Body prints! Imagine reduplicating your own body from a high-resolution scan… well it’s not that unlikely given the advances happening in tissue engineering. According to this article: Print your own organs | COSMOS magazine it may be a reality 10-30 years from now.
May be.
Our understanding of the genetics of cell differentiation is advancing rapidly and may well allow our own stem cells to be arranged and activated into whole organs, including blood vessels and nerves. Eventually I think we’ll be able to “print” whole functioning bodies – with sufficient resolution, even reconstituting brains.
However what will the legal/ethical status be of people who are dead and yet still existing as records of their bodies/brains? Alive? Half-life? Or legally dead? Will a “reprint” be legally a person? Or merely a “meat puppet” of a dead-person?
I mean that as pejoratively as the word “sock puppet” is meant on the Web. What rights will reprinted dead people have? If any?
