No brain, no problem. Meet my headless lump of meat.

22 hours ago

5 min read

Animal experimentation and organ transplant waiting lists are issues replete with ethical challenges and real suffering. Could we one day grow and harvest purpose built fully functioning organs? What about your own personal headless human body as a spare parts depot?

(First published on my Substack where you can get #NerdNews, marvellous maths and general geekery.)

(‘Headless Meat Sacks’: created by the author using imagen)

Full disclosure: I find the ethics of animal experimentation genuinely uncomfortable. I always have.

Doubtless millions of lives have been saved by therapies first trialled on animals. But some of those animals suffered terribly in the process.

Balancing animal welfare against human halth and progress. A few people sit comfortably at either extreme. But I think most of us just find it genuinely hard, or don’t think about it at all.

So when a startup pitches a way to do drug toxicity testing without putting a single monkey through pain, ears should prick up.

R3 Bio, out of Richmond, California, pitched a plan earlier this year. Grow complete organ systems, blood vessels, the lot, but with the brain-development genes switched off. The goal: nothing that can think. Nothing that can feel pain. Not a body missing it’s brain, just … a ‘body’.

“It’s not missing anything, because we design it to only have the things we want.” — Alice Gilman, R3 Bio cofounder.

R3 now says its work is limited to microscopic cell-culture systems and that it has no ongoing work on full-scale organ fabrication.

The monkey problem is real.

Regardless of what R3 is now offering, the problem it is trying to solve is genuine and pressing.

China banned the export of nonhuman primates in 2020. The Trump administration is phasing out animal experimentation across the federal government. One of America’s seven federally funded primate research centres is already considering shutting down. In fiscal year 2024, US research facilities used more than 60,000 nonhuman primates for testing.

More than 1,200 of those animals experienced pain that wasn’t minimised.And there are simply not enough research monkeys left in the US, Gilman says, to handle another pandemic. If Covid-2-Something shows up next year, the testing pipeline has a serious bottleneck.

Organ filled vessels, or meat sacks as I’m going to keep calling them, in theory solve that. Scalable. Potentially more ethical.

Stanford bioethicist Hank Greely, who has actually written about human “bodyoids,” thinks it’s plausible.

“If you make a living entity without a brain at all, I think we’d be pretty comfortable with thinking it can’t feel pain. It’s highly possible that none of this will ever work, but it’s also possible that it could.” — Hank Greely, Stanford University.

Now for the other pitch.

MIT Technology Review got hold of some additional R3 materials. Specifically, the ones R3 didn’t want reported.

Because the organ-sack story, as I’ve described above, is the simple, palatable version. But the version founder John Schloendorn has pitched to certain investors goes further. A lot further.

We’re talking brainless human meat sacks, a copy of you, same DNA, kept alive on life support, as a personal spare-parts depot. Need a new kidney when yours gives out? Grab it from your personal meat lump. New liver? Ditto.

('The New Me(at Sack): created by the author via Dall-E)

Taken to it’s logical (and ethical?) extreme, how about a whole new body to transplant your brain into when your current rig shows too much wear and tear?

One person who sat through the presentation described it to MIT Tech Review as a “close encounter of the third kind” with Dr. Strangelove.

Not my line. Wish it was.

“It sounds crazy, in my opinion. How do you demonstrate safety? What is safety when you’re trying to create an abnormal human?” — Jose Cibelli, Michigan State University.

Cibelli, for what it’s worth, was one of the first scientists to attempt cloning human embryos, so his “that’s too far” threshold is not exactly set low.

The investors, the frozen heads, and the pig.

R3 says its backers include billionaire Tim Draper and LongGame Ventures in the UK, according to Wired, plus Singapore-based longevity fund Immortal Dragons, which put in $500,000.

Immortal Dragons CEO Boyang Wang was bullish enough on whole-body transplant to speak publicly about it at longevity conferences. He’s since cooled considerably, telling MIT Tech Review he now considers it “very infeasible, not even very scientific.”That’s his own investment he’s describing.

Swedish transhumanist Anders Sandberg points out, completely straight-faced, that many cryonics customers opt for the cheaper “head only” freezing option when they die. So there might, he suggests, “be a market for having an extra cloned body.”

As for the science of full body transplant, in a related experiment published last year, Russian surgeons removed and reattached a pig’s head. The animal breathed weakly and lapped water from a syringe. Paralysed from the neck down, it was euthanised after 12 hours.

So, yeah, still early days on this stuff.

Trying to un-ring the bell.

The day the Wired story ran, R3 fired off a statement to MIT Tech Review denying allegations that it intended to create human clones or humans with brain damage as “categorically false.”

At the same time, MIT Tech Review had already found Schloendorn and Gilman presented a session called 'Full Body Replacement' at a $70,000-a-ticket longevity conference in Boston the September before, where Schloendorn pitched his 'final bid to defeat aging' and, according to someone who was there, both animal research and personal clones for spare organs were on the table.

A meaty ethical issue.

This is ethically challenging, but you cannot deny the bigger picture.

Right now, around 2,000 Australians are on the organ transplant waitlist.

Another 14,000 are on dialysis for kidney failure, many of whom could benefit from a transplant that isn’t coming fast enough. Four in five of us say we support organ donation. Only 35% have actually registered.

An uncle of mine sat on a waiting list for years only to receive a transplant, but too late. He could still be alive today.

In the US the figures are even more striking: more than 100,000 people on the national transplant waiting list, and a dozen or so die every day waiting for an organ that never comes.

The monkey testing problem is real. The longevity research community, for all its eccentricities, is grappling with questions medicine will eventually have to face.But surely there’s a significant gap between “more ethical drug testing” and “brainless human meat sack gestated by a paid surrogate.”

“I think the ‘yuck factor’ will be strong.” — Hank Greely.

Could not agree more Hank.

But if we can remove sufficient ‘yuck’ from the process, where would your moral compass point on this one?