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Re:The macabre fate of ‘beating heart corpses’ by ChuckMcM on Friday November 11, 2016 @02:35PM (#12933606)
As medicine gets better and we develop a better understanding of how our bodies work this question will only get more difficult. At some point it will be possible to program your cells to repair any damage to your body including regenerating limbs or organs. And when you can do that, taking someone who is "dead", hooking them up to the "autodoc"[1] and having it repair the damage and restart them, then the only question might be how many short term memories did you lose? And if you can download those some how then even a partly decomposed body could be the source material for reconstructing the original, not a clone per se because parts of the original are re-used but certainly a full retrofit. Then a lot of built in human assumptions get really challenged.

[1] This is a name used in science fiction stories to describe the machine that mechanically repairs tissue damage.

Re:The macabre fate of ‘beating heart corpses’ by seanp2k2 on Friday November 11, 2016 @10:10PM (#12936388)
Wth the current rate of stem cell research, I doubt I'll see that for at least 60 years.
Re:The macabre fate of ‘beating heart corpses’ by ChuckMcM on Saturday November 12, 2016 @02:58PM (#12939857)
As a mental exercise, look up the medical state of the art from 60 years ago (1956), look at what was known and unknown, and compare it to the current state of the art.

The only thing slowing down this development timeline is the FDA approval process, and that doesn't slow down research much at all.

Given that, I would be surprised if it took 60 years. It may not be 6 but I would put it more around 12 - 15 when we start human trials of organ or limb re-generation.