THS / BioTech: Organlegger efficiency

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Broadly speaking, if you can't emulate what a brain does, you can't interface with it either, so either the brain in a box is useless because you can do the same thing in a different way, or it's useless because you can't actually do anything with it.

That...skips at least one step.

We already can interface brains and machines (albeit clumsily), and we most certainly can't emulate brains in any meaningful way in software.

It all depends on what you're trying to do with the brain-in-a-jar. (I'm actually skeptical of this because I don't think the brain is set up to work very well in such isolation, but allowing for that, there's also the risk that the brain-in-a-jar might have his or her own ideas about function and role...

[CeeDub]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What face? What body? After you've harvested everything useful from a body, you don't just leave the scraps lying around unless you're operating in a place where there's effectively no risk of investigation.

That was a response to a suggestion about just removing the brain and using the body for a whole body transplant. Besides, "invasion of the body snatchers" is not the kind of horror I was going for.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

How do you figure they'd have that rule, but allow transplants at all?

Well, organ transplants, both from living and deceased donors, are commonplace and widely accepted in our culture, but cloning humans and anything involving stem cells makes most people uncomfortable and faces lots of legal challenges (at the very least).

[CeeDub]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

It all depends on what you're trying to do with the brain-in-a-jar. (I'm actually skeptical of this because I don't think the brain is set up to work very well in such isolation, but allowing for that, there's also the risk that the brain-in-a-jar might have his or her own ideas about function and role...

I like the horror aspect of the brain, the very center of who we are, being stolen and perverted for nefarious purposes, but it's a little more super-sciency than I intend to go in my campaign. Still, if I were to go there, I'd explain it as the brain being basically lobotomized to (mostly) eliminate agency and personality, and only interface with the parts that enable cognition, language, sarcasm and humour detection, etc. Effectively using the brain as some sort of BPU (biological processing unit), like a GPU for graphics, only for things humans can do better than machines.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Well, organ transplants, both from living and deceased donors, are commonplace and widely accepted in our culture, but cloning humans and anything involving stem cells makes most people uncomfortable and faces lots of legal challenges (at the very least).

Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Cloning humans, maybe. Doing stuff with stem cells? Basically nobody cares. Embryonic-sourced stem cells have some political trouble, basically as a penumbra to the conflict over abortion, but that's about where you get the stem cells rather than about using stem cells.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Well, organ transplants, both from living and deceased donors, are commonplace and widely accepted in our culture, but cloning humans and anything involving stem cells makes most people uncomfortable and faces lots of legal challenges (at the very least).

There's also the fact that, unless I'm missing something, organleggers are by definition operating outside of the law. They may well do their best business in places where organ transplants - regardless of organ source - are illegal (probably for religious reasons), working alongside black market clinics to provide the organs needed for the illegal transplant work. Such places, of course, may not be plentiful enough (or busy enough) to really have much of an organlegging industry.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Varyon

There's also the fact that, unless I'm missing something, organleggers are by definition operating outside of the law. They may well do their best business in places where organ transplants - regardless of organ source - are illegal (probably for religious reasons), working alongside black market clinics to provide the organs needed for the illegal transplant work. Such places, of course, may not be plentiful enough (or busy enough) to really have much of an organlegging industry.

If organ transplants are (meaningfully) illegal, that's likely to brutally cut into demand.

Getting an organ transplant done covertly or sketchily is one thing, learning that you need an organ transplant without anybody being in on that fact is hard. And so is maintaining the after-transplant care you'll likely require.

Unless enforcement doesn't bother to look into cases where someone 'miraculously' recovers from something that they shouldn't without a transplant, you'd have to basically have a firm conspiracy wrapped around your health from before you got the diagnosis. Otherwise your life will be pretty visible cause for criminal investigation. That's a much bigger problem than needing to make sure the genuine origin of your transplant organ is obscure but everything else being aboveboard.