alt Hacker NewsWe should be cloning monoclonal antigen free humans and harvesting blood from factories.
All of medical science still imagines a world where humans are in "God's shape", denying the fact that we are machines made of systems of smaller machines.
We could clone headless humans and have factories full of them. Transplants could cure all but brain cancer. Reverse aging too.
Every time I meet a postdoc biologist and hear them drone on about the limits of detection, I'm furious we are overlooking the obvious answer to everything. The mechanization of the human body as a plant and lab.
It's just going to take someone bold enough to do it, because people look at this as a horror. Like the first medical inquiry into cadavers being an affront to God.
It would fix everything and propel the biological sciences hundreds of years into the future.
We are dumb superstitious apes.
Replies
> All of medical science still imagines a world where humans are in "God's shape", denying the fact that we are machines made of systems of smaller machines.
No, it’s that these systems of systems are so incredibly complex that we still don’t understand many of them deeply. And misunderstanding the relationships of systems leads to major side effects and unpredictability.
If we understood these systems then we wouldn’t have vague success rates on things like drugs or surgeries - we’d be able to say “based on all of these factors this is the treatment that works for you”. But we can’t do that, instead we have trials and shrug and say “it works for most people so it’s worth using”
> We could clone headless humans and have factories full of them. Transplants could cure all but brain cancer. Reverse aging too.
We literally couldn't do this if we wanted to
since we're making things up -- why don't we just spin up a program that trains a bunch of novice clerics to cast Cure Disease?
Developing a blood substitute for emergency transfusions seems like a 100X more tractable problem.
Your HN username should be in the dictionary under “Dunning-Kruger”.
You cant just replace and expect to solve issues.
- tissue rejection - viruses can and do change cell level machinery - cascading malfunctions of small things can have large results
Then theres the ethics of cloning humans and keeping them in a factory. No religion or superstition in this statement, but if theres consciousness or the possibility thereof then this is absolutely monstrous.