[echelon]

I get downvoted every time I feel like posting this (the thread is markedly appropriate), so I'll give some background this time. I'll get to the point after a little bit of setup.

To segue from your post, I was adopted as an only child at birth, so formula was the only option. No IgA exposure, which probably over-taxed my early immune system.

But in being adopted, I have very nontraditional feelings about cloning, artificial birth, etc. I knew about my adoption from an early age, so it deeply worked itself into my thinking. At about elementary school age, some of my asshole neighbors bullied and called me a bastard, but that didn't really impact me as much as the feeling of being a genetic island completely alien to everyone else. All of my peers were related to their birthing parents and sometimes clonal siblings, yet I was alone in the universe. My weird hobbies and behaviors and preferences were out of the norm for my family. Despite my closeness with them, I didn't feel the same as everyone else around me. I wasn't. I was a nerd, absorbed into science books and Bill Nye. The southern culture and football and Christian God I grew up around wasn't my home, and I couldn't understand it just as others couldn't understand me. Everyone talks about blood as being a big deal - it's even in the foundation of the religion I was raised in - but to me, it meant nothing. It really shaped how I feel about humanity and biology and families and reproduction and the universe. Ideas, not nucleotides, are the information that matters.

I've understated and undersold how fundamentally differently this makes me feel about people.

Because of my perspective, I have controversial viewpoints about human biology. I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:

If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor, perhaps we could one day clone MHC-negative, O-negative, etc. monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs. Use genetic engineering to de-encephalize the brain, and artificially innervate the spine and musculature. We'd have a perfect platform for every kind of organ and tissue transplant, large scale controlled in situ studies, human knockouts, and potentially crazy things like whole head transplants to effectively cure all cancers and aging diseases except brain cancers and neurodegeneration.

Because they're clones engineered to not expose antigens, their tissues could be transplanted into us just like plants being grafted. No immunosuppressants. This might become the default way to cure diseases in the future. We could even engineer bodies that increase our physiological capacity. Increased endurance, VO2 max, younger age, different sex, skin color, transgenic features. Alien hair colors. You name it.

I bring things like this up and get ostracized and criticized. But it feels completely normal to me. Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

In light of how others think, I don't think I'd have these thoughts so comfortably if I didn't feel like something of a clone already. A genetic reject, an extraterrestrial growing up, tends to think differently.

Flipping this around, your aversion to this is because you have a mother and father that birthed you that you share blood with. That you grew up in a god fearing society bathed in his sacrificial blood. If you were like me, perhaps you'd think like me.

I'm totally perplexed that other people find this disgusting or horrifying. It feels wholly natural.

And we should absolutely do it.

[achenet]

> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences.

Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.

If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas...

I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football).

Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)

[echelon]

> Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)

I agree with this, and I'm glad we do. But I've posted the "let's harvest clones for organs" idea numerous times on HN -- a community where many of us are on somewhat of a similar wavelength. It's usually met with a lot of vitriol and disgust.

> Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.

That's one of the nice things about this. It would give us an organismal research platform where we could replicate experiments. No more animal studies, imperfect chimera systems, or molecular experiments we can't scale up. We'd have a perfect test bed for investigating almost everything that ails us.

[vacuity]

On a general note, if this feels natural and right to you, don't be quick to dismiss others' views as having less substance or credibility and being conditioned. But I appreciate that you earnestly believe this, and for that there is nothing prima facie wrong with your view either.

> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.

Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.

Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.

[ben_w]

> I don't find them weird at all, but there's a good chance it'll offend you:

It does not offend me. I cannot say if I would be upset if this were to be turned from idea to reality because the closest thing in reality is quite upsetting; but because I think that the only part of a body capable of suffering is the CNS, I also regard any potential upset on my part about a realisation of your idea as a "me problem", not a "you problem".

That said, I don't know how far we are from being able to perfom what you suggest, even in principle.

It may well be the case that growing a full human without a CNS is harder than solving 3D bioprinting.

One downside of such a degree of biological mastery, is that it does to trust in real life what AI is currently doing to trust online.

[TimTheTinker]

Have you ever seen the movie "The Island"? I'm curious what your reaction to it would be.

> If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor

I believe those kinds of "ick" factors are there for a reason - protecting us from a descent into deep dystopia or something.

Implementing new human things at scale often has unanticipated indirect negative consequences.

[ben_w]

I think that in this case, the ick factor is because evolved traits can only work with relatively simple patterns.

My guess is for many of us, our gut says "looks like a human therefore is human"; if you try to tell gut instinct it's fine because there's no brain, you're gut's response is "Brain and brain! What is brain?"

My gut seems to care more about dynamic behaviour than static appearance, but for what it's worth — and despite being able to understand the premise of @echelon's suggestion without being upset by it — even I find images of a real, natural, human birth defect where the brain is missing, to be horrifying (content warning: do not google "anencephaly" unless you're strong stomached).

[echelon]

> Have you ever seen the movie "The Island"? I'm curious what your reaction to it would be.

It's a typical Hollywood sci-fi film with the usual Hollywood lessons and platitudes.

We wouldn't be producing clones with brains or consciousness. We might even have to modify the spine and stomach.

So there's no thinking at all. They'd be like plants.

[throaway1989]

Most of the ick factors are because of our empathy, which triggers upon seeing another human being in "icky" states of being and makes us imagine what it would feel like to be in such a state.

[aaaja]

Have you found that other adoptees feel similarly about or at least are more sympathetic to your ideas?

[fouc]

Given that you've spent some time thinking about this, perhaps you should spend time thinking about the ethics of it, and write a full report AGAINST your idea from the ethics point of view, and then see if you can address all those concerns in a second report.

Some key ethics concerns to consider:

* creating brainless clones is almost like creating a sub-species of humans that we're going to farm like cattle.

* given that many people consider embryos & fetuses have certain rights, can we find a way to create brain-less clones without killing viable embryos?

In reality, most of the work done in this area is going to be focused on growing organs, rather than entire bodies. This lets us sidestep most of the ethical concerns.

[petermcneeley]

Terry?