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With articles like this one a question always comes to my mind that I could google the answer to but then forget, again: What makes it so hard to clone just the

With articles like this one a question always comes to my mind that I could google the answer to but then forget, again: What makes it so hard to clone just the organs of a body? The obvious benefits of this for saving millions of lives are there, so why isn't the technology available if a whole body can be cloned? Is there no genuinely applied research being done on it?

southernplaces7 1y ago
After digging a bit, it turns out that a concrete answer is a bit hard to find. There's a lot of discussion on the ethical details around cloning humans and human bodies, which is fair enough, but not much technical info on why a focus couldn't be made on just cloning parts of bodies. Specifically, the useful ones for the many thousands of people who die each year because they don't get replacement transplants on time to be saved from a medical emergency. Edit: This article did however give some good answers, after first going all out on a dire description of future illegal organ donor markets. "How would organ cloning work? Say you had a failing liver and you needed a replacement. Doctors couldn’t remove your liver and clone a new one and you couldn’t take The Island route (see Chapter 10.1007/978-3-662-43526-7_3) and use your clone’s organs—scientifically this might be feasible, but ethically it’s a no go. Instead, doctors would use stem cells. Stem cells are perfect for organ cloning because they can differentiate into more than 200 types of cells. Scientists extract these stem cells (Fig. 4.2) when an embryo consists of around 150 cells. Unfortunately, removing the stem cells effectively destroys the embryo, which is why many oppose this practice." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7122979/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7122979/ That some people should oppose destroying mere embryos with just 150 or so cells for a procedure that can save many many thousands of fully developed, real human lives is beyond stupid.

southernplaces7 1y ago

After digging a bit, it turns out that a concrete answer is a bit hard to find. There's a lot of discussion on the ethical details around cloning humans and human bodies, which is fair enough, but not much technical info on why a focus couldn't be made on just cloning parts of bodies. Specifically, the useful ones for the many thousands of people who die each year because they don't get replacement transplants on time to be saved from a medical emergency. Edit: This article did however give some good answers, after first going all out on a dire description of future illegal organ donor markets. "How would organ cloning work? Say you had a failing liver and you needed a replacement. Doctors couldn’t remove your liver and clone a new one and you couldn’t take The Island route (see Chapter 10.1007/978-3-662-43526-7_3) and use your clone’s organs—scientifically this might be feasible, but ethically it’s a no go. Instead, doctors would use stem cells. Stem cells are perfect for organ cloning because they can differentiate into more than 200 types of cells. Scientists extract these stem cells (Fig. 4.2) when an embryo consists of around 150 cells. Unfortunately, removing the stem cells effectively destroys the embryo, which is why many oppose this practice." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7122979/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7122979/ That some people should oppose destroying mere embryos with just 150 or so cells for a procedure that can save many many thousands of fully developed, real human lives is beyond stupid.