Implanting Human Brain Tissue in Laboratory Animals

[Recusant]

Intriguing development, this. It brought back memories of Cordwainer Smith's underpeople (an article about that topic--scroll down for an abstract).

"Tiny human brain organoids implanted into rodents, triggering ethical concerns" | STAT

Minuscule blobs of human brain tissue have come a long way in the four years since scientists in Vienna discovered how to create them from stem cells.

The most advanced of these human brain organoids — no bigger than a lentil and, until now, existing only in test tubes — pulse with the kind of electrical activity that animates actual brains. They give birth to new neurons, much like full-blown brains. And they develop the six layers of the human cortex, the region responsible for thought, speech, judgment, and other advanced cognitive functions.

These micro quasi-brains are revolutionizing research on human brain development and diseases from Alzheimer's to Zika, but the headlong rush to grow the most realistic, most highly developed brain organoids has thrown researchers into uncharted ethical waters. Like virtually all experts in the field, neuroscientist Hongjun Song of the University of Pennsylvania doesn't "believe an organoid in a dish can think," he said, "but it's an issue we need to discuss."

Those discussions will become more urgent after this weekend. At a neuroscience meeting, two teams of researchers will report implanting human brain organoids into the brains of lab rats and mice, raising the prospect that the organized, functional human tissue could develop further within a rodent. Separately, another lab has confirmed to STAT that it has connected human brain organoids to blood vessels, the first step toward giving them a blood supply.

That is necessary if the organoids are to grow bigger, probably the only way they can mimic fully grown brains and show how disorders such as autism, epilepsy, and schizophrenia unfold. But "vascularization" of cerebral organoids also raises such troubling ethical concerns that, previously, the lab paused its efforts to even try it.

[Continues . . .]

[Icarus]

^ Recusant routinely challenges our intellectual capacity with such stuff.  Thank you for your positive influence.

[xSilverPhinx]

This is really cool. The ethical concerns are a bit off-base I think, some of them silly, even. Knowledge gained from this kind of transplant could help gain insight into a number of neurobiological problems.

"It brings up some pretty interesting questions about what allows us, ethically, to do research on mice in the first place — namely, that they're not human," she said. "If we give them human cerebral organoids, what does that do to their intelligence, their level of consciousness, even their species identity?"

Species identity? This is rather silly. Just because they have human organoids does that make them slightly more human? What does 'human' even mean then? My head hurts.