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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 The team's data has not yet been peer reviewed.
well here the abortion limit is set at 22 weeks, so the size of that would be a good limit as I posted just before
Not to invoke Godwin's Law but to dismiss moral concerns here as "knee-jerk responses" is a bit shallow, frankly.
As far as we understand (I'm not a brain scientist), we conceptualize that whatever makes us "us" resides entirely in the brain; not the spleen, liver, nor (despite general anecdotal experience from half the population of the other half) the penis.
We don't know *what* process activates "personhood" within that little clump of cells within a growing fetus, nor even have a conceptual yardstick against what to measure when a cell is self-aware, nor finally understand ethically if/when that matters to us.
This isn't a quasi-religious camouflage for an abortion discussion: cows are at least reasonably conscious if not sapient, and we kill them by the millions for food; most would argue that dolphins and dogs are reasonably intelligent and at least some of us kill at least one of them for food, too.
To create what is, as is presented here, a reasonable facsimile of a functioning brain at an early stage of development is to raise some ABSOLUTELY VALID questions. I mention Godwin's only because your justifications appear utilitarian, and of course the response to that would be the valuable and important research done in a number of different fields (such as hypothermia) done absent moral constraint by Germany circa 1940-45. I can't imagine anyone today would be ok with that, despite the data being very, very useful.
Utility is not - it CANNOT - be the entirety of the discussion here.
-Styopa