Philosophical Vegan Forum

I just remembered a memory from my younger self (not that I am old) about human experimentation. I thought that, in the same way that people can become “brain dead” from serious injury, a more open minded future might be able to engineer people without cognition, but still capable of bodily function. This way, unethical experiments could be performed on them instead of animals, which would be beneficial from both an ethical and scientific standpoint.

Now that I think about it now I have some issues and speculations about the idea. For example, I imagine they would have the metabolism (and perhaps other bodily symptoms) of comatose people, which probably wouldn’t translate well with a lot of drugs or nutritional studies. I also have an inclibation that the idea is either impossible to get past a research ethics board or ludicrously expensive. However, I can also see how it would be useful for nutritional studies, because it would be possible to control for far more factors.

What are your thoughts?

We're developing something similar (but much better) with organs on chips. It will be possible to assemble an entire body (minus brain) eventually. But very small.

The big issue is the slow development of humans, comatose or not, and the space they need.
That's a benefit with rats and mice; you need to be able to run larger trials to accommodate for statistical noise, and you need cheap and efficient subjects.
The drawback is the genetic difference (although it's close enough to tell us quite a bit, much closer to us than dogs or cows).