Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/04/mit-cuts-ties-with-company-pro.html
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Meanwhile…
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But they happily took the money in the first place.
There’s legitimate science to be done. If a crazy company wants to fund legitimate research with government grants, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be beneficial to let MIT work on it.
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It’s the whole “you gotta die first” thingy that bugs me.
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Assisted suicide isn’t the same thing as murder.
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Boyden had no issues with Nectome’s scientific foundations (or lack thereof) until the bad publicity. Then suddenly he was shocked to find magical / wistful thinking going on in this establishment.
Is it OK to spell the company’s name as Nectome when the BB style guide seems to specify “Netcome”?
Yeah, this part seems like the biggest no-brainer ethical roadblock:
One cadaver can donate two kidneys, as well as a heart, a liver, a pancreas, and perhaps other organs. To use it instead for a single head transplant with a slim chance of success is unethical.
Even a successful transplant would result in a single surviving patient with permanent total paralysis from the neck down. Unless you were saving the life of a genius who possessed knowledge critical to the fate of humanity, there’s no way you could justify that in lieu of allowing up to eight other patients to not only survive but lead potentially full and relatively healthy lives.
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If you truly believe this, why not go to a hospital, make sure your donation paperwork is in order, and kill yourself? Your selfish hoarding of your internal organs is denying the gift of life to eight other people, after all.
Seriously, since when do we so greatly lack cadavers that we cannot possibly spare any for such a groundbreaking experiment?
I am a registered organ donor. And I would haunt the fuck out of any doctor who decided to use my body in an experimental surgery to keep one person alive on a ventilator if the alternative was to save eight other people’s lives.
You are aware that people on organ donor waiting lists die all the time for lack of suitable cadavers, right? The number is around 20 per day in the U.S. alone. The vast, vast majority of cadavers out there aren’t suitable as organ donors. You have to die under very specific circumstances for your organs to be useful for transplant recipients.
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Heh heh heh
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Obligs…
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Too bad, I was hoping for an afterlife as a heroic robot asteroid miner. I’m too humble to hope for an interstellar embryo carrier.
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Roger that.
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“If it’s frozen,” said the first technician, “we won’t be able to put in the computer. It will have to go forward with with emergency stores.”
“This brain isn’t frozen,” said Tiga-belas indignantly. “It’s been laminated. We stiffened it with celluprime and then we veneered it down, about seven thousand layers. Each one has plastic of at least two molecules thickness. This mouse can’t spoil. As a matter of fact, this mouse is going to keep on thinking forever. He won’t think much, unless we put the voltage on him, but he’ll think. And he can’t spoil. This is ceramic plastic, and it would take a major weapon to break it.”
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Much love for “Think Blue, Count Two”
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