In early 2019, the brains of a group of pigs were revived in a laboratory, the news has impacted by bringing this advance, a few months later it was announced that a group of scientists had managed to bring those created in the laboratory. mini-brains to life. It is clear that we are entering a new era of biotechnology.
The creation of mini-brains in the laboratory has generated a lively ethical debate, after all, based on what we know today, we could say that a human being is essentially his brain, and we do not know how far scientists will go. your journey to experience life. Due to the implications, it has been suggested that this discovery could mark the beginning of human cloning.
“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more. “George Bernard Shaw.
According to the scientific journal Cell Press, mini-brains created in the lab are the size of a pea and produce brain waves similar to those generated by a premature baby’s brain. The medium-term goal is to create increasingly sophisticated neural networks.
The laboratory-created mini-brains were developed by a scientific team at the University of California. The news was published in August 2019. Experts have created organoids whose cellular structures are similar to those of the human brain.
Mini-brains are one million times smaller than the human brain, developed from pluripotent stem cells and placed in an environment that mimics the brain environment, which led them to differentiate, transform and self-organize in the same way they would in a brain.
In the past we had already advanced in this direction, but until now it had not been possible to produce organoids that developed neural networks, as in humans, so this is an unprecedented step forward.
The scientists’ first success was creating an optimized environment for stem cell culture. As a result, the organoids have matured more and better than in previous experiments. The process took a total of 10 months; During this period, meticulous monitoring was carried out with multi-electrodes that recorded neuronal activity.
Two months after the process began, scientists began detecting pulses of brain waves in organoids, which although they produced no continuous but sporadic signals, it was clear that the waves were as often as the human brain in its early stages of formation.
As organoids developed, wave production became increasingly diverse and regular, indicating that more structured neural connections, waves and frequencies similar to those recorded in the brains of 36 premature babies, whose data had already been taken as a benchmark, were gradually developing. .
Researchers believe that organoids themselves are unlikely to have mental activity. They claim that it is a very rudimentary model, so it is unable to perform most of the activities of a real brain. However, they do not exclude the possibility that more complex organoids may be obtained in the future.
The research team said lab-created mini-brains can be an excellent starting point for further studying how neural networks work and believe that this, in the future, could provide clues to better understand and treat certain diseases, such as epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia, among others.
Despite all this, experiences in this regard have been highly controversial since its inception in 2013, for some experts the fact that they give rise to neurogenesis processes and the development of neural circuits, in practice, provides a physical support for the development of consciousness. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that these mini-brains can, at some point, perform more complex functions.
However, at the moment this is not possible, because a brain without a body also makes no sense and, therefore, cannot perceive stimuli that are then converted into data to be processed; some, however, warn that there may be surprises in this dangerous process. In addition, we are getting closer and closer to cloning human beings. Without a doubt, we travel through fascinating and unknown terrain.