Epoch Times - Scientists Want to Create Brainless Human Bodies for Research & Organ Transplants

Nov. 18, 2025 - Epoch Times

04:05

Scientists Want to Create Brainless Human Bodies for Research & Organ Transplants

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	There's a proposal that was put forward by some Stanford biologists and ethicists in the MIT Technology Review.
	And I just wrote a response to it.
	It was published in First Things, just reprinted yesterday in the free press, about this idea of creating bodyoids.
	Now, I should say this hasn't been done yet, but essentially they argue we're almost there with the technology to create human beings that we'd be born without brains, without a central nervous system, but would otherwise have a functioning, physiologically healthy body and healthy organs.
	And by creating these so-called bodyoids, we would have a supply of living human bodies that could be experimented upon without impunity because these people argue they wouldn't actually be human.
	So the original title of my article was Zombie Bioethics, right?
	Because this is not the first time we've contemplated, you know, an undead living organism that appears to be human but is not because it's brainless, right?
	This is a staple of science fiction and horror films.
	So the creation of these kind of zombie-like entities that could be experimented upon with impunity, whose organs could be harvested willy-nilly without their consent because presumably they would have no cognition and they would be incapable of giving consent.
	And so it's a rather, to my mind, rather gruesome proposition.
	And I argue based on, and by the way, according to our brain death criteria, these people would already be dead because they have no functional brain activity, even though their heart is beating, they're breathing, and they're undergoing normal development, they look alive in all other respects.
	And I argue that, you know, rather than creating some sort of human-like non-human species, we would be creating simply profoundly disabled human beings.
	It would be analogous to the creation of individuals who have an affliction called anencephaly, where they're born without a cerebral cortex.
	They have some deep brain functioning that allows them to stay alive for a few days.
	But clearly, these are not alien entities that we can do anything we want to.
	They're human beings with a very profound, life-limiting disability.
	But yeah, in this case, so in the case of anencephaly, you know, we care for whatever foreshortened life these poor babies have, but we don't create them on purpose.
	And this proposal is precisely to set out using gene editing technology.
	And these authors argue we would also need artificial wombs to do this.
	Technically speaking, we wouldn't need artificial wombs to do this.
	They could be ingestated by a woman and given birth to these entities in a normal way.
	But presumably for these ethical innovators, the idea of a woman giving birth to an entity that they argue is not human is just too gruesome to contemplate.
	So yeah, they say using gene editing technology, we could deliberately set out to create these kinds of what I argue are simply profoundly disabled human beings that we can do anything we want with.
	Yeah, so that we can kill them with impunity.
	For the greater good.
	Naturally, for the greater good.
	Yeah.
	Unlimited supply of organs, unlimited supply of human bodies that we could run medical experiments on, unlimited supply of tissue that we could use for experimentation.
	So on the one hand, they're arguing, well, they're not really human.
	Therefore, we can do all these things to them.
	On the other hand, they're interested in them precisely because of how very human they are.
	That their heart and their lungs and their kidneys behave exactly like human heart, lungs, and kidneys, which is why they would be so useful for experiments, even more useful than using animals for experiments.
	So they're talking out of both sides of their mouth.
	On the one hand, we want them because they are so very human.

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