Given the number of people who oppose abortions and animal testing I'd like to pose this theoretical situation:

Scientists have successfully removed the genes from test subjects which are responsible for the growth of a brain. Hormone production and the nervous system are still intact, allowing the body to respond to stimuli. The effective intelligence of this creation does not exceed that of an insect... should they be allowed to create thousands of these, which would eliminate the need for conscious test subjects (such as mice and humans)?

Could make clones of ourselves without brains so we can harvest the blood/organs for later use.

We could just clone our organs in that scenario :p

^ *Ding*

There's been a good bit of work over the last few years into building new organs by basically printing them or growing them on a degradable scaffold, so by the time we'd be cloning full bodies to keep in storage for harvesting, that tech would already be made moot by just making individual organs on demand.

*ding*

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 171907.htm

nanotechnology means the ability to play with things on the atomic scale (and being able to hijack biological "machines" to do stuff for us counts as nanotechnology), which means rather than having to clone "brainless" people to harvest organs, we can just make the organs directly by synthesising the proper cell types and putting them onto a scaffold of the required organ, and use machines to simulate the conditions of the human body so the organ can grow.

ironically, we have the technology to do this, but we still cant figure out how to properly clone things. it takes hundreds of attempts to get even a single viable clone embryo

Not quite sure how we got to the cloning of individual organs but you missed the point in any case. Everything within the body is linked and individual organs simply can't compete with an actual body when it comes to medical testing (etc).

yes, but creating ordinary clones is difficult enough, creating them without brains but still useable as test subjects?...

the people who try are far more likely to just start kidnapping people off the street because perfecting the genetic modifications would likely take multiple attempts.

i philosophically can see nothing wrong with it if the technology was perfect from the start, without conciousness they would feel nothing, they would perceive no time or pain.

but the development process of the genetic "mod list" to eliminate brain function and conciousness would require live subjects and violate the entire purpose of using brainless unconcious clones

And a human body with a functioning brain GREATLY trumps one without a brain or otherwise brain dead body.

What your proposing is essentially a bunch of cloned organs stuffed into a sack of skin for poking and prodding. So why wouldn't a set of individual organs not be as good as said "sack-o-guts"?

To clarify, Im not against the principal of this idea. I think human trials should be far more intensive in regards to medications and surgical procedures, but due to running the chance of really fucking someone up its not. Something like this would solve that issue. But good luck getting it past the bible banging hypocrites that swear its against "god".

And for those that argue against it using a similar argument, define "life".

Because even if a drug or virus is supposed to target a specific organ it may bind to a similar receptor in a completely different place, the immune system is also very complex and you need an entire body to mess around with if you're going anywhere.

Quite often things such as parasites and bacteria in the gut manipulate the immune system, yet at the same time the immune response they diverted could be harmful to the human body. This is the kind of thing that would be difficult to model using individual organs, especially if you set out on a voyage of discovery.



The number of live test subjects required to perfect this would hopefully be minimal and would essentially be a trade off for some of the people who could have died going through conventional medical testing. Don't forget that we can still go through rats (etc) first.

It's also probably much easier to start with a controlled base of genetic variations and fewer legal issues (etc) instead of finding a random person on the street. In the long term it's more viable not to sit on a legal landmine.

Point taken, was just curious if you could back up your choice of an entire body versus a a few jars of organs.

But on the same note, the brains responses to discomfort, pain, nausea and other adverse reactions is just as crucial as the bodies reaction to an invading organism.

The brain controls the body. All of the body. It's not like you can just remove the brain entirely and have the body keep working like there was no brain.

You can remove consciousness, probably, but at the same time it's difficult to not damage the body functions when you do it.

It's a nice idea, but classes i've taken suggest it's not really possible.

I thought your classes were boring and didn't teach you anything.

Pretty much everything you learn in college/school is a lie anyway. I was fortunate enough to talk with some actual immunologists and the basic stuff they told me in a week goes far beyond anything you're told in college.

Pruning sections of the brain and regulating the rest (e.g pacemakers) doesn't sound too far fetched to me. A complete amateur ('biohackers') can do some fairly impressive stuff nowadays... things which would have been impossible 30/20 years ago.