'Brain in a bucket' study spurs medical, ethical debates
From NBCNews :
Three weeks ago, a Yale University neuroscientist, Nenad Sestan, explored the ethical implications of experiments using human brain tissue in an essay in the journal Nature. Then last week Sestan's own brain research was splashed across tabloids under lurid headlines like "Yale experiment to reanimate dead brains promises 'living hell' for humans."
First, a reality check: Sestan’s research used pig brains, not human ones, and nothing was reanimated. Bringing a dead brain back to life remains squarely in the realm of science fiction. But what Sestan and his team accomplished does take science into uncharted waters. Brain research is advancing so quickly that ethicists are scrambling to keep up.
The Yale researchers collected brains from 200 pigs at a local slaughterhouse and rushed them back to their lab, where the organs were kept medically active (though not conscious) by a system of pumps, heaters and oxygen-carrying fluid. The system is known officially as BrainEx and unofficially as “brain in a bucket.”
Sestan declined to speak with MACH about the experiment, pending the publication of results in a scientific journal. Most of what we know about his work comes from news reports of a recent workshop on brain science and ethics convened in Bethesda, Maryland, by the National Institutes of Health.
But Sestan’s work, which he described at the meeting, is being widely discussed and debated by other attendees, including Anna Devor, head of a brain-imaging lab at the University of California, San Diego.
Devor is excited about what Sestan’s research might mean for the treatment of strokes and heart attacks. “There’s a very low survival rate for cardiac arrest, partly because we know so little about what’s best for the brain after blood flow stops for a while,” she says, adding that decapitation in a slaughterhouse is a weirdly useful analog of what happens when the heart stops pumping.
BrainEx shows that it is possible to keep brains alive, both for lab research and, potentially, for human medical therapy. “This result also shows the gray area around the idea of ‘brain death,'” Devor says, and could perhaps someday be used to pull patients back from the shadows. “The hope is that we can transition people in a coma back into a state where the brain is active,” she says.
Just as the BrainEx news was spreading, a group led by Fred Gage at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, announced that they had performed another feat of neural engineering. Whereas Sestan is finding ways to keep brains alive, Gage’s team is growing new brains — using human cells.
The Salk team introduced clumps of human brain tissue inside the brains of lab mice, and got these “organoids” to diversify and develop a network of connections. Previously, brain organoids were grown in test tubes or lab dishes that severely limited their growth. Implanting them into an animal host raises the scientific and ethical stakes. “The hope is that we can transition people in a coma back into a state where the brain is active."
“Organoids bring us a step closer to understanding and designing better therapies for neurological and psychiatric diseases,” Gage says. “But I agree we need to keep the ethical concerns in the discussion and justify the need or value of these experiments.”
The authors of the Nature essay dismissed the idea that implanted human brains might become conscious — at least not in the near term. But is it ethical to raise human-animal hybrids for research or to harvest their brain tissue? What is the identity of an animal that has bits of human brain in its head? What is its legal status?
Adding a further fantastical twist to organoid research is geneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Pääbo is inserting genes recovered from Neanderthal remains into human stem cells. His goal is to grow Neanderthal-ized brain organoids and study how their neurons behave.
These Neanderthal-human cellular mashups wouldn’t be actual thinking brains, but they would be the first living bits of Neanderthal-like brain on this planet in 25,000 years.
Talk about bringing life back from the dead.
Attendees of the NIH workshop sigh in exasperation at the hyperbolic headlines that Sestan’s work has inspired. “The scary kinds of work with humans won’t be done for years, if ever,” says veteran bioethicist Henry Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “The scary kinds of work with humans won’t be done for years, if ever."
But even research involving animal brains raises ethical questions, and the moral landscape quickly turns slippery when human brains are added to the mix. “Although we can learn much from pig brains, the most valuable information would come from human brains kept intact in this way,” Greely says. “We don’t know whether that can be done and, if so, whether it should be done.”
Sestan kept his pig brains alive for just a day and a half. But he reportedly told the scientists at the Bethesda meeting that it might be possible to keep them going indefinitely — and even to restore the kind of electrical activity that gives rise to an animal mind.
If such techniques could be applied to humans, it might mean that an inactive, seemingly dead brain could possibly be revived. “That is restoring a human being,” Sestan told MIT Technology Review. “If that person has memory, I would be freaking out completely.”
No one knows if such things are possible, but they seem closer to reality than they did just a few weeks ago — which is why scientists are having urgent conversations right now.
“The ethics depends on the science,” Greely says, “and we are in the early stages of figuring out what the science will and will not be able to do.”
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Really fascinating research. This could be the start of revolutionary neuro therapies to heal brain damage or deficits. Maybe even regrow lost neurons?
These guys need to get in touch with the Italian doctor in China who's been transplanting heads......
I haven't heard about that. Sounds interesting.
Thanks for the link.
I read about that. Scary as hell. They seem extremely overconfident.
Then we wouldn't have a POTUS that is a raving lunatic? Where do I donate?
Funny, but let's try not to get political. Mmmkay?
very interesting... almost like "rebooting" a computer.. very fascinating !
"Rebooting" is a good way of putting it.
The neurological equivalent of ctrl-alt-delete.
Really interesting article...Need more like it on NT.
I am concerned about the "thinking" aspect of this.
There may get to a point where there is active "thinking" going on. Of course that can only be determined by an FMRI and EEG, but if we get to that point, then we have to start thinking about the ethics of this.
There is much that we don't know about neuroscience. One of my daughters studies cong neuro and we are always amazed by the things they are finding out daily, and yes bio ethics is going to have to really play catch up.
EEGs can detect brain activity. The question is, at what point is the activity actual thought? And what level of "thinking" would it be? I imagine it would not be cognitive thought. Perhaps more on the level of or near a newborn.
Bio-ethics has been asleep at the wheel for too long. Forty years ago my father was artificially breeding cows, harvesting their embryos then growing them in petri dishes before splitting them into two, four or more exact copies and then implanting those individual separated embryos into genetically unrelated host cows which would then gestate, give birth to and nurture the resulting calves which were each genetic copies of the original. This was all done in barns and stables in what would never be described as clinical surroundings. There have been controls over what is done in government funded research facilities but almost none when it comes to what corporate labs and advanced farming and ranching operations have done on their own dimes. Dolly the sheep, the first publicized and publicly acknowledged clone of a warm blooded mammal was born in 1996. Human clones may not be free out walking among us unknown, yet, but I can pretty much guarantee you they are alive and well inside corporate laboratories...
Reminiscent of recent horror movies these beings will ultimately be used for transplants and life extension.
Amazing stuff. The implications for furthering our understanding of consciousness is wondrous as well as unnerving.
Indeed it is.
Dear Friend Gordy 327: As with most science fiction, sooner or later it becomes science fact.
In 1942 Kurt Siodmak penned a fictional work, Donovan's Brain.
It was made into three movies, and an hour long radio program starring Orson Wells.
I recommend any many or all of these for viewing and listening.
There are many ethical matters which appear in new format and can be addressed with tried and true content as technology improves.
Interesting discussion thread.
Thought provoking topic.
Please keep us current as new developments in both medicine and their ethical implications come to the fore.
We are grateful.
Good work here.
Peace and Abundant Blessings.
Enoch.
This seems generally true.
Thank you. To you as well.