And @JuanDaw “You would have to “feed” (nourish) the headless clone” I’m adding you to my list of people with human idiosyncrasies for that comment.
Culture Conditions
Culture conditions vary widely for each cell type, but the artificial environment in which the cells are cultured invariably consists of a suitable vessel containing the following:
A substrate or medium that supplies the essential nutrients (amino acids, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals)
Growth factors
Hormones
Gases (O2, CO2)
A regulated physico-chemical environment (pH, osmotic pressure, temperature)
The above is for cells. So a fully functioning adult body, sans the head, will require more nutrients, especially if it takes months, maybe years to clone from simple cells to a whole human body.
The headless part came from Neo, not me. I cannot imagine how a headless clone can be produced. Perhaps, science will solve that. But I’d rather focus scientific resources in solving how the liver is kept eternally youthful by the body. That would require fewer resources than to clone a spare part or spare body.
Evolution has actually already done the terrible R&D for that genetic defect:
Anencephaly
A baby born with an underdeveloped brain and an incomplete skull.
Anencephaly is a defect in the formation of a baby’s neural tube during development. A baby born with anencephaly might be stillborn or survive only a few hours to a few days after birth.
When you are saying resources are we talking about the R&D or the energy to produce the cloned organs/body?
Now, there is one question I have about this headless clone or brainless clone or, better yet, a clone complete with head and brain with nothing more than the ability to maintain body functions. In other words, I’m talking about a clone with head and brain, but without enough functioning brain cells to become a functioning being with a personality. If this were possible I would be getting a new body, but my own brain since my birth would still be 70, 80, 90 or more years old. How would I fix this problem or has someone already mentioned a solution?
Oh, as an aside, this reminds me very much of Frankenstein’s Monster even though the body in that case was not a clone. Hmmm … maybe I’ll watch the Gene Wilder version of that movie this afternoon and consider the possibilities!
There are a couple of pillars to a complete answer but here is a sketch
if your own head/brain is moved onto/into a genetically identical, but young version of your own body that will itself almost certainly lead to some form of rejuvenation. I will be like young plasma exchange/parabiosis on steroids!!! It would be like a continuous systemic stem cell therapy, it would be like optimal GFD11, klotho, etc therapies and there will be additional benefits from each of your organs having perfect young function without any of the impairments from age - from your kidneys, to your microbiome, to even having a young and fresh spinal CNS to help cleanse and provide a healthy environment for your brain. This argument might be even stronger than just based on those mechanisms, see a post I will come back with.
above will likely increase the time that your brain will last and those extra years or (many) decade(s) will enable more time for you to access more medical advancements
and if body replacement becomes widely used, there will be much less need to study most non-brain disease processes - as most of them can be solved by a body replacement. Perhaps that is too extreme, but it would absolutely shift the incentives and funding and market dynamics to reward work focus on neurological health and neurological aging - probably by several orders of magnitude.
Think about it…. no need to invest in liver, pancreas, colon, breast, prostate cancer… no need to invest in type 1 and 2 diabetes…, no need to investment in kidney, liver, pancreas, lung and heart impairment…, no need to invest in things like Crohn’s or any other digestive tract type of disease…, no need to invest in thing like sarcopenia, osteoporosis…, and so on and so forth…
Above is further accelerated by the fact that people will (a) be living longer lives and (b) care much about their brain, so the willingness for both the government and individuals to invest in brain health would go up by a lot
So beyond a mass shift in resources to Alzheimer’s and other dementia, etc, etc, any of the other longevity therapies that show promise, like partial reprogramming, CRISPR editing can now in a more focused way target brain health and rejuvenation without having to be diluted towards every other system and disease process in our body
And it might be that none of above is needed, because as I laid out in the first post of this thread:
We could even gradually replace parts of the brain in a gradual, continuous way such that you still are you even after we over say a decade or so have replaced your entire brain with healthy neuron and other brain tissue.
Part 2 of my answer that began in the previous post:
It is actually not known if a maximum lifespan exists for any postmitotic cells of mammals, including neurons.
To address this issue, scientists published in the top journal PNAS a study that exploited the differences in maximum lifespan of different strains of mice and rats.
In short neurons from mice lived twice as long as the mice live - when transplanted into longer lived rats.
While we are not rodents, this *supports the conjecture that your mammalian brain could live significantly longer if your old body is switched out to a young one.
“The lifespan of neurons is not limited by the maximum lifespan of the donor organism, but continues when transplanted in a longer-living host,” according to the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Lifespan of neurons is uncoupled from organismal lifespan
Neurons in mammals do not undergo replicative aging, and, in absence of pathologic conditions, their lifespan is limited only by the maximum lifespan of the organism.
Whether neuronal lifespan is determined by the strain-specific lifetime or can be extended beyond this limit is unknown. Here, we transplanted embryonic mouse cerebellar precursors into the developing brain of the longer-living Wistar rats. The donor cells integrated into the rat cerebellum developing into mature neurons while retaining mouse-specific morphometric traits. In their new environment, the grafted mouse neurons did not die at or before the maximum lifespan of their strain of origin* but survived as long as 36 mo, doubling the average lifespan of the donor mice.
Thus, the lifespan of neurons is not limited by the maximum lifespan of the donor organism, but continues when transplanted in a longer-living host.
Our results suggest that mouse cerebellar neural and glial precursors, xenotransplanted into the rat CNS, integrate into the host tissue and differentiate, maintaining species-specific morphometric traits, but survive as long as the surrounding host rat neurons, doubling their expected average survival in the mouse.
Those increases are larger than the relative increases in organismal lifespan induced in mice by dietary (30), pharmacologic (31), and most genetic manipulations (32)
Our results suggest that neuronal survival and aging are coincidental but separable processes, thus increasing our hope that extending organismal lifespan by dietary, behavioral, and pharmacologic interventions will not necessarily result in a neuronally depleted brain.
Thanks to @JuanDaw I’m having a very hard time getting the phrase “feed the headless clone” out of my mind.
I can just hear my wife saying “Honey, can you take out the trash? And don’t forget to feed the headless clone.” Young Frankenstein indeed! (@Jay )
My body is still functioning pretty well and I’m not so concerned about how it looks… but I’d love a new body for my wife! (old Jack Benny joke…or don’t tell me…not Groucho Marx again?)
Just wanted to make sure I was not missing if there was a response / reaction / relation to something I said in my comment just before
In general I think it would be good if people could just give a single sentence or something of context when posting a video so others can decide whether they want to invest in looking at it
I certainly agree here. There’s so much information to go through here that filtering is a critical skill. When someone posts just a video link or in @Vlasko 's case just a study with no comment at all - it’s just an extra hurdle to try and figure out if you should slow down and take a look. Please give a brief summary or at least a reason as to why it might be relevant.
