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Whole Body Trasnplant


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#1 openly68atheist

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Posted 28 June 2005 - 03:47 PM


Whole Body Transplant, transplating your-self (brain) into the body of your younger clone.

Imagine right now you're 50 years old, we clone you and then transplant you (brain) into the 18 year old body(clone). So you would be a 50 year old person (brain) inside a 18 year old body.

First:
We would have to find a cure to paralysis.

Secondly:
We would have to raise the clones in sensory depravation, so that their brains never receive enough sensory stimulus to form any memories, conciousness, or self-awareness. In sensory deprevation the clones would never become 'persons' and hence removing their brain's would not be murder, since a brain that is empty of any information is not a person.

What do you think about that idea?

#2 John Schloendorn

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Posted 29 June 2005 - 01:32 AM

So what of brain aging?

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#3 openly68atheist

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Posted 29 June 2005 - 11:31 AM

So what of brain aging?


Well I forget where I read this, but I read somewhere that the brain ages because the heart, lungs and 'blood-brain barrier' get destroyed by free-radicals, and because of the lack of oxygen to the brain and the increaced free-radicals that get through the 'blood brain barrier' the brain begins to deteriorate. So they said, in a new body the brain would be revitalized by the increased blood flow, and be more protected by the anti-oxidents in the 'blood brain barrier'.

Either way, cureing paralysis would be a huge step in understanding how to connect devices to our brain.

#4 1arcturus

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Posted 29 June 2005 - 07:50 PM

Whole Body Transplant, transplating your-self (brain) into the body of your younger clone.

Imagine right now you're 50 years old, we clone you and then transplant you (brain) into the 18 year old body(clone). So you would be a 50 year old person (brain) inside a 18 year old body.

First:
We would have to find a cure to paralysis.

Secondly:
We would have to raise the clones in sensory depravation, so that their brains never receive enough sensory stimulus to form any memories, conciousness, or self-awareness. In sensory deprevation the clones would never become 'persons' and hence removing their brain's would not be murder, since a brain that is empty of any information is not a person.

What do you think about that idea?


I don't think we'd need to raise a poor clone in a sensory depravation tank. By the time we're really ready to do this, we'd know enough about the genome to be able to switch off the triggers for development of specific organs, like the brain, in an early embryo. Hopefully, there wouldn't be too much trouble getting the clone then to develop without a brain up to the point where it was large enough to receive a brain transplant. The good thing would be that, presumably, all the rest of the neural wiring would be there, brand new, and no even basic sentience would be being sacrificed.

#5 rillastate

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Posted 11 July 2005 - 06:50 AM

I'm not very familiar with the science so my question is, by the time we are ready to do this, do you think it would be possible to just speed up the aging process of the clone so that you can grow your 18 year old body in a matter months or just a few years?

#6 John Schloendorn

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Posted 11 July 2005 - 09:11 AM

grow your 18 year old body in a matter months or just a few years?

Forget it ;-) There is no evidence that mammalian development can be strongly accelerated. Sorry, but this is not star wars just yet.

#7 123456

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Posted 11 July 2005 - 11:33 AM

Forget it ;-) There is no evidence that mammalian development can be strongly accelerated. Sorry, but this is not star wars just yet.


How about Cattle, horses and other mammals? These particular mammals attain a great deal of mass and their development is fairly significant in just a few years so why not humans? Still, maybe I overlooking something here.

#8 John Schloendorn

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Posted 11 July 2005 - 11:56 AM

I don't know how fast these other species develop, but I do know that no one has strongly accelerated development in any mammalian species. The fact that something else can grow faster than we do does not mean that we can learn to change ourselves to grow that fast before we learn other tricks that make this whole thing obsolete.

#9 rillastate

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Posted 15 July 2005 - 02:30 PM

I don't know how fast these other species develop, but I do know that no one has strongly accelerated development in any mammalian species. The fact that something else can grow faster than we do does not mean that we can learn to change ourselves to grow that fast before we learn other tricks that make this whole thing obsolete.


So you think it's possible, at some point, (though we may not have any use for it) to speed the human aging process efficiently? I mean, there is that disease that accelerates aging. Do you think it's possible to efficiently speed aging, even though we may not know how now or in a long time from now?

#10 Infernity

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Posted 15 July 2005 - 03:30 PM

*AhmNanotech, ahm*

~Infernity

#11 John Schloendorn

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Posted 16 July 2005 - 03:18 AM

I guess what you want to speed is actually development, not aging. Progeric children do not develop faster, they just age faster and begin to age before their development is even complete. As I said I know of no evidence that development can be speeded in any species. Thus, I also know of no evidence that it can be "efficiently" speeded in humans.

There is no point in asking me if i believe something is possible, given enough time. Unless we know anything for sure, which we can't, by definition everything is possible. If we want to live forever, then the interesting question is what can we hope to achieve within the short time we have. We better take it easy, sit back, consider all the options available with great care, and then pick the one that is the best compromise between cheap, fast and reliable.

It was in these terms that I said "forget it".

(Note that I am deliberately ignoring the moral bankruptcy of the full body transplant strategy outlined above. If we were to include the ethics of raising reproductive clones "in sensory depravation", then I really would not know why I would spend any of my time on just replying to this.)

#12 henri

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Posted 16 July 2005 - 10:50 AM

But didn't some people raise tadpoles that never acquired a head? People thought it youcky, so maybe this hindered further progress. I think it would be cool if we could grow headless clones for organ transplants.

#13 John Schloendorn

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Posted 16 July 2005 - 11:09 AM

I don't know, did they? It sounds hard in humans, because much of our development is regulated by brain-borne hormones. I agree, it would be cool, if some divine revelation told us how to grow clones without a central nervous system. But, in the real world, you can't do this type of research on humans, because there is no way to eliminate the risk to cause immeasurable suffering to the clones and their mothers before you figured out how to do it properly, period.
Aside, the aforementioned problem of brain aging remains. At least in mice, brain stem cells do suffer massive intrinsic aging.

#14 henri

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Posted 16 July 2005 - 07:34 PM

I don't know, did they? It sounds hard in humans, because much of our development is regulated by brain-borne hormones. I agree, it would be cool, if some divine revelation told us how to grow clones without a central nervous system. But, in the real world, you can't do this type of research on humans, because there is no way to eliminate the risk to cause immeasurable suffering to the clones and their mothers before you figured out how to do it properly, period.
Aside, the aforementioned problem of brain aging remains. At least in mice, brain stem cells do suffer massive intrinsic aging.


Well, here's a reference.

"The controversy surrounding the headless frogs arises from the fact that some people are suggesting that headless humans may be just around the corner. Such human clones could theoretically be used to grow organs and tissues for transplant surgery."

Maybe it's more complicated than this. As for accelerating development, growth hormone would increase growth and sexual hormones would advance the onset of sexual maturity.

If we need the hypothalamus and pituitary to regulate hormone levels, we could leave those structures and forget about the rest. But I agree with you, it is not feasible trying to develop this in humans if it can't be done in one step.

#15 rodentman

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Posted 27 July 2005 - 08:59 PM

Hello all, this is my first post here.

The Whole Body Transplant will almost definetely be in our future. Even assuming we come up with a way to completely stop the underlying causes of aging beforehand. There would still be demand for this due to body wear and tear, and even vanity.

I think all of the technologies will be available soon.

1) reliable primate cloning.
This might be a few years off, and in spite of some scientists who say its impossible due to the way primate chromosomes don't split properly, there will most definetely be workarounds using techniques other than nuclear transfer. Maybe the Korean cloners are pointing us in the right direction.

2) a brain dead body large enough to support an adult brain and/or brain stem, etc.
This HAS been done in lower animals, by interrupting development. For humans, we'd have to wait a good 13-16 years for it to become full size. For those of us who cant wait, I'd speculate that human hibernation might be an option.

3) Human/primate incubation
I don't see this as being out of the realm of possibility. There has been progress into growing womb tissue outside the body for potentially helping infirtile women.

4) re-attaching severed nerves, and then mapping them correctly to another body.
Just today there was more advances in coaxing nerves to regrow and re-attach. This really has already been done in rats, and they regain almost all of their movement and sensation back, but it was done shortly after the sever.

As far as nerve mapping goes, that may be foggiest part of this process. I remember the guy who got a hand transplant and towards the end, before it had to be removed, he said he had sensation in it, and could move it slightly.

With a brain dead clone, I havne't a clue wether or not the spinal chord would develop appriopriately to be reconnected to a brain stem that had a lifetime of interaction with its body. But at any rate, scientists can be offly clever.

RodentMan

#16 John Schloendorn

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Posted 28 July 2005 - 08:46 AM

scientists can be offly clever

Have you considered the possibility that this may be why they aren't trying to do this? Never mind, welcome to imminst ;-) Enjoy reading your way around.

#17 amordaad

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Posted 12 October 2005 - 03:35 PM

Hi everybody ,
Let me remember you a liitle point missed here . I think no matter it is possible to speed up growing the clone or not , if the other obstacles would be managed , this method will come true . For instance when the Origin is about 50 , the clonning with the natural speed will be started ... and when he is 66 if has enough chance to be alive the clone will be ready to recieve the old brain ...
So the problems left will be :
1 - Wether the brain will start to renew and will be rebuilt;
2 - The surgeons can perform a brain transplantation .

But still there is some important problem that I'm not sure and may be you can tell me something for scientifically explanation about it ... and It is the aging of the DNA ... as I've heard , during our life our DNA changes somehow that if in the age of 50 we pick up a DNA and try to make a clone of it , the clonned will no more stay alive than the rest of the Origins life , less or more .

If I'm wrong , so there would be no hard attempts to bring lengthened life to reality [huh] ...

#18 johnuk

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Posted 29 November 2005 - 03:25 AM

Hello all, this is my first post here. 

2)  a brain dead body large enough to support an adult brain and/or brain stem, etc.
This HAS been done in lower animals, by interrupting development.  For humans, we'd have to wait a good 13-16 years for it to become full size.  For those of us who cant wait, I'd speculate that human hibernation might be an option.


With a brain dead clone, I havne't a clue wether or not the spinal chord would develop appriopriately to be reconnected to a brain stem that had a lifetime of interaction with its body.  But at any rate, scientists can be offly clever.

RodentMan



Good point regarding the age, that you'd probably be able to do the transplant with quite a young clone.

I can also think of methods for remapping the new neural tissue to the "correct" address map for the original brain. The obvious problems form from the gigantic numbers of reconnections involved. Hopefully, if the new neural net is a clone of your own, the neurons would be in roughly the correct locations to begin with, although that wouldn't be majorly important for the methods I am thinking about.

I'd be interested to know what regrowing method you mentioned. This is something I try to follow quite closely. Stem cells are old news. To my knowledge, the newest idea for random regrowth of neural bundles is with a carbon nanotube medium. The axon root tips accelerate through the tube form as it provides them with some guidance. Other developments, neurotrophins and growth factors that allow the regrowth to occur more rapidly (The spinal cord has a tendancy to scar over the axon ends when severed as the cells try to clean up the damage).

You may also be interested to know that such brain transplants have already been carried out on reeses (from memory) monkies. I believe the transplants managed to sustain themselves for half an hour or less but that this surgery was back in the 60's if I recall rightly.

But still there is some important problem that I'm not sure and may be you can tell me something for scientifically explanation about it ... and It is the aging of the DNA ... as I've heard , during our life our DNA changes somehow that if in the age of 50 we pick up a DNA and try to make a clone of it , the clonned will no more stay alive than the rest of the Origins life , less or more .

If I'm wrong , so there would be no hard attempts to bring lengthened life to reality  ...



You are correct.

The DNA helix is tied together at it's ends by a kind of sticky DNA glue. When the helix's code is read, a section is pulled open and transcribed. Not a problem. But when the code is used for total cellular replication, the entire helix is unspiraled and transcribed. To unspiral the helix, the sticky glue on the ends needs undoing. Each time you undo it, you loose some. Eventually, you loose too much of it and the helix unspirals, becoming useless. The DNA it's self has a preprogrammed replication limit to it's nature; a kind of organic clock.

When you clone a cell, you clone it's DNA's sticky end state. If you start out with a cell that has already been replicated numerous times in the original, you increase the chance of the DNA in the clone unspiraling.

The unspiraling effect has it's advantages because it means that mutated DNA can't exist permanently in the body, buffering the rate at which evolution occurs. Most mutagenic evolution isn't helpful. If you allowed it to occur too rapidly, you'd risk damaging the population expressing it.

If you tried to prevent unspiraling, you could end up with man made cancer. Cancer is the result when your body forgets how to deactivate cells and instead puts them into hyper-reproduction mode, the physical expression is big clumps of misformed tissue.

In response to the practical questions of using host, clone bodies, the brain could simply be anesthetised into a medical coma from birth, critically damaged or physically removed, such that a consciousness state never occured, so as to save effort messing around with gene manipulation. The body would then be maintain on life support. In the process of removing the "grow brain" genes you'll probably end up removing the "support brain" genes as well.

I would suggest those uncomfortable with the idea of headless clones, or clones grown only to have their brain tissue damaged at conception, consider that many people were equally uncomfortable with Darwin's thoughts on human evolution, or the idea of Da Vinci slicing up the bodies of pregnant women. Looking back with hindsight, the benefits of these contributions are still being explored today, with these trains of thought considered to be perfectly normal and even encouraged. You have to be very careful with your footing when discussing the ethics of what may only be superficially "disgusting" ideas, as a lot of what we base our judgement of disgusting on is based on social conditioning alone.

amordaad, I don't fully agree with the logic in your signature. It takes zero prior personal experience for a baby to equate being burnt with something bad. While this is based on painfully simplistic logic (close to a reflex arc, having a logic gain of 1; you don't ever learn to enjoy being burnt, only what it means to be in kinky S&M games) it is still inherited knowledge; burning = bad.

Edited by johnuk, 29 November 2005 - 03:44 AM.


#19 armrha

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Posted 01 December 2005 - 09:51 AM

The surgery was preformed by Dr. Robert J. White from the 70's to the mid-80s. He claims that the procedure is sufficiently advanced to work on humans. The longest survivor was 3 hours, but there's no reason they couldn't make it last longer...

You probably wouldn't need to make a headless clone. I think you definitely have the right idea on the clone handling... Some careful in-womb-or-alternative surgery could probably eliminate the possibility of sentience, just leaving the motor structures intact... That way, you get none of the bad effects of genetically altering the clone.

Yeah... Some human knowledge is provably genetic. The 'knowledge' of pain responses, our reflexes, the feeding instinct and all. Maybe he means higher abstract structures though. Armodaad, what exactly do you mean by your signature?

#20 johnuk

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Posted 02 December 2005 - 01:40 PM

Yeah... Some human knowledge is provably genetic. The 'knowledge' of pain responses, our reflexes, the feeding instinct and all. Maybe he means higher abstract structures though. Armodaad, what exactly do you mean by your signature?


I'm pretty sure that's what he does mean, and I fully agree with that. I'm just being stringent with terms. It's in doing so that we can prompt each other to consider things we might not have otherwise rather than pure pickyness or malevolence.

Of worth noting is that this is a prime observation where the atheist shoots himself in the foot when talking to the religious about the unlikelyness of god. Something the religious very rarely do, if ever, because they're so willing to bend the rules of their own definitions to make it fit whatever they like.

Once you mention the possibility of humans being born with 'prior knowledge' the question instantly arises, what is that knowledge, why is it there and who put it there. For the Religious, rock solid proof of the existence of God. For the realistic, and I feel no shame in adding, intelligent, DNA put it there.

Take a super simple piece of prior embedded knowledge, feeling pain when you're burnt.

Evolution of those children who don't possess this knowledge, out of the DNA chain, is going to occur very rapidly, since they'll probably kill themselves messing around with fires or getting burnt some other way long before they have a chance to reproduce. We take it for granted now that children, and adults, don't purposefully try to set themselves on fire, or enjoy the experience. Think about what would happen if this piece of logic were erased from both children and adults, starting now. The population would rocket vertically down over a few weeks or months as people died from burns.

How could this prior knowledge possibly have gotten into humanity? Exactly the same way the rest of the information, tangible or otherwise, get's into our DNA, random mutation. Out of the 99 systems that don't mind being burnt, one will, through random mutation. This system has an obvious advantage when it comes to reproduction probabilities, so the logic get's carried forward.

Simple, simple stuff. And you'll not that a lot of the prior knowledge humans are born with relates very specifically to things that will otherwise kill them; e.g. a strong urge to eat as much as possible.

Then you get on to personalities.

The more I think about this, the more obvious it seems. If you're willing to accept that your conscious experiences are an emergent attribute of your brain tissue, and that DNA directly effects how tissue forms in your body, then all that's left for you to do is put the two together to get, your DNA can carries some form of effect on your conscious experience. And that perhaps your personality is created in the same way your mother and father's DNA mixed to create something with physical similarities to both of them; different genes expressed in their brain tissue are mixed and matched into your's.

Incredible at first. But then consider this in the same way you would your eye colour. Not quite so incredible after all.

I have reached a point now where I would actually feel it more impressive if children weren't born with this prior knowledge, as it would imply some form of absolute separation between genetics and consciousness. But there isn't such a separation, consciousness isn't untouchable.

Note that the solid logic of life, how to move your hands properly, how to make a computer work, don't seem to be passed on directly through DNA. I think this is probably something evolution would also work, creating humans are that able to pass on large quantities of factual data via their DNA (e.g. "Delivery coming on Friday, leave note"), but these factors are not directly life threatening, so it doesn't.

Further suggestion that what we believe we are, believe the world is or learn to do within these boundaries is highly dependant on our empirical experience of it.

Although I'm sure there are mutations of DNA out here that possess the ability to carry over larger quantities of information than others. A useful trait to look for whilst tracking it down would be children, preferably separated from their genetic parents at an early age (Orphans with living genetic parents), who have a similar thought pattern or personality. The stronger the match, the more likely it is their DNA is passing more of the information over, in it's reproduction, that relates to that child's conscious experience of their world. The investigation would also double up, as you could investigate the link between genetic carry over and how closely their thought paterrn and personality match that of their adoptive parents; taking into account how closely those parents match the child's genetic parents in terms of thought pattern and personality to ensure a fairer test. E.g. A child with genetic parents with a family history of kindness in a home with adoptive parents who teach it, empericially, to be nasty. Positive result for genetics = a kind child.

Edited by johnuk, 02 December 2005 - 02:03 PM.


#21 manspeaker

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Posted 03 January 2006 - 05:41 AM

I think that there is the possibility of transfering the mind, consciousness, spirit, and force of life into a blank tablet clone of my self with an energy transfer.
Energy being molecular and the ability to transfer energy has been developed.
You may think it is pure speculation.

MARC M.
1-2-05

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#22 boundlesslife

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Posted 04 January 2006 - 05:19 AM

I think that there is the possibility of transfering the mind, consciousness, spirit, and force of life into a blank tablet clone of my self with an energy transfer.
Energy being molecular and the ability to transfer energy has been developed.
You may think it is pure speculation.

MARC M.
1-2-05


I think it will be easier than we can realistically imagine, right now. On some other boards, drawing on such ideas as appear in Entwined Lives by by Nancy L. Segal, and...

Based on one particular, very short, very powerful short story titled:

Travelling

I've asked that the readers on those other forums consider, seriously, the possibility that:

The genome is the 'soul'!

(Meaning that, from a non-mystical standpoint, it's about as much of a 'soul' as they'll ever have. Preserve it at death, and they still 'exist', in a very important way. Fail to do so, and in a very important way, they 'cease to exist'. Each person carries with him or her, by this point of vew, hundreds of trillions of these 'souls', at all times, and in a crematorium, all of those can 'die', not just clinically, or biologically, but in a 'cessation of molecular integrity' way. All of those 'souls' can be obliterated, in flames, in a just a few minutes. The 'Devil Himself' was never envisioned to be able to destroy so many, so completely, so quickly, even with the fires of Hell. And, one can ramble on and on about that, at far greater length than need be, here!)

Sure! This is a "shock" approach, but it's about the closest way to think about it in basic terms most people have any way of understanding. This (your genome) is the one thing that is just about the same, with you, from the moment you form until you turn back into dust (if you let that happen to you). It drives your personality in so many ways that if you haven't carefully looked at books like Segal's, above, the word "clone" is almost meaningless (by comparison to the way it's possible to think of it after understanding, in depth, that a clone is, literally, "an identical twin displaced in time, so much like the original twin in so many ways that 'soul mates' is almost a perfectly descriptive term for the two of them" (as distinguished from the romantic use of the term).

Anyway, in far fewer words than I've used here, I think you've said something pretty important, manspeaker, or I wouldn't have blathered on for so long. Keep thinking about this idea, and you'll no doubt find a lot of ways to talk about it in ways that others will relate to better than anything I could write.

I would suggest a look at Nancy Segal's book! It has no "pro-cloning" slant at all, but it gives you so much 'geography' of what that will mean, that it might turn the way you've expressed your thoughts (above) into a far more detailed, textured tapestry!

A lot more people might listen to you, and think about what you've said.

Best of luck with it!

boundlesslife




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