[HN Gopher] The stealthy startup that pitched brainless human cl...
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The stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones
Author : joozio
Score : 34 points
Date : 2026-03-30 11:02 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| btwotch wrote:
| Sounds a bit like "The Island" movie from 2005.
| danielodievich wrote:
| I was about to post the same thing. Except here someone wants
| that minus brain? good luck. I recently saw someone watching
| The Island on the airplane recently and remembered being
| reasonably well entertained by that movie. Obi-wan was sure
| having fun riding a motorcycle in it.
| torginus wrote:
| Sedentary patients have tons of health trouble from lying in
| bed constantly, I'm not sure if its possible to grow a
| healthy human that doesn't move about.
| bitwize wrote:
| Which in turn is a remake of _Parts: The Clonus Horror_ (1979).
| XorNot wrote:
| The problem here isn't the idea, it's that absolutely no one has
| done any useful precursor research.
|
| Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich when spinal cord
| injuries prognosis is still lifelong paralysis.
|
| And if I were to extend that thought a little further: we're more
| likely to develop useful and less invasive rejuvenation
| technology then to try and do surgical body transplants because
| the technology you'd need to fix spinal cord injury - which is
| mandatory - would have a lot more overlap and applicability to in
| situ tissue repair anyway.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _Discussing replacement bodies is pretty rich_
|
| Reconnecting spinal nerves does not look impossible. But I
| don't see any other feasible way for people whose heads are
| cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except cloning a new
| body for them.
|
| In general, the idea of producing a body that lacks the brain
| but has everything else intact is very _rational_. Its
| doubtless creepiness may wane with time.
|
| I still expect that growing particular tissues and whole organs
| (like liver, or kidneys, or bone) will end up being a faster
| route to cloned organ replacement. In particular, a body takes
| like 20 years to grow to the "finished" state, and a separate
| organ could grow much faster.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose
| heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except
| cloning a new body for them.
|
| Well the first step would be to understand how to undo the
| damage caused by freezing. We're arguably further away from
| this than we are from any other part of the process. We might
| never be able to do this, freezing might just be too lossy.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Reconnection does not look impossible. But it will be
| extremely hard.
|
| I think what is much more intractable is actually massive
| amounts of axons you'd need to reconnect, and you'd need
| extremely good classification to connect the right axons from
| host body and brain together. I think the only way to do it
| is to coax the new body/brain combo into self-repair.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose
| heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except
| cloning a new body for them.
|
| https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/jadensadventures/images/0/.
| ..
| justinclift wrote:
| > But I don't see any other feasible way for people whose
| heads are cryogenically stored to have bodies again, except
| cloning a new body for them.
|
| As an old (at least decades) concept towards solving this,
| there could be a translation interface layer between the part
| of the brainstem still attached to the brain, and the body
| into which it's going.
|
| Aside from the technical challenges, it'd probably best have
| its translation vocabulary built from recorded signals (ie of
| actual daily movement) of the primary body.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| This website is almost impossible to read. Pop-ups, "see also"
| blocks, lots of distractions. I wonder if the creators ever tried
| actually using it.
| nine_k wrote:
| Reader Mode helps.
| Animats wrote:
| Cloning works rather well now. Here are six polo ponies,
| Cuartetera 01 through 06, all clones of a famous polo pony.[1]
| Their owner has been winning world class polo matches on these
| mares. They're strong and healthy and very real.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/six-cloned-horses-
| he...
| torginus wrote:
| It's interesting to see how the spots on these horses look
| different. I thought it was chimerism like in cows, but
| apparently it's extremely rare in horses, but still there are
| epigenetic factors in play.
|
| I wonder how much gene expression differs in clones of
| particular species raised in similar environments, I would
| expect the amount of difference between genetically identical
| individuals to differ by species, but I have no idea by how
| much, and how would humans rate on this measure.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| The DNA is the code but the animal still goes through the
| growth process which involves a certain amount of randomness.
| nwah1 wrote:
| Is there any danger of transplanting organs into you that have
| genes which signal not to develop a brain? Would those genes
| potentially affect your actual brain?
| XorNot wrote:
| The short version is yes! This would be a significant concern.
| johnpdoe1234 wrote:
| Spares (1996, HarperCollins) - ISBN 978-0002246569 Michael
| Marshall Smith
| goda90 wrote:
| I enjoyed reading a Young Adult Sci-Fi novel with this premise
| called The House of the Scorpion[0]. The main character is a
| clone who's owner is a powerful enough drug lord to get away with
| not having his organ clones' brains crippled at birth like all
| the others are.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Scorpion
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Sounds like Altered Carbon (tv series).
| rolandog wrote:
| Gah, just posted a sibling comment echoing the same thought. Do
| you think there's a revolving door between the Sci-Fi Writers
| Guild and the "Let's build billionaires a Torment Nexus" think
| tank?
| rolandog wrote:
| This is all giving me Altered Carbon vibes.
| moffers wrote:
| It's good to know that the ethical line is some amount of human
| brain cells. Not too much, not too little. The perfect, ethical
| amount.
| babblingfish wrote:
| I don't think this idea could work. There's this common
| misconception that our brains control our bodies, like how
| software can control hardware. The fact is that our brains are
| intrinsically connected to the rest of our body: via the central
| nervous system, sensory, and motor neurons. You can't just swap
| out our brains. It's integrated with the rest of our body in a
| fundamental way. If you cloned someone, the neuronal connections
| between the CNS and organs would not be the same, because these
| interconnections develop over a lifetime and are not
| predetermined at birth.
|
| It also feels super unethical to me. Reminds me of "Never let me
| go" by Kazuo Ishiguro.
| mike_d wrote:
| You don't think that the idea could work _based on our current
| understandings_.
|
| To be clear I think this type of work crosses a lot of ethical
| boundaries. But entire fields like gynecological surgery were
| the result of a person with no ethics doing horrific things to
| people without consent. Most early vaccine testing was done on
| orphans and the mentally handicapped.
|
| This is ultimately what happens when the people who were
| cheered for "move fast and break things" start to get older and
| come face to face with the one thing money can't buy.
| nathanh4903 wrote:
| These type of research seems to always assume that we are a ghost
| in a machine: the brain is what really matters, and the body is
| nothing more than a suit. The mind-body problem fascinates me,
| and I'm skeptical of anyone who held any position with certainty.
|
| The only thing thats certain is that the debate on the mind-body
| problem is going to be no longer just philosophical/theological,
| but a practical problem with real world implication. Its exciting
| and terrifying that we may soon have empirical data refuting or
| supporting dualism.
| scarmig wrote:
| The neurons in the brain and body will inevitably learn
| connectivity patterns to best take advantage of neural signals
| from the other. Which is kind of an interesting wrinkle to the
| mind body problem: the brain likely has more capability to
| remap circuits than the body. So, if you implant a brain into a
| body... The implanted brain changes more to match the implanted
| body than vice versa.
| caycep wrote:
| There is some shared juju these people and the wellness
| influencer crowd in Brentwood are smoking
| trhway wrote:
| it isn't brainless :
|
| "a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure
| to be alive"
|
| "A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which
| children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres;
| he's shown people medical scans of these kids' nearly empty
| skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.
| "
|
| That looks like hardware firmware vs. software. The clone would
| come with the firmware. Giving that the brain ages too, one can
| later want for the lower level brain parts to be refreshed too -
| i.e. amigdala, lower level visual cortex, etc - to come with the
| clone on top of the firmware.
|
| For getting spare parts one would have expected that growing
| individual organs would come first, yet it may happen that
| growing them all together as such "brainless" body may be
| simpler.
|
| Ethics-wise i think we're going into pretty nightmarish scenarios
| - as mentioned in the article women will be used as surrogates,
| and thus a multi-billionaire today can already clone himself,
| CRISP-in brain suppression (we'd like to hope that they would do
| it), and get such a body-clone as a source of parts.
| api wrote:
| If it's truly brainless then I don't see a major ethical problem.
| But I also don't see people being allowed to do this because it's
| much too far past the "yuck" threshold. It's gross and disturbing
| even if technically it is ethical.
|
| I also think it would be way harder to do this than it sounds.
| The body would not develop properly past the fetal stage without
| some kind of artificial stimulation.
|
| Printing organs is probably both more likely to work and more
| likely to be accepted.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Every time I hear about a tech firm trying to implement some
| dystopian/nightmarish sci-vision, I think of Tobias from
| _Arrested Development_ saing '...but it might work for _us_. '
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| Better biomimicry is a growth area in robotics but a brainless
| human just isn't possible.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I'm mentally reading all of the quotes from this guy in the voice
| of Walter from Fringe.
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