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Researchers Grow Tiny Human Brain In Lab
schwit1 writes: A team of researchers from Ohio State University claim to have grown a human brain in their lab that approximates the brain of a five-week-old fetus. They say the tiny brain is not conscious, but it could be used to test drugs and study diseases, but scientific peers urge caution. "The brain, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, is engineered from adult human skin cells and is the most complete human brain model yet developed, [the researchers say]. ... Anand and his colleagues claim to have reproduced 99% of the brain’s diverse cell types and genes. They say their brain also contains a spinal cord, signalling circuitry and even a retina." The team's data has not yet been peer reviewed.
I used to be all for this type of research. Then my wife and I had a child a few months ago and my feelings towards what is acceptable to toy with changed, and continue to move more conservatively. It is odd, I never thought I'd say it, but maybe we do need to limit what we are doing in labs. Sometimes it just doesn't feel right.
How do they know it's 'not conscious'? (Note: I am an atheist.)
There is a lot of lab work that makes me squeamish. Come to think of it, there's even more stuff that happens outside a lab that makes me squeamish, but still produces important benefits for my life and many others.
I have kids myself, and I understand how having them can make you empathetic in new ways. This certainly isn't a bad thing.
But suppose your baby were diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. Would you still reject research that relied on techniques like those described here? Would you reject a treatment or cure, with proven efficacy, because its development had relied on this sort of model? Would you subject your child to experimental therapies that had some chance of success, but some chance of horrible, painful failure, if you instead had the option of trying them first on a model like this grown from your own child's skin cells?
Like I said, some lab work makes me squeamish. I respect the importance of Institutional Review Boards to keep abuses in check. But, on balance, I'm glad that researchers continue to push into new avenues like this, and I expect that the research will eventually prevent a great deal of human suffering.
If my baby was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, and it was possible to cure this disease by murdering a hobo and offering his heart's blood to some voodoo-related entity, I might seriously consider doing it. That doesn't make it right, of course.
Human brain activity starts at ~12 weeks
And yet, some higher functionality, like the frontal lobe, only get fully developed and fully functional only *AFTER* birth.
(For some obvious space-saving reasons that got selected by evolution once we start to try walking upright).
That's why some toys are inappropriate for kids under 36 months old. The part of the brain that prevents them for choking on anything coming nearby their mouth isn't there yet.
The brain isn't a magical machine which a switch that suddenly get turned on at a set point in time.
It's a horrendously complicated machine that only gets to working very progressively and slowly over time, some parts finishing getting wired and myelinated (=electrically insulated) only after on the other side of the birth cannal, when size restrictions matter less.
At 12 weeks, even if a few neurons starts firing, you're far away from the complexity and awarerness of a full grown kids brain.
For fuck's sake, the baby won't have enough brain activity for such simple tasks as preventing itself to choke, and you expect a bunch of neural cells which have barely started to fire to be anything more intelligent than a cockroach ?!
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Let's not stop halfway! If abortion is murder, then a miscarriage is manslaughter. We need to start jailing all these women that have a miscarriage so we can stop this horrible epidemic of killing the young people.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.