Ethically Sourced 'Spare' Human Bodies Could Revolutionize Medicine 188
In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, authors Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi make the case for human "bodyoids" that could reduce animal testing, improve drug development, and alleviate organ shortages: Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.
This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can't replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time.
There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. 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. These could revolutionize medical research and drug development, greatly reducing the need for animal testing, rescuing many people from organ transplant lists, and allowing us to produce more effective drugs and treatments. All without crossing most people's ethical lines.
Although it may seem like science fiction, recent technological progress has pushed this concept into the realm of plausibility. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of "bodyoids" -- a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.
This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can't replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time.
There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. 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. These could revolutionize medical research and drug development, greatly reducing the need for animal testing, rescuing many people from organ transplant lists, and allowing us to produce more effective drugs and treatments. All without crossing most people's ethical lines.
Although it may seem like science fiction, recent technological progress has pushed this concept into the realm of plausibility. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of "bodyoids" -- a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.
Nothing will go wrong here (Score:5, Funny)
This is going to go great.
Re:Nothing will go wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Nothing will go wrong here (Score:2)
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A sex doll that you have to make sure is fed, maybe have some form of exercise (physio style?) to make sure the muscle tone stays?
Maye even make sure does not get sick?
It might be similar to taking care of someone in a coma. You sure you want to spend so much effort on a sex doll?
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I would not spend any effort on a sex doll, not my thing. But I do understand a fair amount of people do spend some, and then some cash on top of it.
Feeding, excercise, and health, I would expect most if not all of these problems can be solved via some electrodes and IV inputs. This effort will obviously be solved on manufacturer side. What sounds like more effort would be hygiene, so the docking station would be quite something all right.
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Re:Nothing will go wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to go great.
Yup. Win the lottery, go to The Island [wikipedia.org] ...
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It's a concept that has appeared in science fiction far longer than that. For example in Lois McMaster Bujold's works. Essentially the idea of growing clones for organs and/or complete body swaps (specifically full body swaps in Bujolds works because individual organs can be cloned by themselves in her stories). Those stories examine the ethical implications of growing clones who, by necessity (in those stories), need to have fully functioning brains to develop properly to the point that they will be a suit
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Calling Larry Niven, people are trying to scavenge your book plots and turn them into reality.
People aren't good at boundaries, and FrankenPeopleParts is not a good research model, although I understand the driving needs to produce transplant parts.
Soon people will want Star body parts, your Barbie figure or hung pr0n star incarnate. Those lips!
The medical ethicists will demand a chain of authorities about the provenance of parts. Was that grown outside, or are these parts from the gulag or Myanmar?
This doe
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I actually feel somewhat hopeful we can maybe skip the "traffic infractions are capital crimes and send you to the organ banks" stage and go straight to the "artificial organs for anyone who needs them" stage.
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"The Jigsaw Man" was published in 1967; "A Gift From Earth" was 1968
Re: Nothing will go wrong here (Score:2)
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I was thinking Altered Carbon.
Right where my brain went. The uber-rich will spare-part themselves eternal life, while the rest of us fight each other to the death for their entertainment in the hopes they'll throw us some scraps. Why not? We're trying desperately to create dystopia in every other possible way.
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Indeed, we may say, "I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good...Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!" --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Be not afraid of growing organs, be afraid of growing bodies.
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One would think that it would be much, much, much easier to grow organs in a dish.
Not remotely. Why would one think that? Most organs are pretty vascular and for good reason. How does that work in a dish? Consider the limited amount of time that transplant organs can survive outside the body even with refrigeration and being filled with special solutions to preserve them, etc. Certainly not the months that it would take to grow them in a dish to transplantable size, and that's just one of the problems with the idea. Growing things in a dish works when the clusters of cells in the dish ar
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@TheMiddleRoad "Musk is a Nazi". Let's break this down. "salutes". He sent his heart to his fellow Americans. Not exactly screaming "Heil Hitler" now is it? "Dog whistles". Anything where any person centrist or right of centre connects with their base, and discusses facts is a "dog whistle" to you on the Left. It's your way of equating people you don't like with dogs.
Sure, sure, and that sending out of his heart to his fellow Americans was totally in isolation and there were no past incidents that sent him scrambling to tour Auschwitz to prove to the world he wasn't a Nazi. and he totally did not support the far-right authoritarian Nazi-apologist party in Germany and tell a crowd of them that there is "...frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that." He certainly didn't follow up the incident where he "sent his heart to his fellow Americans
Well, (Score:5, Interesting)
unethically sourced 'spare' human bodies could revolutionize it too. And if the unethically sourced ones are cheaper and/or easier to obtain, then... (fill in what's missing).
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unethically sourced 'spare' human bodies could revolutionize it too. And if the unethically sourced ones are cheaper and/or easier to obtain, then... (fill in what's missing).
I'm not sure that's even true.
In the US alone we already have around 25k ethically sourced bodies that are used for the same purpose, a program that's been in place since the mid 80s
If any "revolution" happened, it was then.
Adding cloned bodies, or as you mention unethically sourced ones, can sure raise that number but that sounds like an incremental improvement not some revolution in medicine.
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Adding cloned bodies, or as you mention unethically sourced ones, can sure raise that number but that sounds like an incremental improvement not some revolution in medicine.
Id assume the real advancement is a genetic and medical database history of billions of humans that are alive now so that the right “spare” part(s) can be harvested immediately with no uncomfortable waiting.
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Have ICE bust in and start grabbing organ donors. Good thing everyone's DNA is on file.
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Have ICE bust in and start grabbing organ donors. Good thing everyone's DNA is on file.
I mean sure, but they would probably pay 10x+ more for it to pass the paper bag test and just grab it off some poor white person. Or you can just say you did, his name was “Abby Normal” - they won’t be able to tell the difference.
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Unethically sourced body parts are already a thing, https://www.bbc.com/news/65960... [bbc.com] . Might be nice for people worried about dying due to organ failure to have a source that was both reliable and ethical so as to reduce this practice.
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unethically sourced 'spare' human bodies could revolutionize it too. And if the unethically sourced ones are cheaper and/or easier to obtain, then... (fill in what's missing).
Indeed, the bodies that are 68% palm oil are much cheaper but nowhere near as ecologically sustainable (and I don't think they taste as nice).
In all seriousness, we've been here before. Victorian era graverobbers (A.K.A. the Resurrectionists) [nationalarchives.gov.uk] would look for fresh corpses to steal as they could be sold to universities for medical training and experimentation. This lead to the Anatomy act of 1832 which stipulated that medical students could use certain corpses, initially limited to executed murderers, for
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Ethics are all opinion-based and change with the times. What's not ethical now can be altered. If there's any lesson that I've learned since 2020, it's that ethics are malleable.
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You may find ethics is deeper than that. [chatgpt.com]
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I think you're confusing morals and ethics. You can make the argument that ethics are just an idealized form of morals that seek to be more universally acceptable. Indeed, even ethics committees and people who study ethics deeply are generally still bound up in socially developed moral stances Still, the word you are looking for here is definitely morals.
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There is already a trade in unethically sourced body parts. Both Israel and China have been accused of stealing organs. In Israel's case from Palestinians, in China's case from condemned prisoners after execution.
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Okay, who's got Burke and Hare's email addresses?
China has been doing that for some time (Score:2)
I don't think it's for the wealthy though they're aren't enough truly wealthy to matter it's for the middle class and upper middle class who can then buy the organs.
Other way it's something that's already going on. And I have no doubt it's going on in othe
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unethically sourced 'spare' human bodies could revolutionize it too.
Not remotely. Not without some amazing breakthroughs in immunology. Cloned body parts without rejection issues would be vastly superior from a medical standpoint.
What the fuck- (Score:2)
Re:What the fuck- (Score:4, Funny)
isn't that how politicians are created?
Re:What the fuck- (Score:5, Funny)
isn't that how politicians are created?
You gotta remove big chunks of the spine as well for that particular procedure.
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Maybe the two, combined, explains that weird toddler fist thing POTUS does.
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Maybe the two, combined, explains that weird toddler fist thing POTUS does.
Toddler Fist would be a great protest band name.
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Clearly it's a lot more ethical if you can grow them without brains in the first place. Of course, that does raise the question of precisely what that means. How much of the brain is "the brain" for ethical purposes? For example, does it have a Medulla Oblongata and is missing just the rest of the brain, or is it missing that as well? The fact is that some parts of the brain are a bit required to regulate the body. However the fact that organs still function as transplants, with all the neural connections s
"Excuse me, old chap" (Score:4, Funny)
Not happening (Score:2)
To create these so called "bodvoids" you would need to create totipotent stem cells (not pluripotent) .. that's way too difficult to do in humans because to find out the right signals needed .. unlike for creating pluripotent cells .. it would involve messing with embryos to figure out and no scientist wants to risk jail even if it's a Nobel. What are you going to do sitting in jail with a Nobel prize? .. It won't make you bad-ass in jail.
Re: Not happening (Score:2)
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Are they? Then why hasn't anyone done it? It is a guaranteed Nobel prize.
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We're already turning stem cells into gametes in animals, not to mention cloning them. Absolutely no reason it can't be done in humans, no special secret sauce that requires objectionable experiments on embryos beyond research that is already done for obstetrics reasons.
"Ethically sourced" (Score:4)
Yeah just like blood, hair, hormones etc. which are harvested from the poor & desperate and make companies billions. How long before a mysteriously large number of bodies show up from Calcutta or Laos all of who seem to have signed paperwork donating themselves to a megacorp?
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Didn't RTFA. Or the summary.
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Which said nothing at all about that.
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They would presumably have signs of being ethically sourced though. If they removed all parts of the brain except those needed for the body to grow to enough maturity to be harvested, presumably it would be in absolutely pristine condition. No signs of being lived in. The body chemistry would probably be different too, having been fed through IV drips.
They might also be one specific ethnicity, or have specific combinations of genes that were selected e.g. for heart health or rapid maturity.
Of course some pe
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Filthy Tleilaxu (Score:4, Informative)
Remember why you never saw female members of Tleilaxu society.
Missed Chances (Score:2)
With life beginning at conception, you cannot have ethically grown bodyoids.
Or maybe not. I guess there would be a moral way to grow those from bad people or unworthy offspring. By transplanting them into a better person you might be saving a little part of their doomed soul.
Though none of that really matters because other countries have different morals and if one country goes after it then the others must as well. It's too useful to ignore. Both the pros and cons are too useful to not advance more in
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"...if one country goes after it then the others must as well."
False. If one person murders then others must as well?
"It's too useful to ignore. Both the pros and cons are too useful to not advance more in this area."
You don't have to ignore it to not do it. Medical experimentation isn't ignored because it's not useful.
Please Think.
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"...if one country goes after it then the others must as well."
Not necessarily, but in one country does allow research to proceed and they succeed a black market will form. Stopping that will be just as successful as stopping fentanyl.
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With life beginning at conception, you cannot have ethically grown bodyoids.
Silly boy, life begins at erection!
I always wondered why the fundamentalists haven't picked up that since sperm and egg are both living, and can be turned into humans, that they aren't demanding that every egg be fertilized and brought to full term in order to comply with their gawd's mandates, and punish those who do not do this. Every period is a dead potential new human.
I think I've read this Niven story before (Score:2)
This is giving me "A Gift From Earth" vibes.
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Or the "Long Arm of Gill Hamilton"
Science fiction justifies its existence again (Score:2)
It's been talking about these ethical problems for many decades. We need to get the ethicists to read some of the stories to help them work at the issue.
How it went (Score:2)
"But.... ETHICALLY!"
The feeling that we live in one giant sarcastic reality gameshow is getting stronger by the minute....
Ah, another man-made horror beyond my comprehensio (Score:2)
I'm not surprised, obviously. Secular opinion on human dignity is obviously very much different than my take on it.
It's just... we've seen so many things go wrong in ludicrous ways. I accept that sci-fi isn't a given outcome but considering, again, all the things that went wrong in the past in ways nobody expected... One would think a teensy little bit of caution would be in order, even in those people that do not ascribe any humanity to a body without consciousness.
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If it doesnt have a brain it cant suffer.
If a body can be grown that is completely incapable of any form of thought you've got nothing to fear monger over here as it's morally equivalent to using a legally dead, brain dead person's body parts which we already do.
Too Many Ethical Questions (Score:2)
If a body can be grown that is completely incapable of any form of thought...
If we can do that i.e. turn on or off the generation of different organs then why would you grow an entire body? The far more efficient and less ethically dubious approach would be to just generate the one organ you need. If the argument is that you need the body to support the growth of the organ you need then that means you have to have some neural tissue to control the heart and lungs etc. so exactly how incapable of thought and feeling will the body be? In particular exactly where is the line between b
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I assumed the full body generation would be for medical testing as we would want a full picture of what a tested drug does to the entire body. Still wouldnt cover brain damage but it would be ethically cleaner than animal testing (which I'm not necessarily against but I am in favor of finding other options for).
As for the rest, you suggest this "raises so many different ethical concerns" but you dont mention what any could be so I have no idea how to reply to that. As long as there's not ever any conscious
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You wouldn't, for organs. It's likely simpler to grow specific organs, although at least for some you might need a bunch of other stuff for support.
For clinical trials you'd want a whole body.
Just make a transporter (Score:2)
Molecular 3d printing of a body is only slightly less unrealistic than somehow growing complete adult bodies with only the necessary parts of the brain. Also if you can just delete the brain from the plan, the ability to just grow the organ you want in isolation is unlikely to be beyond you.
Humanity isn't going to stick around long enough to reach that level of technology either way.
Sounds like a complete BS story (Score:2)
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Don't think that they actually achieve it, only that it's the story they give while they do it. It's kind of like AI, just need some good lies to cover for the crimes.
All they want to do is normalize the idea that it is ethical to harvest human bodies based on lies about how they do it. Then they don't even need to "grow" them in a lab, just claim they did. Do not forget about Elizabeth Holmes.
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Nonsense. There are birth defects that involve an otherwise healthy body minus much of the brain and part of the head. And in case you haven't watched any hospital shows lately, we're pretty good at "controlling all the living functions" in order to keep a brain dead body going.
Compartementalized thinking again (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a computer scientist by training and not well versed in biology, but last I checked my whole body was full of "neural components" that made me "aware" and "feel pain" in all sorts of places outside my head. I think that this is actually inherently necessary for the proper function of the particular body part, be it my toe or my spleen. In fact, I read in a few places that humans' digestive tracts contain more neurological tissue than their brains - and the majority of e.g. neurotransmitters are synthesized there, fulfilling other functions too than just thoughts.
Our bodies can't really be abstracted (that well) into separate, fungible or removable components - it's rather a complex system with closely intertwined subsystems. Yes, of course sometimes we lose some part and can still function afterwards, although sub-optimally (compared to the hale whole) to a greater or lesser extent.
Another ethical question: if an anesthetist puts me under (so that I temporarily - hopefully - lose my thinking, awareness and pain perception, am I also a spare human body during that period? (We do sometimes semi-jokingly refer to surgeons as meat mechanics, after all.)
SciFi way ahead of you (Score:2)
Soylent Green (based on an earlier novel, "Make Room! Make Room!") is too easy a easy reach. Consider, for instance, Never Let Me Go [imdb.com] , in which whole cadres of children are raised in orphanages, and given okay lives, only to be gradually culled for their parts as they reach adulthood.
A source already exists (Score:3)
Motorcycle riders.
deus ex (Score:5, Interesting)
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Isn't that the plot of many zombie stories?
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Can anyone reference a story that addresses only the question of growing bodies without brains and using them for organs, without bringing in a deus ex?
In Altered Carbon [imdb.com] they grow human bodies without a consciousness and then rather than harvesting the organs for another person, they move the other person's consciousness into the body.
Greetings from Jupiter! (Score:2)
Hello earthlings! I just arrived from Jupiter. It is my first day on Earth and I have never interacted with humans before.
I just wanted to stop by and say that this seems like such a great idea, I am sure there will be no problems with it. It seems like it will revolutionize your medical research and save many lives, who wouldn't want that? It's a no brainer (yuk yuk)!
Minds matter (Score:2)
The difference between a body and a person is the presence of a mind. No brain means no mind.
A lab with a mindless body being experimented on is extremely disconcerting, but if you can overcome that feeling it is a great idea.
Imagine cloning yourself, with genetic corrections made for any issues you have, and then having a nice set of spare parts. If we get better at connecting nerves this could mean replacement limbs, eyes and ears in addition to internal organs. Of course, it'll be expensive and keepin
Difficult to grow a healthy "bodyroid"... (Score:2)
...if it doesn't have a brainstem to regulate basic things such as breathing, body temperature, etc. Oh, and you might need a pituitary gland, and a hypothalamus to regulate the pituitary, and then maybe in order to grow a hypothalamus you'd need a thalamus? (Fun fact I was taught in grad school: The thalamus is the one part of the brain that appears to be absolutely essential for consciousness, in the sense that no human being with thalamic damage has ever exhibited signs of consciousness. I don't know
Why couldn't God have given me a twin? (Score:2)
Not creepy AT ALL! (Score:2)
No, Sir!
Sure, but... (Score:2)
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...can they still be elected president? I mean, nothing in the Constitution says they can't... right?
Couldn't be worse than Drumpf.
Yeah, maybe, but... (Score:2)
...I like the Deep Mind approach
After solving protein folding, their next goal is to create an accurate cell simulation
This could be expanded to accurate simulations of any organ or system, giving deep insight into how they all work and respond to treatments
A brainless body is nearly as difficult to study as a living person. A simulation can be understood at any level of detail
Ray Winnegar's Underground (Score:2)
Underground, as part of it's background lore, posits that McRainey's, their version of McDonalds, looked into cloning cattle, and determined that it cost 200,000 per clone.
But then they figured out that the average adult buys 250,000 dollars worth of their food in a lifetime, so they didn't clone cattle, they cloned people, made them genetically predisposed to like their food, and there you go.
Wonderful... NOT (Score:2)
So as soon as you start, there will be huge "pro-life" protests outside. And arguments about whether they're human, and who has to keep them alive.
I know where I saw this before, in the early 90's'. The result was a 10,000 year war, and eventually the "pro-lifers" planted a bomb that blew up Krypton.
The bodies will be worthless (Score:2)
How healthy are humans who are permanently bed-ridden? How healthy are astronauts when their bodies are not subject to the constant constraints of gravity?
That's exactly how healthy a non-mobile, mindless clone will be.
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You don't have to worry about the clone's feelings or dignity... it's literally brainless.
Put it in a sling over a treadmill and use NMES to make it walk for eight hours a day while you feed it an optimal diet through a tube.
Alternatively (Score:2)
I have a Modest Proposal, if anyone is interested.
Need Body for Abe Normal's Brain (Score:2)
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This is the definition of a slippery slope
You got a great laugh out of me with this. "Slippery slope" is a logical fallacy https://www.txst.edu/philosoph... [txst.edu] and your post IS one big slippery slope logical fallacy, only you don't even say what the danger is. Your post is what quite literally meets "the definition of a slippery slope".
It's "about 10,000x worse" than embryo research!? Can you show me the math on that?
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Generally speaking, but not all slippery slope argument is fallacious. [chatgpt.com]
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Yeah, that's bad wording on my part. The one above definitely is though.
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As far as I know we are the only known species that came up with a concept of ethics
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Other species may have a sense of social morality. [chatgpt.com]
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This should NOT have been modded offtopic. The entire point is to normalize the human body as a resource to be exploited.
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That's funny, from where I'm sitting the whole point is to heal the sick and reduce human suffering. People die every day due to not being able to find a needed organ doner, these are people's spouses and children.
Re:MAGAoids (Score:5, Informative)
Which is exactly how MAGA view women. Nothing but a vessel to pop out a child. What happens afterwards is not their concern.
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The entire point is to normalize the human body as a resource to be exploited.
That... is already completely normalized. Whether we're talking about ethical exploitation where people consent to organ donation, etc. or we're talking about unethical exploitation such as slave labor, or working people in warehouses with no air conditioning in insanely unhealthy conditions. Workplaces and even schools frequently fail to acknowledge the basic biological necessities of their workers, students, etc. Militaries regularly sacrifice the life and health of their members. Not just in terms of the
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