But is the brain functioning or is only there for display ?
Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
71–80 of 147 posts
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist. The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do wi…
> Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. People always say this, and yet the universal ban on human cloning has, at least so far, held strong and prevented further research more or less entirely.
[deleted]
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is only true because people don't know how/the tools have been restricted/the freedom not given to people I think what the above person is saying is that one day, even if people try to restrict the ability, technology will advance to a point where anybody will be able to do it. What do we do then?
The point of banning research is exactly to prevent this eventuality. Technology doesn't advance by itself: someone has to be actively advancing it.
Technology does advance regardless of your ability to ban it, because bans only form a system that locally restricts research- but globally, research will march forward somewhere. Banning research on a topic is fundamentally like burning books- but enforcing some consistent concept of ethics within a field of research is critical.
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#74* mouse embryo
[deleted]
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist. The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do wi…
Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.
"testube babies" have parents.
These will have owners. I think it's a valid fear that once someone is able to create living things out of nothing, they'll treat them as products and tools
We already do it with animals....
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.
"testube babies" have parents. These will have owners. I think it's a valid fear that once someone is able to create living things out of nothing, they'll treat them as products and tools We already do it with animals....
Oh and of course patent it. And build in copy protection meassures, meaning someone cloning your "tools" would result in not working products, aka death or disabled
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the embryo stage, what's the difference?
Ho ho courting controversy. The difference is you don't know if there's a difference: when does the soul come in? Maybe you don't believe in souls but can you disprove that they exist? is the personality only some sort of construct that's formed as a child is raised? Or is there something eternal spiritual inside? It doesn't have to trip your anti-religious ADS, maybe it's a fact about the universe we haven't found a…
How would we be able to tell that a person has no soul? How can we even say that we have a soul? The problem with the existence of the soul is that there is no definition of what the soul is for science to prove or disprove its existence. Right now it's just a fuzzy term to be employed in religious rhetoric.
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#78* mouse embryo
Inmiced now. Thanks!
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#79This really is pretty amazing work. But, to the uninitiated, there's a dark side; I overheard someone commenting about an earlier post about this experiment, thinking it's possible to get out a chemistry set and just make a living thing. To be clear, they started with stem cells, and teased them into doing the right thing - they did not create a new living artifact from scratch; > Instead, they used stem cells - the…
Ok, we've put stem cells up there too. Thanks!
Re: Mouse embryo with brain and beating heart created from stem cells
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect we will find out at some point in the next 25 to 50 years. Somebody, somewhere, is going to give it a good try. As in not stop at just the embryo stage, but make fully functional living beings, regardless of whatever laws exist. The ramifications of "synthetic life", will sure to be staggering. This was covered a bit in the Blade Runner Sci-Fi, but what real Replicants would be like and what they will do wi…
Why would we abuse them? We treat disabled people OK, don't we? What exactly is your fear? Some kind of prejudice against people who were born through different procedures? We already have test tube babies walking among us and nobody mistreats them.
That's the best case, even though "not abusing them" is a low hurdle.
Such life would not be limited to human forms.
Even with just human forms, if you're going to all the trouble to engineer custom life, why make that life anything other than your idea of perfect? I don't know for sure, but I suspect that a predisposition to obedience to authority figures may be engineered; some would want that in their own children, others in what may be de jure servants and de facto slaves.
Last I checked — a few years ago, and this is a fast moving field — we can't currently 3D print large complex living structures, only simple and small because of the oxygen diffusion limit; if we can engineer around that, even if you still needed to replace the brain with a computer and nerves with metal, you can have a "real life centaur ride" or dragon drones.
If you do that but deliberately replace the brain and nerves with electrical equivalents, you have remote controllable meat[0] puppets making bodyguards redundant (the person being protected can just be remote); making worthless eye witness accounts, DNA tests, and fingerprints; and what happened with DeepFake porn then happens IRL with sex workers puppeting everyone and everything from Addams Family's Thing to Westworld LARP.
The landscape of possibilities and preferences for these things may be radically altered by other related tech. For example, skin samples can be grown in vitro and transplanted back to a human (IIRC this is already done for severe burns victims), combine with suitable GM (IDK, spider silk perhaps?) and someone could become naturally bullet resistant, radically changing not only the nature of bodyguarding but also soldiering.
[0] well, not necessarily meat, it might be made from GM fungus cells or plant cells, but it could be made to look arbitrarily close to or far from any of those things