> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

unlike man-made machines, we do not fully understand our bodies yet, and as such should be careful when trying to make them better. Don't start randomly `rf -rf *` on a Unix system if you don't know what it does, don't start randomly using steroids if you aren't sure of the long term biological consequences.

Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.

If you'll also allow me a quick remark on your upbringing, as someone from an intellectual Parisian family who grew up in God-fearing, football-loving Texas...

I'm sure that somewhere in the South, there is a little gay kid, or one born with an odd mutation, to his birth parents, who felt or feels the exact same way you did - as something of an alien. I believe that the vast majority of cultures will produce outsiders, and it's also very probable that somewhere in Paris, there is someone who doesn't feel at home in the midst of heavy intellectual conversation and would prefer a simpler world focused on traditional religion and football (possibly association football/soccer, rather than American football).

Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)

> Humans can form 'tribes', in the loosest sense of the word possible, based on genetics, but we also form tribes based on similar beliefs, values and interests - for example, Hacker News :)

I agree with this, and I'm glad we do. But I've posted the "let's harvest clones for organs" idea numerous times on HN -- a community where many of us are on somewhat of a similar wavelength. It's usually met with a lot of vitriol and disgust.

> Obviously, your proposed "monoclonal human bodies in artificial wombs" would help with that.

That's one of the nice things about this. It would give us an organismal research platform where we could replicate experiments. No more animal studies, imperfect chimera systems, or molecular experiments we can't scale up. We'd have a perfect test bed for investigating almost everything that ails us.