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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 The team's data has not yet been peer reviewed.
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.