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Mini-Brains Grown In the Lab
fustakrakich sends news that researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences have used embryonic stem cells to grow a tiny human brain in a laboratory. The miniature brain, roughly the size of a pea, is at the same level of development as that of a 9-week-old fetus. From the BBC:
"They used either embryonic stem cells or adult skin cells to produce the part of an embryo that develops into the brain and spinal cord - the neuroectoderm. This was placed in tiny droplets of gel to give a scaffold for the tissue to grow and was placed into a spinning bioreactor, a nutrient bath that supplies nutrients and oxygen. The cells were able to grow and organise themselves into separate regions of the brain, such as the cerebral cortex, the retina, and, rarely, an early hippocampus, which would be heavily involved in memory in a fully developed adult brain. The tissues reached their maximum size, about 4mm (0.1in), after two months. The 'mini-brains' have survived for nearly a year, but did not grow any larger. There is no blood supply, just brain tissue, so nutrients and oxygen cannot penetrate into the middle of the brain-like structure."
...we can now artificially add one to the $POLITICAL_PARTISAN that needs one!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Finally, scientists thinking ahead. When the zombie apocalypse is upon us (Thanks to the effort next door to these guys) we will have a stable food source to keep them appeased.
Unfortunately, many of them already are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives
To my mind this is where this kind of research starts treading into murky ethical waters. Harvest stem cells from aborted fetuses? Fine, as long as you avoid creating any perverse incentives that might encourage abortions then I don't see the problem, you're just salvaging as much as possible from a difficult decision.
But growing brains in a lab? What would they have done if the brains ended up growing the necessary infrastructure as well as the neural tissue? At some point we're going to have something approaching a "real" human brain, and given that we credit the brain with containing the essence of a person that brain-in-a-jar will should probably be granted human rights. Not that such rights are likely to be terribly relevant to a mind trapped without sensory input. In fact I imagine there's a fair chance that it would be driven completely mad before it even reached full-term development.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Exactly, in my lab we work primarily on bone and colon tissue (although generated from adult stem or induced pluripotent stem cells). It would not be exaggerating to call these technologies the next generation of medical research. There are tons of genetic and developmental disorders that are either too rare to study readily in vivo or just impossible to study in-vitro. We're nearing the point where we can start with IPSC's either engineered to carry mutations of interest or derived directly from patients carrying these mutations and turn them into all sorts of tissues: liver, colon, neural, vascular, muscular, etc. In many cases it's not even necessary to get to the stage of organoids, simply having true human tissue with the right pathophysiology will be a tremendous boon to in-vitro drug screening and discovery and far more relevant than animal models.