Brain transplants are purely science fiction for now, but while it might be called a brain transplant, it’s more of a body transplant. Assuming you’re taking a useless body with a useful brain and a useful body with a useless brain, and swapping, the person, being in the brain, is getting a new body. The owner of the brain-dead body wouldn’t get a new brain. Their family would get the useless brain and useless body to bury.
If that sounds grim, it’s because it is, and the potential for abuse would be so great. Imagine a random wealthy, 79-year-old pederast dictator who would demand that some family give up their ten-year-old child to receive his brain. Maybe they get compensated for their child, maybe they just get to keep living. Is that something medical science should allow? Would there be any condition in which it’s ethically or morally okay? And what if, with healthy body replacements, a brain can only live 150 years? After the second or third transplant, what would be the ethics or morality of taking a good mind (say, one that might cure cancer) and giving that brain 10 more years of life, versus giving a 10-year-old only 10 more years before that body just drops dead at 20 (maybe to be a recipient of another brain with a dying body, but to make things fun, let’s say a body can only get a new brain once: remove the second brain, and a third one cannot be successfully transplanted in)?
If full body transplants become possible, the most obvious way forward is growing bodies in vats. When you hit 30 or 40, you start up a new body using your own DNA and swap over at age 50 or 60.
[waves hand] It’s fine. Just have to 3D print the new body and a regulation that requires everyone take a body of the opposite sex. That way trans people can get the right body and the rich can gain some empathy for trans people real fast.
Brain transplants are purely science fiction for now, but while it might be called a brain transplant, it’s more of a body transplant. Assuming you’re taking a useless body with a useful brain and a useful body with a useless brain, and swapping, the person, being in the brain, is getting a new body. The owner of the brain-dead body wouldn’t get a new brain. Their family would get the useless brain and useless body to bury.
If that sounds grim, it’s because it is, and the potential for abuse would be so great. Imagine a random wealthy, 79-year-old pederast dictator who would demand that some family give up their ten-year-old child to receive his brain. Maybe they get compensated for their child, maybe they just get to keep living. Is that something medical science should allow? Would there be any condition in which it’s ethically or morally okay? And what if, with healthy body replacements, a brain can only live 150 years? After the second or third transplant, what would be the ethics or morality of taking a good mind (say, one that might cure cancer) and giving that brain 10 more years of life, versus giving a 10-year-old only 10 more years before that body just drops dead at 20 (maybe to be a recipient of another brain with a dying body, but to make things fun, let’s say a body can only get a new brain once: remove the second brain, and a third one cannot be successfully transplanted in)?
If full body transplants become possible, the most obvious way forward is growing bodies in vats. When you hit 30 or 40, you start up a new body using your own DNA and swap over at age 50 or 60.
[waves hand] It’s fine. Just have to 3D print the new body and a regulation that requires everyone take a body of the opposite sex. That way trans people can get the right body and the rich can gain some empathy for trans people real fast.