4 ms·

Brain is kind of critical though. Might be easier and more efficient to just grow single targeted organs.

• carmen_sandiego 6y ago
  Sure, but presumably only the lower functions? So below some threshold that makes us feel less 'icky'.
  • hinkley 6y ago
    That line moves all the time. Be careful what you start.
    • carmen_sandiego 6y ago
      The line of what's required to make organs grow seems way lower than the level of consciousness that people are happy factory farming when it comes to animals. I'm not sure that will change much. People find humans extra 'icky', I'll concede. But abstracted in the above terms, I don't find it really worrisome. Politically difficult, sure, but that's a different question.
    • tablespoon 6y ago
      > That line moves all the time. Be careful what you start. Yeah. It's probably easier and more efficient to just raise the clones with intact brains, and just indoctrinate them to believe that dying so their organs can be harvested is their purpose and is noble and right. Then the organs can take care of themselves while they grow, requiring less staff. Any moral qualms the rest of the world may have could be addressed with some lie about how the clones have had done to them to make them subhuman. Seriously considering the idea of cloning people for organs is just inviting a nightmarish crime against humanity.
• at_a_remove 6y ago
  Eh, not really. There was a very funny old sci-fi story about scientists on some kind of space colony who just ... wanted fresh milk. And the point of the story was just how much of the actual cow they had to replicate (in semi-isolated containers) to end up making that milk. So you want an organ, sure, but you're going to need something like blood flowing through it so it doesn't just flat up die. That means that it is going to need oxygen -- so you're stuck replicating some kind of pulmonary system, and then you're going to need to put various nutrients in it, and then you're going to need to remove waste products, so you're definitely getting a liver and a kidney out of that ... and then just making the red blood cells requires bone marrow ... My guess is that anacephalacy would be studied and replicated to grow humans with only a minimal brainstem, with probably a nubbin of various hormonal systems tacked on. We could get to that a lot faster, I think, than single organs.
  • tener 6y ago
    Sounds difficult if you want to replicate organs 1-1, but what makes sense for human/animal bodies isn't necessarily the best way for labs. Maybe a single large biochemical reactor can solve half of those issues? There are already well established procedures for growing cell cultures and multiple startups that want to grow muscles (meat) or other organs. I don't know details - not my field - but pretty sure a large part of those seemingly hard problems are already solved/worked around.
  • bitwize 6y ago
    All you want is a banana, but you end up getting the gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle...