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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: 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.