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Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine:
Even if it all works, it may not be practical or economical to "grow" bodyoids, possibly for many years, until they can be mature enough to be useful for our ends. Each of these questions will require substantial research and time. But we believe this idea is now plausible enough to justify discussing both the technical feasibility and the ethical implications.
Bodyoids could address many ethical problems in modern medicine, offering ways to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering. For example, they could offer an ethical alternative to the way we currently use nonhuman animals for research and food, providing meat or other products with no animal suffering or awareness.
But when we come to human bodyoids, the issues become harder. Many will find the concept grotesque or appalling. And for good reason. We have an innate respect for human life in all its forms. We do not allow broad research on people who no longer have consciousness or, in some cases, never had it.
At the same time, we know much can be gained from studying the human body. We learn much from the bodies of the dead, which these days are used for teaching and research only with consent. In laboratories, we study cells and tissues that were taken, with consent, from the bodies of the dead and the living.
Recently we have even begun using for experiments the "animated cadavers" of people who have been declared legally dead, who have lost all brain function but whose other organs continue to function with mechanical assistance. Genetically modified pig kidneys have been connected to, or transplanted into, these legally dead but physiologically active cadavers to help researchers determine whether they would work in living people.
In all these cases, nothing was, legally, a living human being at the time it was used for research. Human bodyoids would also fall into that category. But there are still a number of issues worth considering. The first is consent: The cells used to make bodyoids would have to come from someone, and we'd have to make sure that this someone consented to this particular, likely controversial, use. But perhaps the deepest issue is that bodyoids might diminish the human status of real people who lack consciousness or sentience.
Thus far, we have held to a standard that requires us to treat all humans born alive as people, entitled to life and respect. Would bodyoids—created without pregnancy, parental hopes, or indeed parents—blur that line? Or would we consider a bodyoid a human being, entitled to the same respect? If so, why—just because it looks like us? A sufficiently detailed mannequin can meet that test. Because it looks like us and is alive? Because it is alive and has our DNA? These are questions that will require careful thought.
Until recently, the idea of making something like a bodyoid would have been relegated to the realms of science fiction and philosophical speculation. But now it is at least plausible—and possibly revolutionary. It is time for it to be explored.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, @07:42AM (1 child)
> Bodyoids could address many ethical problems in modern medicine, offering ways to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering. For example, they could offer an ethical alternative to the way we currently use nonhuman animals for research and food, providing meat or other products with no animal suffering or awareness.
The usual cart-before-the-horse. Rather than worrying about testing on animals, so we'll make human bodies without brains, how about we start with mouse bodies without brains? Keep up the "animal" testing, and test the feasibility grow the technology.
The real problem is: the brain, A beating heart is controlled by a brain. I think it'd be pretty hard to put a pacemaker into a "bodyoid", and also the functions of the kidneys - peeing -- and other bodily maintenance that's all controlled by the brain.. taking a difficult task and making it difficult.
In other news, on a 1990's episode of Sliders the TV show, your clone is on the run, trying to preserve its life when you need a liver transplant... [but clones have no rights!]
(Score: 2) by Undefined on Tuesday April 15, @04:05PM
No. See: Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday April 15, @08:54AM (10 children)
Actually, this could make ethical problems worse. Much worse.
As it is cheaper and faster to hunt and kill someone on demand than grow a bodyoid, already established gangs of criminals in this kind of trade may legitimize the true human organs by false bodyoid certificates.
If something may go off bad, it will.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @01:29PM (2 children)
>Bodyoids could address many ethical problems in modern medicine, offering ways to
create dystopian science fiction of the most nightmarish variety- bodyoids that gain consciousness and self-awareness. We already have some examples I'm sure.
>As it is cheaper and faster to hunt and kill someone on demand
I have heard stories from the 1990s about a very wealthy elderly man from a very high population country who appeared in a New York hospital one evening requiring medical intervention. His people had assembled a team of ~20 of the best available specialists (one of whom was a friend, thus the story), these physicians were being paid mid-5 figures each to be present for the evening. The initial consulting team determined that organ transplantation offered the best possible outcome, and within less than 24 hours a suitable young donor appeared... the donor was not expected to survive the organ removal long term, but the sponsor did and both were back on his private plane as soon as the sponsor was stable enough to transport.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday April 15, @01:40PM (1 child)
"The Island" was essentially this exact plot. It was an entertaining movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @02:41PM
Clones is one kind of plot, I'm pretty sure this was just a kid from a poor family who was used for the purpose. As the story reached me there was absolutely no way to know the circumstances of the organ donor's selection / acquisition.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 15, @01:40PM (2 children)
It may be cheaper, but I think you'll need to match the DNA, so the pool of candidates will be rather small. ... Immune suppression is possible, but an organ would require a rather extreme version.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Touché) by looorg on Tuesday April 15, @01:56PM (1 child)
If only there was some place that peons paid to have their DNA checked and stored online ... Lets call it 22+1 and me or something. Only so they for fun can find out that they are 1/x Viking, 1/y Native American etc etc. If only there was some other things you could do with all the biological materials they sent in ...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 15, @05:32PM
You've got to be extremely similar in DNA to not need strong immune-suppressants after a transplant of a foreign organ. Usually that means an identical twin, though sometimes a brother or sister is close enough. (I'm not sure how long those kidneys last, or how strong the immune-suppressants need to be.)
(OTOH, I have heard that there's decent progress on just removing everything that contains an antigen that the immune system would recognize...but I don't really expect this to be sufficient anytime soon.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 15, @04:22PM (1 child)
I feel like the risk here is overstated.
An organ off the street will require anti-rejection drugs and will be worth significantly less than an organ from a cloned bodyoid that's an exact genetic match for the recipient.
The difficulty is for organs that a protracted amount of time to grow large enough to be useful.
The most common organs for transplantation are the Kidney, Liver, Heart, Lung, and Pancreas. Of these, I assume the heart has to be near net size; I don't know about the others. Partial liver transplants are a thing, so that one I assume is not size critical.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 15, @05:36PM
There's work on transplanting pancreatic beta cells surrounded by a membrane that protects them from the immune system. According to the report I read (pop-sci, several years ago) the cells weren't transplanted into the pancreas but somewhere else (I forget where) and they lasted for at least several weeks, with no obvious reason that they couldn't last permanently. (I don't remember for sure, but this may have been a pig or a dog.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @06:41PM
Examine your premises. Organ donation requires someone with immune system compatibility. They don't grow on trees. You have to find that person, then hunt them down. A bodyoid with guaranteed compatibility (say because it's grown from your own stem cells) can be grown, perhaps even on an appropriately engineered tree.
My view is that if the wealthy person in question has planned ahead, then the bodyoid is cheaper and far more legal. The big problem comes in when rich person with really deep pockets direly needs a transplant sooner than can be grown by bodyoid. Finding and snatching someone out of desperation would be more a thing in that case.
(Score: 2) by bussdriver on Thursday April 17, @01:52AM
I am waiting for that story since Dick Cheney got a heart replacement from a long time search for the right one.
I'd prefer a mystery conspiracy story because it'll begin first as something for the elite to do in the shadows. Hopefully getting people ready for when that time comes to prevent it in a severe and strong way before we end up with a dystopian situation where society has broken down to that point. I'm not a fan of fiction that presents the inevitability of such things because it contributes to the chances it becomes reality later on such as making more people cynical to prevention when the times comes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday April 15, @09:29AM (2 children)
Just wait for their kidneys to fail and being told that they now require dialysis many hours every other day for the rest of their life. The appalling grotesqueness quickly goes away then if you just have some spare kidneys that will 100% match yours that can be reinstalled.
(Score: 2) by Username on Tuesday April 15, @03:33PM (1 child)
Whatever happened to growing new ones with stem cells? I remember new ears and what not growing on people's arms or on thier sides.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 15, @04:04PM
It's probably one of those things that are currently still 10+ years away with a very flexible goalpost. Have not seen anything about great progress in organ cloning, growing new once or mechanical replacments. I think they are still sort of fixated on pigs and cleaning them or desperate measures to get people to donate more organs. Still if the population gets older and older a lot of these problems become greater and greater. Need more replacement parts.
It's also one of those things I am not certain that they can solve with a pill or an injection or something as there is something that needs to be removed from the body. The options in that regard are all messy. Sucking it out, Dialysis, is probably the least messy. Great improvements have been made over the last few decades but as far I know it has sort of hit a wall. You just can't keep sucking out fluids faster and faster and hope that the patient will like it, and survive. You need to get things to exit the body and we only have so many options for that and none of them are attractive or easy.
Things need to be sucked out, including a lot of excess liquids that you can no longer expel as urine since you eventually have close to zero production. So if your kidneys fail you are basically in a world of suck. No good options. Transplantation as it is today isn't exactly sunshine and unicorns either, lots of pills to eat every day forever. In that regard that cloning or "spare body" thing seems more and more tempting until they invent the cyborg-kidney that you can implant as a replacement.
I interviewed some doctors, nurses and patients for a project about people living with dialysis and one of the doctors flat out said that he would rather get Cancer then Renal failure. It would suck to but it's temporary and then you are mostly ok or dead. Here there is never any ok again. No cure. Nothing get better. You will hopefully feel less worse every other day but then the cycle restarts. It's not that they can't keep you alive almost indefinitely. It's that the process sucks in every possible imaginable way. Every other day for 3-6h you are hooked up to a machine that sucks the blood out of your body, filters it and pushes it back in again. If you didn't have issues with blood pressure and such things before then you'll get it. The people are drained in that regard. You better hope you are already retired cause I don't see you holding down a full time job ever again.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aim on Tuesday April 15, @09:35AM (3 children)
Who else is reminded of the scifi dystopia "The Island"?
(Score: 2) by HeadlineEditor on Tuesday April 15, @11:22AM
Yes. Also: Never Let Me Go [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday April 15, @02:04PM
Ah, yeah, I noted it in a reply above your comment. Just hadn't gotten down this far yet. While it would be rather unlikely for things to get so far as something like "The Island". It's certainly something to avoid!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Wednesday April 16, @01:57AM
That was exactly my thought too. Corp shows buyer an amorphous blob of tissue. The rest of the movie shows how they "cut costs".
(Score: 4, Touché) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday April 15, @11:42AM (14 children)
All it means is the rich guys people love to hate - Soros, Trump, Gates, Musk, Bezos, etc - will be around for centuries rather than decades. What could possibly go wrong?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @01:12PM (9 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @06:38PM (8 children)
>As a aside, I challenge anyone to find a life extension tech that would benefit the general public, but not benefit rich people first.
Sanitizing drinking water, i.e. with chlorine and similar processes. Now, you may argue that only happens in "rich" countries, but once it's rolled out it benefits everyone using the water system.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @06:50PM (7 children)
I'll note that historically, sanitized drinking water would have been a rich person thing, as running water in a palace or manor taken from a clean spring.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @07:16PM (6 children)
>>Sanitizing drinking water, i.e. with chlorine and similar processes. Now, you may argue that only happens in "rich" countries, but once it's rolled out it benefits everyone using the water system.
>I'll note that historically, sanitized drinking water would have been a rich person thing, as running water in a palace or manor taken from a clean spring.
I'll not that historically, sanitizing drinking water with chlorine and similar processes was first rolled out in Hamburg in 1893, and at city-scale in Maidstone, England in 1897 - later coming to America in Jersey City in 1908.
Around those same times, the palaces and manors still had servants to muck out the privies.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @07:34PM (5 children)
That's the version for the masses.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @08:34PM (4 children)
>That's the version for the masses.
And which rich manors chlorinated their water before 1908?
I'll note that simply staying away from the poxy masses and staking out a clean spring to drink is a related idea, but hardly tech.
I'll also note that staking claim to clean fresh water sources is also historically practiced as a communist activity. The native Apalachee which occupied the land around Wakulla Springs, south of Tallahassee Florida, were reputed to be the fiercest fighters and successfully managed to repel European invaders from the headwaters of their clean water source, until Andrew Jackson.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @08:54PM (3 children)
Why would they need to? Chlorination is a mass treatment of an impure source. The wealthy would have both better quality water sources (such as deep well water) and better treatments - such as boiling water and sand filters, for example, that they could use on water for their personal consumption.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @09:35PM (2 children)
So, then, chlorination of water is a tech that did extend life, but did not roll out to the rich first.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 15, @09:42PM (1 child)
My point is that the wealthy had better tech already. This was merely the version that scaled up for the public (and was proven in halting some waterborne disease outbreaks).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 15, @10:01PM
>My point is that the wealthy had better tech already. This was merely the version that scaled up for the public (and was proven in halting some waterborne disease outbreaks).
My point is that the wealthy didn't have tech, they had wealth, and that wealth didn't necessarily protect them from cholera, typhoid or any of the other lovelies that chlorinated water put mostly to bed. Typhoid Mary was still serving food and disease to the wealthy in 1907. Cleaning up municipal water stopped that vector.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by liar on Tuesday April 15, @04:28PM (1 child)
some shades of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mickey_17 [wikipedia.org]
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 2) by liar on Wednesday April 16, @02:20AM
PLEASE TELL ME, CAN ANY OF YOU HONESTLY GUARANTEE THAT THE TECHNOLOGYWILL NOT BE ABUSED?
https://clip.cafe/mickey-17-2025/please-tell-me-s7/ [clip.cafe]
Noli nothis permittere te terere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, @10:23PM
This won't fix brain issues. You should understand this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 16, @10:12PM
With exception to those who are young and deserve the opportunity for a full life, we should probably just accept our mortality instead of unleashing ever more terrifying eldrich horrors upon the universe.