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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 The team's data has not yet been peer reviewed.
When a reporter asked the tiny brain how it felt, it replied "Kiiiiiillll meeeee".
If the tiny brain starts sporting big hair and a big mouth, better kill it. We don't need mini-Trumps wandering around seeking media exposure.
How did this pass an ethics review?
How do they know it's 'not conscious'? (Note: I am an atheist.)
I guess this is one way to fix it!!
I'm not sure how I feel about this research...and that's pretty much why I'm all for this. We don't understand enough to be able to say whether or not this should be happening, and this is the best way we know how to move forward. This is something that doesn't directly harm anyone, and we have no reason to believe that any sort of consciousness exists in it. This should be an obvious win-win that could potentially benefit everyone.
Certainly, this is going to trigger all kinds of knee-jerk responses from a lot of folks. I get that, but those are also the kinds of responses that are regularly made in the absence of any solid understanding of what's going on. That's why we had limited stem cell research for so long. This isn't mad scientist war crimes type stuff. This is the best way to study the human brain without actually stealing one from an unwilling donor.
I don't know how we reconcile the fact that some people have a religious objection to messing with the parts that we're made of and the fact that there's huge benefits to be gained, but we can't dicker around and make everyone happy. Sometimes we just need to get stuff done so that we can say "Just be happy with your cure for ALS."
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Sounds like he's more interested in the money than the science. He's locking up the patents and growing a business.
We have enough small-brained comments on slashdot already. Unfortunately some people likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference around here.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I, uh, I dropped it.
Who's brain did you get?
Abby, Abby someone. Abby Normal I think.
You mean to tell me that I put an Abnormal brain into a 74 inch tall, 54 inch wide.... GORILLLA!!?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Well, this will help alleviate the zombie food problem if they can scale it up to industrial proportions. We could even put them in head-shaped bowls and have large pens so the zombies are more "free range" like they would be in the wild.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When will enter the presidential race?
-Dave
we have no reason to believe that any sort of consciousness exists in it.
Defining consciousness is an endless philosophical debate... but forget all that, it's a brain - something we know to exhibit the properties that everyone uses to define consciousness, how can you possibly say there is no reason to believe it is concious? what arbitrary metrics are you using to call it unconscious? because craniometry is pseudo-science.
I'm not sure how i feel about this either, and maybe it's fine... maybe we can prove it to be effectively brain dead but useful enough to observe chemical processes in the brain... that doesn't mean we can conveniently sweep conciousness under the rug though.
This is the best way to study the human brain without actually stealing one from an unwilling donor.
I don't know how we reconcile the fact that some people have a religious objection to messing with the parts that we're made of and the fact that there's huge benefits to be gained.
You don't have to be religious to have a problem with this. I don't care where the brain comes from, it can be a willing donor or grown in the lab, the issue people are going to have is empathy with a potentially concious organism... i'd even extend that to sufficiently advanced synthetic neural networks, and i think most non-religious people would agree that conciousness is not bound to us "special" naturally grown humans for all time, it applies to any kind of brain.
The point is: it's a brain - not a kidney, that doesn't mean you can't do experiments, it just means you can't dismiss ethical considerations (do not confuse this with religious ones).
Why does "posting it on the internet" make it okay? You most likely wouldn't say with your mom/kid in the room.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
*A* retina? Did they clone a cyclops?
For them life begins at conception. Since there is no conception here, well, everything must be A-OK.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The tiny brain just declared its candidacy for President of the United States. It will run in the Republican primaries, and two polls taken today report that 12% of likely GOP voters will vote for the tiny brain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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 ]
There's more activity that goes on in a brain besides electrical activity. Neurons pass messages to each other by releasing chemicals to other neurons. That's why serotonin reuptake inhibitors work.
That must be freaky as hell. Especially if the eye follows you everywhere. Where can I buy one for Halloween?
Many people become wiser as they age. That's why they become Republicans.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
>>>I used to be all for this type of research. Then my wife and I had a child
See, this is how we can be sure your argument is emotion-based instead of fact-driven. Unsurprisingly, your hormonal adjustment and parental instincts interfere with clear thinking. Logically, you having a child is unrelated and irrelevant event to evaluating merits and ethics of medical research.
Too bad you succumbed to "Think of the children" hysteria, and my condolences on the premature demise of your logical self.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham
Stop being childish. It's both annoying and boring.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If it cannot ever communicate and was never able to communicate, it's not human. Not being human, it can't have human rights. It will also be unable to understand even one word in your post.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Oh, nonono: you mean THE Ohio State University!! So as not to confuse IT with all the hundred other Ohio state universities!.
The, THE, THE!!!
What a bizarre type of monomania they possess. (Neat story nonetheless).
I meant exactly what I said.
Just try to define consciousness without referring to "awareness", or "subjective experience", or "understanding". It's all begging the question -- in this case, "defining" a concept by equating it to other concepts, and pretending those concepts are already understood, when in reality they're aspects of the same mystery.
Yes, I know most people who mention "begging the question" mean something else entirely. Not this time. Feel free to shoot down an argument I'm not making, but don't ascribe that argument to me.
True, but without electrical activity, there's no real propagation of signal. There's local signaling, but no integration of inputs across multiple axons.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
They have absolutely no way of knowing whether it's conscious or not.
Thank God, we now have a new weapon to use against a zombie apocalypse! I sure hope they can scale it up for mass production, so that we can keep up with the demand from the hordes :)
If that's the case then how do Serotonin reuptake inhibitors work?
Human brain activity starts at ~12 weeks. 22 is the taking of a human life.
Which "brain activity" are you referring to?
I was under the impression that the inter-neuronal interconnections of the cognitive portion of the human brain did not begin to form until about a week into the third trimester. Before that those sections were essentially "a kit of parts, not yet assembled into a computer".
So are you talking about other "brain functions" - like low-level automation of body functions? Or are you claiming that the timing of the interconnection of the high-function neurons is different? (Note that these are not exclusive.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If that's the case then how do Serotonin reuptake inhibitors work?
If I understand correctly, SSRIs try to inhibit the too-rapid re-uptake of neurotransmitters like Serotonin, Dopamine and Norepinephrine that appears to be behind most mood and anxiety disorders. We're talking about consciousness, sense and cognition, all of which require electricity (as best I understand it) to run the overall orchestration of many systems. Without this operational system there's nothing for SSRIs to do, so I don't really understand your question.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Dr. Gillian Taylor: Sure you won't change your mind?
Spock: Is there something wrong with the one I have?
-- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
She's got the body of a 16-year old... hidden in her closet!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
But they are very, very expensive! Any idea how many right-wing conservative brains it takes to make a pound???
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There is a pretty heavy conceptual bias in defining what counts as consciousness, and as these borderline experiments continue it will only become more obvious. Outside of "the West" a much larger circle of reality is defined as conscious. That may include sacred elements of the landscape, celestial bodies, plants etc. The radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich held that everything in the universe was suffused with what he called "orgone" energy that tended to pulse and potentially spontaneously organize into more complex forms. By this logic planets and stars are also alive, the universe is not a dead object, even though they don't usually reproduce, they seem to have other features shared with what we conventionally understand is alive and/or conscious. The Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose also didn't draw such a hard line between dead and living matter, much to the chagrin of the UK Royal Society.
We still struggle to understand what happens at the energy threshold of activity in our neurons, and what is coming and going from the dirac ocean. The different behaviors of observed particles suggests that consciousness, or perception, is some kind of loop that can reach down to the atomic level in an experiment and back up to our human scale again. Perhaps these researchers can determine if that brain can "observe" a quantum experiment somehow, I think that'd be pretty interesting.
I honestly wonder how many people that make all these blanket assurances about how various things aren't conscious have ever hung out with some ferns while on something like psilocybin mushrooms, an experience which arguably discards a lot of ordinary perception filters - the very filters that tell you 'no, that plant is not conscious right now' etc etc. How many of these people also tend to say that animals don't have emotions, which is pretty obviously a false claim.
--hongpong.com
I thought that depression was a brain-wide phenomenon, and if chemicals only signal locally then they can't have the global effect necessary for alleviating depression.
I guess I wasn't really clear. Chemical signals are local, and in a normal neuron those are converted to electrical signals, which are integrated across the neuron from different sources. That then causes other chemical signals to be sent. However, if this artificial brain isn't doing electrical signaling, then it can't integrate or process information. SSRIs work because they help change the chemical signaling in a (mostly) beneficial way. You need both chemical and electrical signals to properly function - one isn't enough by itself.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Right, I understand now. It's an interesting question but I can't shed any further light myself.
As for a brain-wide phenomenon I'm going to need to look that up because I've been operating under the impression that emotion is handled by a discrete 'section'(1) of the brain, which is what the SSRIs are targeting (I presume).
(1) or, more likely, several areas working together
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
The ethical issues here have nothing to do with abortion.
With abortion, the fetus lives a "normal life" until, one day, you decide to put an end to it. If you think that a fetus is a real live human being (as do certain religions), then abortion is murder. If you don't think this, then abortion is more like plastic surgery for the mom, or at most, like putting a pet to sleep when you can no longer take care of it. In short, momentary pain which is justified by other needs.
With this brain, the problem is not ending a life, but the life itself. If this brain were indeed conscious, it is not having a "normal life". It could be in a continual state of stress and panic due to not receiving the sensory input it expects. Keeping it alive could mean subjecting it to nonstop emotional torture. That's not a specifically religious concern - anyone who cares about not inflicting pain should be bothered by it.
This brain does not show brain waves, so it's probably not conscious. But the next brain this group develops will be more developed. So we need to figure out how to morally safeguard this kind of research, sooner rather than later.
Just an observation on the subtle dishonesty at play ...
As happens regularly in the world of biological experimentation, the wording describing the achievement is chosen to remove the 'biology' from the experimental process. Here we see that the experimenters have created a 'brain model', not a brain ... even though it _is_ a brain, living cells, albeit in a very early stage of development. However, it is easier to speak of what you are doing to a 'model' (especially an animal 'model' like a mouse, rat, chimpanzee, dog, etc.,) with the lay public, because 'model' implies not living, feeling, etc. like say, a 'climate model'.
Why worry? Well, if someone feels the need to obfuscate what they are doing, perhaps what they are doing should be looked at a bit more closely.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The man with two brains... true classic!
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
Wouldn't that be cool?!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Thought of another cool name: Petunia
As in the Bowl of Petunias from Hitchhikers Guide: "Oh no.. Not again!"
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