah, just posted a sibling comment echoing the same thought. Do you think there's a revolving door between the Sci-Fi Writers Guild and the "Let's build billionaires a Torment Nexus" think tank?
The initial murder case Kovacs investigates in both the book/show involves a wealthy man who is killed but has his backup mind inserted into his backup clone so he is “recovered” so the victim has no memory of his killing since the backup was prior to killing instead of optimally just prior to death. There is also a big subplot that is show only with Kovacs’ sister and clones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anecephaly is a thing. Though those babies don't survive much past birth.
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.
> 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?
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
The DNA is the code but the animal still goes through the growth process which involves a certain amount of randomness.
It's not just randomness; it is environmental influence. A simple example being a lack of food in the environment affecting size and developmental health.
Well there are cloned humans now…
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?
The short version is yes! This would be a significant concern.
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.
Spares (1996, HarperCollins) – ISBN 978-0002246569 Michael Marshall Smith
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion
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.
Sedentary patients have tons of health trouble from lying in bed constantly, I'm not sure if its possible to grow a healthy human that doesn't move about.
There is some shared juju these people and the wellness influencer crowd in Brentwood are smoking
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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 suppose we can postpone this problem for another 100 years.
Haha. As far as I’ve heard the frozen head companies have a pretty terrible track record. The odds of them keeping the heads frozen continuously for 100 years are not good.
>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.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/jadensadventures/images/0/...
Go no farther than Futurama! Its very first episode sort of tackles the issue.
Reconnection does not look impossible. But it will be extremely hard.
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.
This is all giving me Altered Carbon vibes.
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.
I read that while listening to the soundtrack for Fringe.
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
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.'
Sounds like Altered Carbon (tv series).
Gah, just posted a sibling comment echoing the same thought. Do you think there's a revolving door between the Sci-Fi Writers Guild and the "Let's build billionaires a Torment Nexus" think tank?
Except Altered Carbon mostly waves the real difficulty away by talking about something like "downloading" a mind into a body.
I don't remember there being anything about growing replacement clones, but it would make sense given the other tech in the story.
The initial murder case Kovacs investigates in both the book/show involves a wealthy man who is killed but has his backup mind inserted into his backup clone so he is “recovered” so the victim has no memory of his killing since the backup was prior to killing instead of optimally just prior to death. There is also a big subplot that is show only with Kovacs’ sister and clones.
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.
Better biomimicry is a growth area in robotics but a brainless human just isn't possible.
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.
Reader Mode helps.
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.