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Scientists Couple Nerve Tissues With Computer Chip
patiwat writes "Recalling Ghost in the Shell, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried have coupled living brain tissue to a semiconductor chip. This technique involves culturing razor-thin slices of the hippocampus region on the chip, enabling them to record neural communication between thousands of nerve cells in the brain tissue slice. The hippocampus is associated with temporary storage of memory. Employing the new technique, the scientists working under the direction of Peter Fromherz were able to visualize the influence of pharmaceutical compounds on the neural network, making the 'brainchip' an exciting test bed for neuropharmaceutical research, with potential for further development in neurochip prosthetics and neurocomputation. The researchers reported this news in the online edition of the Journal of Neurophysiology (May 10, 2006)."
Nice, but does the chip run linux ? Would it if the slices were taken from a penguin ?
Anyway I for one welcome our living hyppocampus-sliced brainchip overlords.
I work in neuroscience, and Fromherz has been doing this for a long time:
A neuron-silicon junction: a Retzius cell of the leech on an insulated-gate field-effect transistor.
Science. 1991 May 31;252(5010):1290-3.
pdf
All the same, it is an interesting field, but don't let this post lead you to believe that he (and others) haven't already been doing this for 15 years.
Hooray! Now there seems a real chance that one day doctors will be able to graft one of those whatsits onto the prefrontal thingey and cure my attention something something disorder!
Resistance is futile!
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
So if one grafts hippocampus tissue into a solid state memory chip, will it help Alzheimer's patients retain some information? Even if such a thing is possible, I wonder how far to go before practical implementation.
I'll read TFA in detail tomorrow...
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makes for good eatin too!
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if you had read the article carefully, you would notice they hadn't achieved bidirectional transmission between cells and transistors. the chip works in the same fashion as ccd does in your camera. the difference is that the first is responsive to charged particles and the latter to photons. so forget about ghost in the shell style ai. however it would be a great mistake to neglect the impact of this work on developement in neurophysiology.
I always worry when these kinds of press releases come out. They always overdo it and spoil the impact.
True, it is a significant step in terms of scale and they way they have overcome the interfacing problems *and* maintain the culture medium is pretty snazzy. But...
Exciting testbed for pharmaceutical research? Nah!
Setting aside the fact that it's not human tissue; the interactions between neurons is massively complex. The culture medium (which keeps the cells alive) is, by necessity not anything like the infrastructure which keeps the cells alive in a living organism, so it will interfere with many of the more subtle interactions. And those subtle interactions make all the difference when it comes to developing drugs.
It's still interesting and a good step in the right direction but they overhyped it. Someone is looking for more grant money.
Disclaimer: Yes, I *am* a biochemist.
I'm really clumsy, and I've being doing this accidentally for years. Barely a month goes by before I trip over a stray power chord and have motherboards protruding from my forehead.
Unfortunately, I've never persevered long enough with the addition to see if any fusing occurs, though I have a feeling that there wouldn't be too much improvement due to the inherent sluggishness of my general brain design, causing any information passed from silicon to brain to be so slow as to make any improvement virtually unnoticeable.
I think I probably need to get a faster bus speed, maybe the 42 would be a better choice.
That was the most incredible project I heard from about neurotechnology in the past years. Here is the link in french and english to that lab :
http://www.polystim.ca/
For(k;;)(Fork();)
It wants feet.
Dr. Sam Beckett did this back in 1996. He used these circuits to create a senient computer named Ziggy, who in turn helped him design a time travel machine.
Then:
Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that are not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on his journey is Al, an observer from his own time who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hopin g each time that his next leap will be the leap home.
Hopefully, before he gets home, he'll leap into someone around my teenaged self and teach him/me about girls, and then I'll never have been able to type that from memory.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Brain slice experiments (this case is just in conjunction with this new chip that can measure various impulses from cultured hippocampal slice) scare the hell out of me. A brain we know already has capability at least in full to present a rich sensory representation. When we get better at using brain slices in neurocomputation or experiments (cultured, donated, harvested, ...) then a line has been crossed until we know enough to know better. Who'd donate their brain if they knew some aspect of 'themselves' might be preserved while experiments were performed on it? Especially since the brain's owner is not in any condition to back out of the experiment at that point.
A brain slice is functionally inferior subset of this full brain's capability. How small a slice should it be before all sentience is lost and therefore ok to put it on a chip? Should it be for volunteers only? Are cultured samples ok to use or perhaps brain properties make them generate sensory representation just as well? Is it for example to use neural gag reflex circuitry to instead move our robotic arm and a neural 'gut punch' to alter the speed and trajectory? Repeated hundreds of times an hour? For decades on end? Is this kind of thing ok to do to animal brains / slices over a long period of time? Anyway, all I know is when I talk like this I'm modded into the subzero territories, so cheers to the few that see it!
Now I can find out what I was *really* thinking when I bought that El Camino on Ebay!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages; all alike.