Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.
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china organ harvest
every accusation a confession
it’s boring at this point
Rephrase the headline as a question:
Could ethically sourced “spare” human bodies revolutionize medicine?
Apply Betteridge’s law:
Until recently, the idea of making something like a bodyoid would have been relegated to the realms of science fiction and philosophical speculation.
Still sounds like it to me, dork.
bodyoids seething
yooo I love manmade horrors beyond comprehension
I am really skeptical that growing and maintaining brainless clones would actually be worth the effort for most potential applications.
this is a pretty old idea for like 0-rejection organ transplants. maybe some
would benefit from itYeah, probably not, since most of that mass is going to be unnecessary and bring hundreds of random complications - but it’d present a very valuable step towards better iterations. The stuff learned from full clones would be applicable towards more targeted growth of usable organs (with some pared-down body scaffolding), the clones themselves would allow for some degree of testing of genetic therapies, new medicines, nerve stapling, experimental transplant methods, exotic cuisine, etc.
All very ethical stuff.
Still pretty far-out from a thing we can do, and while mindless clones should be a “thing we can do ethically”… well, I’m sure we’ll find a way to fuck that up.
Okay I guess I’ll be that nerd.
Assuming these copies aren’t like actually conscious, what’s the ethical objection here?
I think most people are going to be fine with the idea of growing a new liver in a vat. They’re probably also going to be fine with that liver being surrounded by various supporting tissue to make the setup work. But if that supporting tissue begins to look too much like a real human being people after going to feel squeamish about it which is probably not all that logical but very human.
Yeah I kinda assumed if there ever were a thing it wouldn’t be an ACTUAL human in a vat, but like a blob of kidneys and livers with the brain of a cricket.
That they’re going to use regular humans which are cheaper and in abundence and lie about the source
The Island is a 2005 film, in which the rich clone themself in case of emergency, supposedly with brainless bodies kept on life support. In reality the clones of them possess consciousness, they are kept in a society in a bunker where they are told a deadly pathogen has rendered the earth unliveable except for one remote island where if you’re lucky you win lottery to go live there, the pathogen causes mental degradation as new arrivals have no memory and must relearn how to look after themselves. The truth is they have to learn as they are in fact basically an adult baby, having been made in the time immediate to arriving and the island is a euphemism for having all your organs harvested.
CW SA
And forced pregnancy
Yeah, I was like “oh so they just clone you from your DNA like Dolly but don’t grow the brain and keep the body alive and health- oh wait capital will never allow this, it’ll be homeless people”
I’ve heard that in the 70s and up through the 80s there was a suspicious source of cheap human skeletons from India in abundance with perfect bodies, no damage, even perfect teeth that medical schools and so on were using. Apparently someone started looking into this and the source suddenly dried up.
They’d absolutely use normal humans for this, it would be cheaper, they’d do it in the global south and they’d lie about it.
IMO I do NOT trust that they can really tell it’s not conscious. They have a clear incentive to say that no matter what, so I’m not gonna feel good about this unless I see solid proof that all the nervous system never develops at all.
They wouldn’t be conscious without a brain right?
People lose their consciousness when you take off their brains, yeah. I guess other parts of the nervous system don’t contribute to consciousness but the more I think about it the more I wonder how they can take out only the part that thinks (not to mention being 100% certain that it doesn’t develop at any point).
Idk there’s some evidence that nerves in your body can contribute to cognition beyond just pain reception and so on
In the standard view, people think its just some pattern of neurons in your forebrain and maybe some memories that makes you you. But all the neuron shit is important, all those glial cells, we keep learning more about the gut-brain axis, we don’t have any examples of minds without bodies.
Without even getting into philosophy of mind and that we don’t have an empirical definition of consciousness, so it’s impossible to tell for sure one of the clones is conscious or not, neuroscience doesn’t know for sure the anstomical boundaries of consciousness, either. As others have said, there seems to be more to perception and cognition than only brain matter.
If you can do a whole body, couldn’t you just do the part you need? Why make a fully human form without humanity. Just’s seems pretty sus. Also doing this under capitalism will be a horror show. If this was a state owned enterprise in China growing organs, much less to quibble about.
If you can do a whole body, couldn’t you just do the part you need?
It’s hard to say, since despite the article’s vague assertion that the technology is nearing, this is still purely speculative science fiction. What’s keeping the organ alive and growing? It needs some sort of life support system. The only existing life support system we have for organs is the rest of the body. The alternative is… some sort of organ scaffold in a nutrient bath? Who knows, either way we’re making up technologies.
Also a whole body allows a whole body transplant (brain transplant) which, while often overkill, would work on most things. (Brain transplants aren’t possible yet, but scientists are working on that one, and I’d bet it’s doable before growing a body is.)
Would be kinda dope to get a biologically compatible vagina out of this but I can tell you it’d be sure freaky to see the body you’re going to get implanted in
have you seen “Infinity Pool”? It’s not really about that exact concept, but something along those lines
not a plot spoiler, just a thematic spoiler
what if you could get a ethics transplant (kind of the liberal wet dream — a little flesh puppet that can carry your sins so you can freely engage in consequence-free hedonism)
“Just seems pretty sus” isn’t a good reason by itself not to do something.
“Couldn’t you just do the part you need?”
Maybe, if the goal is a transplant or something. But if we’re trying to have a long-term testing platform, human bodies are complex interdependent systems. Let’s say you want to test a blood pressure medication for example. You can’t have just a heart and veins, you also need lungs, kidneys, and a liver to see how the medication affects related organs and gets processed. Then you’d also need soft tissue and muscle surrounding that set up to stimulate the actual environment those organs would be housed in. At that point we’re talking about pretty much an entire body anyway, which is exactly why we test things on animals (problematic) and “volunteers” (super problematic under capitalism, great risk of harm even under some other system), you know, things with bodies.
Moving from vitro testing to animal testing is a very long process, and moving from animal testing to human testing is even longer. Important medications spend years if not decades in safety testing when they could be potentially saving human lives or massively improving them much sooner than that if we had some spare bodies around to test on which did not have the usual moral concerns or full moral status. Even if the drugs don’t all work, immediately being able to test them on a human body and realizing it causes intolerable side effects or harm or is just plain ineffectual, it saves us the labor and resources trying to continue to develop it or test it and researchers can move on to other options much faster.
I won’t engage on arguments about fictional technology feasibility in this case. But let’s talk about a full body without consciousness. If it is a fully formed and functional body, it has to have a nervous system. So it has to have some organ to regulate all the various functions that are coordinated by a nervous system. So basically this is a “animal person” following this logic. It wouldn’t have enough brain for “human consciousness” by design. So how is this significantly different from live animal for testing? Only the animal is “more human bit still animal”. This just gets pretty thorny as a thought experiment.
This is simply not a good situation to have thought experiments about. The conclusion is purely based on how generous your assumptions are: any other mammal is conscious, just not sapient, so even that makes your thought experiment faulty. But the issue is that any set of assumptions will completely determine your verdict and there isn’t really even that much meat to the scenario outside of the assumptions: if it was possible to just make a piece of meat that is biologically compatible with human beings, great; if the piece of meat is stated to have the quality of being sentient by the premise, then not so great.
A nervous system doesn’t necessarily imply sentience. Someone who is brain dead but on life support has a nervous system, yet no activity will be registered in the brain no matter what kind of stimulus happens to the body. One might bicker about it being impossible to know whether a brain dead person has any kind of qualia, but I’m pretty doubtful and think it’s reasonable to assume they don’t based on the evidence available. Hell, while we’re on the topic let’s just shift our hypothetical a little bit.
What if someone volunteered to donate their body to science after their death OR brain death. A terrible tragedy happens, and they do indeed wind up brain dead. The will is solid and a research institution (for the sake of argument, we will stipulate a morally sound institution) wants to keep that body on life support and use it for medical testing purposes to avoid having to test on animals or fully conscious and sentient humans. Assuming the person made such a donation in good health and a sound state of mind, I don’t see anything wrong with this. The family might object based on sentimental attachments to the body and the person the body used to be, but without a functional brain I don’t really think we’re talking about a “person” anymore, not morally speaking. Much closer to a corpse than a person in my opinion.
Having a human body grown without consciousness, sentience, or a social identity/connection at all overcomes any kind of remaining sentimentalist objections. If we accept that someone can donate their body and organs to science or other people upon their death/brain death, I think it follows that we can permit non-conscious and non-sentient bodies in general to be used for such purposes. Again, as long as the body is grown expressly without those things, I don’t see a coherent argument against it.
as long as the body is grown expressly without those things
That’s the tricky bit, how and where does this determination get made? A lot of people believe many animals are non-sentient even if there is strong evidence otherwise. I just think it is pretty fraught territory based on a hypothetical, which is kinda like a rocko’s basilisk thing to me.
Maybe the organs would function better as part of a whole body
Next gen crash test dummies
Remnant Christian morality
oh yeah, I saw this movie. I think it had Carrie Mulligan in it. sad ending.
anyway, next headline: undocumented migrants, the unhoused, and protestors legally classified as “bodyoids”.
Wild the version I saw had Ewan McGregor. Had a happy ending.
But it’s interesting to have two films about cloning people for their organs in 5 years. The Island 2005 and Never Let Me Go 2010
I too have seen this movie, although I could’ve sworn it was with Scarlett Johansson…
type inventionI remember when I was very unemployed multiple people recommended I do medical experiments for extra cash. Unfortunately, most medical experiments required I wasn’t taking other medication, which was true of pretty much every other unemployed person I knew.
Why not work on poor people’s health to the point where they don’t need meds and then use them for experiments? Or something
We’ve invented the disposable bodies from famous movie
Mickey 17don’t invent disposable bodiesthe island, house of the scorpion, it’s a well worn sci fi trope
The sixth day, so many shitty sci fi movies with a similar premise.
it basically boils down to ‘wot if humans were factory farmed and treated like we treat other animals’
Why are you all so skeptical? It would be great! We could finally have an ethical way to eat humans!
From the people who brought you “infants don’t feel pain”
If there’s legit no way they have consciousness or anything that’s fine, but I’m skeptical that it’s going to work out like that, in the same way that the Hyperloop turned from “future vacuum tube transport” to “tunnels that are only for teslas”
- “Brainless, paralyzed, what’s the difference really?”
I, too, also just watched The Prestige where David Bowie invents a painless instant cloning machine
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Fuckin’ Rusty Venture shit here
They’re called “Bodyoids” Brock, not clones, they are totally different! See, Bodyoids are dumb as bricks, nothing like the real McCoy here. I give them the lobotomies my self.
It’s powered by a forsaken child?!
