The craziest stuff is being planned as a new commercial startup project (archive link).
Apparently, a team of Israeli entrepreneurs is planning to grow human embryos in artificial wombs. After they grow, organs could be harvested from such infants. To avoid ethical dilemmas, human embryos will be grown without heads. No kidding. The article does not explain how growing human embryos without heads would “avoid ethical dilemmas”, leaving the reader needing to figure it out on their own.
The idea of this startup is to
- take stem cells from any given individual, such as you or me
- modify the genetic code of those stem cells to prevent the formation of a human head (or brain) when developing as an embryo
- seed these genetically modified cells into a jar serving as an artificial womb and grow an artificial human embryo, but without a head
- According to the startup, this somehow “avoids ethical dilemmas”
Although Hanna doesn’t think an artificial embryo made from stem cells and kept in a lab will ever count as a human being (NO SHIT — I.C.), he has a contingency plan to make sure there is no confusion. It’s possible, for instance, to genetically engineer the starting cells so the resulting model embryo never develops a head. Restricting its potential could help avoid ethical dilemmas. “We think this is important and have invested a lot in this,” says Hanna.
This plan does have some interesting possibilities, and the article mentions old people who would benefit from youthful immune cells.
The article does not say this out loud, but perhaps a large target market would be all old people who destroyed their immune cells through “Covid vaccine” injections and want to reverse the effect the vaccine had on their immune systems.
