Re:Frog skin cells turned themselves into living machines
by echelon on Friday April 02, 2021 @06:36PM
(#26676666)
We can clone a human, we just don't.
We can keep babies born at 22 weeks alive with extensive prenatal care, and the technology continues to improve.
We can keep braindead people on life support.
It'll be easier to clone a whole human and remove the brain early in development (or genetically stop it from developing) than it would be to clone any organ or tissue in isolation without all the developmental biology, tissue scaffolding, etc.
Since the goal is no longer doing "prenatal care that results in quality of life", you can just iterate over and over until you improve survival duration.
You can grow the fetuses in pigs to iterate quickly and cheaply and probably run batch sizes in the thousands.
This is less ex nihilo than you think, and more like horticulture.
We can keep babies born at 22 weeks alive with extensive prenatal care, and the technology continues to improve.
We can keep braindead people on life support.
It'll be easier to clone a whole human and remove the brain early in development (or genetically stop it from developing) than it would be to clone any organ or tissue in isolation without all the developmental biology, tissue scaffolding, etc.
Since the goal is no longer doing "prenatal care that results in quality of life", you can just iterate over and over until you improve survival duration.
You can grow the fetuses in pigs to iterate quickly and cheaply and probably run batch sizes in the thousands.
This is less ex nihilo than you think, and more like horticulture.