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Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create βspareβ bodies, both human and nonhuman.
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I won't engage on arguments about fictional technology feasibility in this case. But let's talk about a full body without consciousness. If it is a fully formed and functional body, it has to have a nervous system. So it has to have some organ to regulate all the various functions that are coordinated by a nervous system. So basically this is a "animal person" following this logic. It wouldn't have enough brain for "human consciousness" by design. So how is this significantly different from live animal for testing? Only the animal is "more human bit still animal". This just gets pretty thorny as a thought experiment.
This is simply not a good situation to have thought experiments about. The conclusion is purely based on how generous your assumptions are: any other mammal is conscious, just not sapient, so even that makes your thought experiment faulty. But the issue is that any set of assumptions will completely determine your verdict and there isn't really even that much meat to the scenario outside of the assumptions: if it was possible to just make a piece of meat that is biologically compatible with human beings, great; if the piece of meat is stated to have the quality of being sentient by the premise, then not so great.
A nervous system doesn't necessarily imply sentience. Someone who is brain dead but on life support has a nervous system, yet no activity will be registered in the brain no matter what kind of stimulus happens to the body. One might bicker about it being impossible to know whether a brain dead person has any kind of qualia, but I'm pretty doubtful and think it's reasonable to assume they don't based on the evidence available. Hell, while we're on the topic let's just shift our hypothetical a little bit.
What if someone volunteered to donate their body to science after their death OR brain death. A terrible tragedy happens, and they do indeed wind up brain dead. The will is solid and a research institution (for the sake of argument, we will stipulate a morally sound institution) wants to keep that body on life support and use it for medical testing purposes to avoid having to test on animals or fully conscious and sentient humans. Assuming the person made such a donation in good health and a sound state of mind, I don't see anything wrong with this. The family might object based on sentimental attachments to the body and the person the body used to be, but without a functional brain I don't really think we're talking about a "person" anymore, not morally speaking. Much closer to a corpse than a person in my opinion.
Having a human body grown without consciousness, sentience, or a social identity/connection at all overcomes any kind of remaining sentimentalist objections. If we accept that someone can donate their body and organs to science or other people upon their death/brain death, I think it follows that we can permit non-conscious and non-sentient bodies in general to be used for such purposes. Again, as long as the body is grown expressly without those things, I don't see a coherent argument against it.
That's the tricky bit, how and where does this determination get made? A lot of people believe many animals are non-sentient even if there is strong evidence otherwise. I just think it is pretty fraught territory based on a hypothetical, which is kinda like a rocko's basilisk thing to me.