Comment by dyauspitr
Comment by dyauspitr 3 days ago
We really should be able to grow human bodies without a brain for testing purposes. It’s gruesome but realistically victimless at the end of the day.
Comment by dyauspitr 3 days ago
We really should be able to grow human bodies without a brain for testing purposes. It’s gruesome but realistically victimless at the end of the day.
I don't think the biology is there, let alone consensus on the major ethical questions involved
As someone whose mother died to pancan, I could really care less on any of the brainwashed old farts in their churches or parliaments. None of that matters to me or the people suffering from cancers, it’s al Knut a selfish obstruction attaching religion to the research material
A more practical option is using brain-dead humans for medical testing. This was discussed recently in the journal Science, using the term "physiologically maintained deceased". As they say, this "traverses complex ethical and moral terrain". (I've seen enough zombie movies to know how this ends up :-)
The anti abortion and anti birth control contingent would never let even a little of that happen in countries with significant fundamentalist and Catholic voters. There are plenty of examples where these people force babies to be born without a brain on principle. Just recently https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisiana-woman-carryin... One can go back to something like Terri Schiavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case
What do you mean by "without a brain"?
There are multiple examples in the literature of people leading perfectly ordinary lives whilst unknowingly having no more than 5% of the typical amount of brain matter (typically because of hydrocephalus). For example, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023 from 1980.
They mean stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anencephaly.
The brain is indeed incredibly resilient - some kids with serious epilepsy get an entire hemisphere taken out - but which 5% you're left with matters enormously.
This sounds ethically questionable to me. I wouldn't rule it out entirely, but I'd want to see a well-reasoned argument, both technical and moral, that it was likely to lead to greatly reduced suffering for patients. Even then.... growing a body without a brain likely would not produce a model organism with predictive ability for human diseases.