alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Yeah... Non-sentient monkey "organ sacks" as a replacement for animal testing sounds great, but those organs aren't going to function or even develop the same without a brain. At best, I think this could only be another step to filter out unsafe compounds between testing on cells and testing on whole animals. Potentially with misleading results, I imagine.
Anecephaly is a thing. Though those babies don't survive much past birth.
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.
Consider also that even reattaching nerves that are supposed to be there is not exactly a walk in the park. Look into finger reattachment surgery and post operation care. Think pain, tingling, a year or more of physiotherapy.. and that's in the best case that it actually works and you don't end up with a "dead" finger. Now, imagine that for your whole body.