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Chinese Doctor Performs Head Transplants On Mice
An anonymous reader writes: Xiaoping Ren, a Chinese surgeon, has performed roughly 1,000 head transplants on mice since 2013 and says that monkeys are next. Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates. With $1.6 million of funding so far, he says, "We want to do this clinically, but we have to make an animal model with long-term survival first. Currently, I am not confident to say that I can do a human transplant."
that we're moving into "Island of Dr. Moreau" territory?
Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates.
Maybe he should try to have his patients survive more than one day, before moving up to primates.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
How about switching to another species after you get the lifetime close to half of normal. These aren't fruit flies.
Sounds more like a BODY transplant to me...
Sentience hasn't historically caused much grief for the perpetrators of violence in the past, nor for third party observers on second thought. Everything from other tribes, countries, their women, their children, within group competitors, weaker group members and, of course, animals have been fair game. If sentience has been a necessary and sufficient condition for moral consideration, it hasn't shown.
For those who doubt the sentience of animals, I can offer you the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Copy and paste into your favourite search engine if you are among the minority who care.
I can't understand how head transplants are even helpful in the real world. I can understand limb transplants, livers, kidneys, but heads? How often does someone lose their head and there is another head ready to take it's place? Seems to me like this is one thing that will almost never have use for anything practical if it's even possible.
Be seeing you...
"Some of the mice have lived as long as a day after the operations according to Ren and he hopes to have similar success with primates."
Really? He'd better get survival rates down to something close to normal lifespans before he moves up to primates or he's an idiot.
I wonder if he's even bothered to look at the old Soviet attempts at this. With that short "survival" duration, I highly doubt it.
How is this physically possible? 1000 transplants in under three years! This is more than one serious microsurgery per day. An article in WSJ says he leaves the brain stem of the acceptor along with the so that it can control breading and hearth beat. This would mean that he is just connecting the blood vessels of the donor head to the circulatory system on the acceptor, without connecting the nerves. This seems more feasible to me, but hardly warrants the bombastic headlines. Does anybody have a link to an original research paper?
and they were certainly sentient beings being sacrificed.
They were "sentient" cause the story demanded it.
There is no reason why a jar-grown clone would need to be anything other than completely brain dead.
Hell... If they can be grown to a full healthy adult in an artificial womb - make the clones anencephalic.
And then there's that whole bit where people don't give a flying fuck about what happens to their clone's ass when their own ass is on the line.
I for one wouldn't care. Hell... I'd club my own clone-self to death with a garden dwarf if necessary.
Though it would probably just be much simpler to just check the "yes - I would like to have a clone(s) for all my future transplant needs" box.
And besides that... It is not sentient if it is never allowed to be sentient.
Keep it in a box - both physical and mental.
All that needs to be done is just get in there while it is still just an abortion in a jar, and never allow it to form sentience.
There. "Morality" problem solved.
And for anyone out there who's getting their panties all bunched up while getting their favorite appeal to emotion argument ready - THINK OF THE CHILDREN YOU HEARTLESS CUNTS!
You know how hard it is to get child-sized organs for transplantation?
You wanna go and tell those dying children they have to die cause your "morality" won't allow them to have clones?
Boy are you people fucking heartless.
But in all seriousness now - that's what all "morality" arguments about cloning boil down to.
Appeal to this or that emotion.
Whether it is fear or guilt-shaming or simply "my god is against that".
A clone raised in a jar is no different from a stillborn baby, resuscitated into a coma and kept alive by machines.
Except there are no parents to fool themselves that their little Braindead Billy will get better and grow up to be a politician or a model.
Oh... And to any of those Fuckers for Ethical Treatment of Clones out there...
My clones come with a contract on their ass.
Clone leaves the storage without my consent - its head explodes.
It leaves the storage WITH my consent but without my immediate medical need - there's money in an account out there for anyone who blows its head off.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Translates roughly to "we have no clue how to do this right".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Which part of the brain holds your conscious self?
There is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon of consciousness - no theory about how it arises, not even a definition of what qualifies.
You cannot transfer consciousness without know what it is and how it works.
Yes there is. Just because you don't know it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Consciousness is the pattern of electrical and chemical signals, (including to a lesser degree, hormones,) being passed around between neurons. This has been EXTENSIVELY studied, and is easily evidenced by the changes to consciousness AND personality, by the way, that occur as the result to changes in the physics or chemistry of the brain. If you swap the entire brain, and do so without KILLING it by hypoxic insult during the swap, and manage somehow to attach all the million or billion or however many nerve fibers that attach it to the peripheral nervous system, the "self" goes with it.
There is nothing magical (by which I mean either magical or transcendental or 'holy') about the mind, the self or consciousness. It is even pretty well documented what parts of the brain are generally responsible for what functions, from where the body's skeletal nerves map into the cerebral cortex, to which parts control breathing and pulse.
As for what you're responding to, well... even if you made an exact, atom-by-atom replica of the brain or a body, what you'd have would be an indistinguishable copy of yourself which would not feel as if he (/she) is any more a COPY than YOU are. However, yes... if the original instance of you dies, that instance still dies independently of what the other copy has happen to him/her, just as if you kill a (non-conjoined) twin nothing actually happens to the other just because you killed that one. Once the (impossibly difficult in practical reality) copy process is complete, the copies are fully and completely independent of each other. When your brain stops working, your "self" or consciousness ceases to be in any real, meaningful way. It doesn't "go" anywhere. The brain can be likened to a computer, an analog one, one whose purpose is to drive and coordinate activities within the body. Don't get confused about the word analog here. I don't mean it in the common sense as being the diametric opposite of "digital," nor of any suggestion of roundness of face with sweeping hands. Only that its functions by comparing (or making analogies) between inputted signals it receives from its own memory, or from the body internally, or externally through the senses. For example, if the occipital lobe receives an image of a bear approaching it, (getting progressively larger in the field of view of each eye, and causing the eyes to track more and more nearly crossed to keep it centered in field of view, and if the nerves that contort the lenses... you get the idea,) it passes this information to a few places, one of which goes hunting for previous times seeing an object like that. Another passes it to the part that says simply, "hey, something's approaching me, rapidly," which in turn lights up commands to the adrenal glands, but again, you get the idea. Presently, you realize that it's a BEAR and you should probably respond in some way to its approach such as perhaps considering [fight|flight|shitting your goddamned britches].
The "self" or the consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, the thing that refers to itself by the pronouns, "me," "myself," and "I," (in English, at least,) is simply the program running on that analog computer. The implications of this make some people uncomfortable, because one of the things the realization that we are all just basically computer programs is that other species computers, and the main programs running on them, such as those in dogs, cats, cows, fish even, are not really qualitatively different from our own, and we are not magically different from them. There's obviously a QUANTITATIVE difference in the sheer complexity of the thoughts we are capable