Brain Balls

Wait, you're listening to radio lab radio from W and wife Okay, Lulu. Yeah, we're gonna start today Back in 2010 in a lab in Vienna. Oh, jumping right in. Yeah, just picture sort of a lab with microscopes, computers, experiments, and often one corner. Hello. Hi, how's it going? We're in glasses and a white lab coat is this scientist named Dr. Madeline Lanekastor Call me Madeline. Okay, Madeline is just finished her PhD and moved to Austria Just joined the lab to start her postdoc research. I was still sort of making friends Still trying to make a good impression Getting to know people, you know, and one of the first things for Boss Astor to do was something called a screen Just basically looking for specific genes in mouse neural stem cells So that's like a baby brain cells of mice. Yeah, now she hadn't done exactly this kind of gene screen before and that's probably Why I didn't really, you know, I was kind of naive about it all But so anyways, she got to work with this enzyme on it just preparing the baby mouse cells The cells all become loose and apart from each other That part she'd actually done before so you know easy enough. Yeah, but then something she hadn't done before She needed to get those cells to stick flat to the glass bottom of her dish so that she could do that screen And to do that she needed to use special organic proteins as a glue and I hadn't they hadn't come in yet I'd ordered them but they hadn't come in yet and instead of just you know waiting for them to arrive I don't know. I was so anxious to do the experiment. She decided to improvise and so I just kind of like rummaged through the freezer Found a random tube of glue-like proteins. I don't know how old they were and anyway, and I used those Squirted it on the dishes pipetted in the cells pop them in the incubator and Went home for the night Next morning came in took a look in her petri dishes hoping to see a nice clean Clear layer of cells like flat on the dish, but instead everything in there was really cloudy Hmm shouldn't be cloudy cloudy means those cells are floating freely around in there Which means that those tubes of protein glue she used you know We're no good and the cells hadn't stuck and if the cells aren't stuck in the protein that means they're probably dead Yeah, all the cells are dead. I'll just throw it away. Hmm and I don't know why I did this but Right before she tossed it she thought You know, but I'll check it. I'll just take a peek. Why not? So she slides these cloudy dishes under the microscope peers into the eyepiece and in the circle of light she sees these weird Blobs the cells weren't dead. They were alive and healthy and plumped into three or four blobs Yeah, can you as vividly as you can describe them? I mean they're like a sort of beige color like an off-white tiny about the size of a grain of sand for these floating balls of cells And she's like huh weird So she zeros in on one of these blobs turns the dial on the microscope to zoom in until she's looking basically inside the blob and That's when she sees a tube a tube Yeah, so she's like looking down into like one end of the tube. So it looks almost like a donut shape What had you ever seen anything like that before? No No Huh, yeah, I mean as far as she knew if the cells weren't in that protein stuff stuck, you know flat to the bottom They should sort of die and fall apart and make a big random mess But these ones seem to be coming together to make this shape So she gets up from the microscope and start sort of going around the lab a little bit subtly at first kind of just like hey Has anybody ever like seeing cells do funny things, you know? huh clump up together And everybody was just sort of like oh well if they're they're supposed to be laying flat if they're not laying flat You you screwed it up like they just weren't that interested. No So I just kind of like put it in from aldehyde Put it away in the fridge for a little while and was like okay Let's try this gene screen again, but this time no floaty clumps gonna get those cells to stick flat on the bottom And eventually she decides to try something this thing that I'd read about called matrogel basically cellular crazy glue Like she's not taking any chances. I'm just gonna put a whole bunch in my dish So she squirts a lot of it on there Okay, she puts her cells on top and again pop some in the incubator crosses her fingers and goes home for the night She comes back in the morning. Yeah, same thing go to the incubator you take it out of the incubator You look at it and I was like okay This is weird once again. There's a bunch of stuff floating in there, huh? I was like okay, well the matrogel didn't work like it was supposed to again It seemed like the cells had started clumping together and that's when I then took them put them on the tissue culture microscope Look down the eyepiece and again There they were Funny shaped balls these ones were also beige-ish off white kind of color But they were bigger and they sort of have like bulges coming off of them and this time when she looked inside She saw full on architecture There was a tube but also a little circle sort of all-blong shaped thing and a fat layer of tightly packed cells All lined up around a space in the middle they were making structures. They were making things kind of like what cells do as an embryo is Developing which to Madeline didn't make any sense everybody had always taught me that cells need things coming from other tissues in the body, you know of the embryo that are necessary for building that embryo and Here was a situation where nothing was telling them what to do because they'd been completely taken out of the embryo Hmm and they were like forming structures With no instructions. She's like oh my god like this is like there are things developing here but toward what? Well to Madeline it kind of looked like they were building a brain So these are these are neural stem cells which inside a developing mouse starts out as a Sheet of cells and then they fold up and close and form a tube and then the neural tube elongates and that becomes a spinal cord One end of it balloons out and that becomes the brain and that's what it looked like this cells in Madeline's dish We're doing it. It seemed like these cells on their own were starting to try to make themselves Into a mouse brain at the time. Yeah at the time I was I was just kind of confused So she showed some other people around the lab what she'd seen I showed some of these structures tubes the circles the lines But several people in the lab were just kind of I think they were just totally bored They were like I don't know sometimes things just grow weird you probably just did the gel wrong and the director of the lab her boss was like I thought you were gonna do a screen you know make a flat dish of cells to screen for jeans Huh you doing and I was like don't worry. I'm working on it hmm And so over the next few months Madeline focused on getting a nice flat layer of mouse neural stem cells on the bottom of her Petri dishes so she could do those screens and so that was like mostly what I was talking about with people in the lab Yeah, but at the same time off by yourself in a little corner when no one was paying attention I was always still playing around with matragel growing these weird balls of cells tweaking the recipe Trying to make sure I could get it to happen reproducibly and then one day She gets her hands on some human stem cells cells that come from skin or blood that you can reprogram to an embryonic state where do you get those from I think these were actually made from discarded human foreskin Wow So specific okay, that what a detail all right Thank you for that because it's just bit of tissues. It started away. Yeah, right of course of course Literally thrown away all right. Okay, so uh wow. Yeah, so anyway, so then so she got these human stem cells She put them in the matragel swirled them around in this nutrient-rich fluid so they could kind of eat and She would watch as these formerly foreskin cells Started forming into clumpy parts of a human brain Oh my god, and then she kept tweaking when and how much of the matragel she would add and she would just watch these Blob shapes over time get bigger. I mean they can get as big as like a pencil eraser Side note at the time she was pregnant. Yeah, my oldest. I was pregnant with her so she said she had this extra maternal instinct and she was like just really nurturing these little brain balls Yeah, and then one day a couple months after she's been tweaking her ball recipe and I looked under the microscope inside Yeah, on this beige lump she could see a perfect ring of Black pigment and that was just I looked at that I was like that's a developing eye Shut up and it was growing on a developing human brain You're like no what? Yeah, no you what and then then that was then when she went to her weekly lab meeting I presented this data. I showed this picture of this Beginning of an eye and I remember hearing audible gasps and Then she showed them pictures of the cells forming tubes and lobes and ventricles like an actual brain Everybody in the lab started to get it. They were like hey wait a second It's like you have a version of an early human brain in this dish and you can actually watch the earliest stages of this process of development That we know almost nothing about Is that true though? Do we not know anything about early human brain development? I just think you get all these little like when you pregnant you get a scan here scan there Maybe we know something from animal models But this was literally the first time anyone in human history had ever watched the early brain Developed right from the beginning like this. Yeah, which is especially important When something in the brain has gone wrong now We can actually watch this process instead of just looking at the end when the person is already Svierly suffering we can try to understand how it got there so Madeline and her boss Yurigan Kenoblick who's on board with the whole project now in 2013 they team up with a bunch of other researchers and publish a paper in the journal nature in that paper They describe how this disorder microcephaly Develops in a fetal brain and they were like oh and to see all of this we use these tiny 3d brain balls Which we have decided to call cerebral organoids that's when Like everything changed if you were studying human brain development It was like someone just invented the microscope Yes, you can see things that were invisible before So this is Carl Zimmer science journalist New York Times columnist book writer. Oh, you got Zimmer Yeah, as soon as I heard about this stuff of course he's my first phone call and he was all over it sort of like humanoid Organoid very sci-fi and the first thing that he pointed out is that there are so many neurological disorders where the key moments are During development it's like the key the key plot points are happening when we can't watch the movie right totally off limits But 2013 Madeline and Jurgen published their paper and boom we could watch human progenitor brain cells Give rise to parts of the brain, but what would you do with that like what would you see? So one example is a there's a scientist at Stanford, Rainser, Dio Paska, and he studied a very rare disease called Timothy syndrome It's caused by a genetic mutation that causes severe neurodevelopmental Problems and you basically created an organoid with that mutation so that you could see how a brain with Timothy syndrome develops like from the beginning Yeah, now you can actually see What Timothy syndrome is about so when what did he see so there are certain kinds of cells called Inter neurons and they make very important connections between different parts of the brain and With kids with Timothy syndrome they just don't they just fail to get where they need to go and now that he knew what was going wrong He started testing out some drugs to see if they could fix that Yeah, and he and his colleagues actually ended up finding a small drug that actually did help these neurons to find their way in an So he cured it in an organoid right huh and They are on track to actually start a clinical trials with that drug next year Wow and you could imagine that's one Disorder that's right a lot of other conditions epilepsy schizophrenia fetal alcohol syndrome Any of these brain conditions that have an issue starting in development or where we might even suspect they might start that early But aren't sure yet now you can see it a lot of people in the field said whoa I got to try this this whole field of neural organoids has just totally exploded There's I think there's thousands of labs actually using these tools now the study of the brain is is it's fundamentally different now That's what we are doing on radio lab today we are Just Lulu we're gonna jump into the ball pit of brain balls Okay, in which there are tons of new opportunities, but also Confounding questions are there thoughts in there is there thinking in there how brainy are these balls? We are gonna get there after the break Hey Hey Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by better help it is March in like a lion out like a lamb and somewhere in the middle It's international women's day and better help wants us all to just take a moment To consider the women in our lives our Personal lives our society and thank them for their strength and for all that they carry that work matters They matter you matter and therapy offers a space for all of us to take care of ourselves in the way we deserve Think about the roles you play for the people you love think about how those roles Intentionally or not way on you and in the worst moments work to weigh you down therapy helps Create perspective set healthy boundaries and work toward balance better help has loads of therapists all of whom work according to a strict Code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US Why don't you try fill out a short questionnaire and better help will use their 12 plus years of experience to match you with one If you aren't happy with your match switch to a different therapist at any time your emotional well-being Matters find support and feel lighter in therapy sign up and get 10% off at better help calm slash radio lab That's better H.E.L.P. dot com slash radio lab This week on the New Yorker radio hour as the campaign in Iran enters its second week What lies ahead for Iran and for the United States? Can the US now succeed at regime change where we failed so dismally in the past? I'll talk with two of our most experienced reporters on the Middle East robin right and Dexter filkins That's the New Yorker radio hour from WNYC listen wherever you get your podcasts All right here we are I'm in the 72nd Street subway station and I am walking to go see a fridge full of rates Hey, I'm lots of not sir. I'm Louis Miller. This is radio lab more specifically a fridge full of brain organoids Just before the break we learned from Madeline that now thousands of labs around the world are growing these brain organoids And it turns out that one of them happens to be just up the street from our studio in New York City Only when you're recording are you truly conscious of like how much you breathe so we sent our producer Mono Macauker Laboratory caution hazardous materials to check them out Where are we entering so we're entering so we have special rooms called cell culture rooms where we grow Oops, we grow The organoids this is Dr. Howard fine. I'm a medical and neuron Colleges and this is his lab at the Wild Cornel Medical Center where he studies brain cancer type of brain tumor known as a glial blastoma a Very bad kind probably now the most lethal of all human cancers the average survival is about 15 or 16 months and Dr. Fine says around 15 years ago or so he hit a wall in his research He's we've probably made the least amount of progress with so he'd been studying glial blastoma mostly of course in mice, right? And he admits he actually calls this at the time It was the dirty little secret of oncology that for all these research they were basically getting nowhere Whoa But then you know he came across Madeline's work on organoids it was the lab and casters paper I read in nature and it's like like a light literally not many times And you know at least my 37 career did I truly have a light bulb moment and I I read that paper and said This is what we're looking for and even though and that's when he pivoted away from mice and started making brain organoids Can I can we see him? We're going to get a look okay, so He's opening the incubator and he's pulling out So these are the stem cells they look just like Madeline described they're kind of like a beige color They look like a kidney bean or like a like a nerd candy little beige balls floating in liquid and it is It's surrounded by a major cell in under the microscope I see like a dark shape and then I see these little bubbles off the side almost like little popcorn-y shapes You can see structure Dr. Fine, these are from specific patients like your patients Yes, but the difference between these organoids and Madeline's organoids Was that these ones had cancer So the idea is we're going to make a mini brain From an individual patient and then oh these are the glioma cells Wow They take cells from that patient's brain tumor almost just looks like sugar that hasn't dissolved Yeah, and then we retroengineer the patient's own glioma stem cells into the mini brain basically They can put a version of your brain tumor on your version of your brain on a version of your brain And they can basically make a bunch of those we can test Hundreds or thousands of drugs and then try a bunch of medicines on them to look for the drugs or combination of drugs That might be most effective. So you're saying that like you can try every chemotherapy that's out there and decide like which one Everything only limited by resources see as you could imagine these are My god, that isn't that is beautiful. I mean that just thinking about a way of like a kind of bespoke medical future exploration Right way better than just using mice. Oh my gosh partly because it also Could help us leapfrog one of the biggest reasons on average 90% of clinical trials for neurological drugs fail And for brain cancer by the way that number is even higher 95% They're failing because they're not predicting whether the drug actually works on the disease and this is something that Madeleine told me to you might have a drug that works really well for Treating mouse spinal cord injury like it's like okay great. This is not gonna kill you because you've got the animal work to show you that it's safe But it also doesn't make them better after this spinal cord injury But now sure they can do a monster for safety But they can also test that drug to see if it works on a spinal cord Organoid which is you know just a tiny version of an actual human spinal cord Wait, what I thought we were talking brain organoids. She are there are there spinal cord organoids spinal Spinal cord organites. Yeah, okay, so as Madeleine was developing her brain organoids Independently around the same time other scientists all over the world are growing intestinal organoids long organoids liver organoids muscle organoids gain organoids anchors organoids stomach organoids heart organoids kidney organoids breast tissue organoids that actually produce milk Ah, they can have a breast tissue organoid that can make milk. Yes, weird. Has anyone tasted that milk? I certainly haven't I've only read about it. I don't know That's a good question Anyway, that's science writer Carl Zimmer again, and he says now you can make an organoid of basically any part of the body and then You can connect them What you can like you can Does that work you can do that? Oh, yeah, they call them assemblodes assemblodes. Yeah, no like you can mr. Potato head Assemble correct, but then do they attach to each other? They attach to each other. Yeah, they communicate with each other You they communicate with each other. Yeah, okay, and then what do what with your charm bracelet? human body so here's an example so Sergio Pasca neuroscientist at Stanford University and his colleagues thought can we use an assembly to study pain the pathway of pain So they started with the finger Finger organoid no, no, no, sorry just a nerve in the figure. Okay, the sensory Organoid connect that like with some other cells in the dish another organoid the spinal cord Yeah, it's a little teeny piece of spinal cord now We're gonna connect that to a brain organoid that is specifically the phalamus Which is the central hub in the brain that direct signals in all sorts of different ways and finally? We're gonna connect that one to one more brain organoid the cortex Whoa, this is so weird. I mean, it's like Legos. It's like Legos with the human body correct So then they took capsaicin that's the molecule in like spicy food is a spicy food and chili breads Yeah, very it can be very painful to the skin Okay, and they said okay, let's let's hit it with capsaicin and see what happens Uh-huh boom immediately the that sensory organoid goes right and starts sending really strong signals and those signals Carl says Zoom right up through this assembly to the spinal cord the phalamus to the cortex Just like it would in your own body and they can see some kind of registering correct And when they watch the way the signal travels which is something that's normally hidden inside a body They've discovered all sorts of things about what happened when we feel pain that they didn't know about before like for example signals from different parts of the assembly began firing together in these synchronized waves of signals Okay, and the more you know about how those signals work or move the better chance you haven't stopping them You could for example say okay, can I put a molecule into this assembly? That will stop the pain Wow, but um So if they're using these things to study pain Is it feeling pain? No probably not these organoids are Just little bits of human tissue in order to feel pain the way we feel pain There are other parts of the brain that come into play the assembly is just this super basic circuit that you send a signal through So like this pain it seems to be superficially registering it But like what is it? I think the capsaicin in that case. No, no, I'm the I'm The first it's like it is this little ball. Okay. Yes, it a thing like What is it? Well they Crackled with electricity. They they form connections called synapses. They replicate parts of the human brain with astonishing accuracy but Carl says they're not brains. They're not brains. That's right Okay, so if there's like a slider and on one end is brains and then on the other hand is just like some neurons in a dish Where is this on the slider and and how do you yeah? I would say that it's Closer still for the time being do the neuron end of the slider simply based on numbers our brain has something like 80 billion neurons and The biggest human brain organoids contain About two million cells that's 0.0025 percent well under 1% yeah, and you know These things don't have blood vessels so that is a very important limiting factor to how big and complex it can get yeah And they're not in a body so they can't interact with the world in like a meaningful way. Okay Well, but when I was talking to Carl about this so He said that a lot of that might no longer be true some scientists have you know taken organoids from human cells Yeah, and I put them into the brains of rats What so basically what they did is they basically took a rat and they like carved out a chunk of its brain But they left some of it they left most of it. Okay, and it's almost like it's like think about it Like it's almost like they gave a rat a little human tumor or something. Yeah, I mean it doesn't but the tumor is like just brain human brain it's human brain. Oh my god and These human organoids are pretty happy in there. It's sort of wired in they connect up with the rat neurons They get supplied by the rat blood system. So they have made in a real sense like a new kind of being Yeah, yeah, yeah, that did not exist before this correct Okay Feels like there should have been a bigger press release, but okay do the do the do the rats act any differently? Are they suddenly like into podcasts and coffee? When you do studies on these rats behavioral tests memory tests all sorts of things They're just rats. There seems to be nothing humaney about them. Okay, but one thing they did notice when you tickle its whiskers Yeah, you can actually measure signals from the human brain Organoid neurons the human part of the brain lights up Yeah, so it's registering The feeling they are receiving signals from the rats senses I mean strictly speaking They are receiving signals from the rat senses are they feeling it? Feeling it gets hard because it's kind of the pain question again But yeah, but now they're in a body. I mean they're in a being yes, but they're not the like driving force of that being They're like up. They're like a house guest in the attic. Okay, Latif would you put make a brain ball Brain-Organoid of your brain cell and put it in a rat If I'm being honest, would you would yeah, okay, okay? So I don't know, but I just think you're more on my side that this is a little scary than you in your little with your reporters Wand are letting on to because yes There's exciting research, but it just feels like every time you try to comfort me with what we know about these things You then end up not comforting me and then the scientists take it one step further anyway Okay, well, it's it's as if you have seen the future and what the next chapter holds Because that exact thing is gonna happen. It's gonna get weirder and creepier and stranger and that's all after the break stick with us Hey Lulu here and this episode is sponsored by better help it is March in like a lion out like a lamb and somewhere in the middle It's international women's day and better help wants us all to just take a moment To consider the women in our lives Our personal lives our society and thank them for their strength and for all that they carry that work matters They matter you matter and therapy offers a space for all of us to take care of ourselves in the way we deserve Think about the roles you play for the people you love think about how those roles Intentionally or not way on you and in the worst moments work to weigh you down therapy helps create perspective Set healthy boundaries and work toward balance better help has loads of therapists all of whom work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US Why not give it a try fill out a short questionnaire and better help will use their 12 plus years of experience to match you with one If you aren't happy with your match switch to a different therapist at any time your emotional well-being matters Find support and feel lighter in therapy sign up and get 10% off at better help calm slash radio lab That's better H.E.L.P. dot com slash radio lab From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes classical music happy out a new podcast hosted by me manny X Each episode will speak with a special guest about their lives Listen to musical gems and sir your classical queries and take part in playful musical games So grab a drink and press play on the new podcast celebrating our love for all things classical listen wherever you get your podcasts Lutth Lulu radio lab we are back talking about brain balls, you know bitty brains boba brains the brain ish in a dish Yes, haha with all your clever word play, but you are about to send us into the next existential tailspin About how people are using these things it is possible. So the final thing I was told to do is push record record. Yes That's an important button now tell me who you are so I'm I'm Brett. This is Brett Kagan He's a neuroscientist. I'm the chief scientific officer here at cortical labs Cortical we're a small tech startup here in Melbourne Australia. Did you start it? Did someone else started? No, well it was founded by there was a few of us and I was contacted by Dr. Hun Wen Chung and Andy kitchen and they were looking for a neuroscientist Brat had been academic obsessed with this particular question How do you get intelligence at a brain cells that are in a dish and this company was like Why don't you leave academia and help us find out the question they had was can brain cells in a dish do anything at all that we might want them to do Huh like do what? What better to pick than pong Pong They're like 70s computer games. Yeah, the game battles and a little ball. Why that everybody knows Pong It was one of the first computer games It was the first thing that machine learning which people now like to call AI really was trained on as a big breakout success And he figured the brain runs on electricity and it's also a shared language that silicon computing So why wouldn't we be able to get neurons to do something a computer could do that exactly like play a simple video game We use some hardware. They allowed us to record the activity of the cells process that and then deliver Small electrical pulses back into the cultures and they did it Scientists just put pieces of human and my brain on a plate and wired it to a computer to play pong They learn to track the ball and control a paddle Seriously, this is one of the craziest things I've ever covered. So here's what's going on. What? No, yeah, and this wasn't even An organoid this was just a flat sheet of neurons in a dish. I mean, how could it possibly be doing that? Like I mean it can can really dumb things do that could like a could like a tree do that Trees don't have neurons. I don't think a tree could do that. Okay, so so but well what what does this mean like are they learning? Well, Brett says yes I called it learning and I think learning was incredibly fair Definition because what would an improvement over time in a way that would suit a goal be called other than learning But other people including Madeline Lancaster I actually remain to be convinced anybody has really shown that say no because It's really hard to interpret the signals coming from the neurons She says when you teach brain cells to play pong They're you know connected to a computer. So what what people do is they use Algorithms to sort of decode that message and then send a signal back to neurons And so you kind of have like two black boxes that you've just hooked up It's sort of a collaboration between the brain cells and the computer and you don't really know what either of them are doing Anyway, whatever is happening here what Breton his team took away from this is if neurons can do something a computer does Why don't we use neurons as Computers what yeah literally a couple months ago They released their first computer called the CL1 and it is They don't call it this but it's it's effectively a bio computer. It has neurons in it you brain sticky real Human brain matter in it. Yeah, it's got like little brain organoids in it has 800,000 neurons Interfaced with a silicon chip you can use it to do computer stuff with Okay, I mean I can get behind the the brain balls being used for neurological disorder research great You know what bespoke cancer treatments cool But why are we hooking up human brain cells to computers to like Make money That to me feels like not worth the risk like well think about the problems we are having right now With all of these data centers chugging all this energy Absolutely wrecking the planet right so our brains are so Impressively efficient energy wise. We have like a dim light bulb like screwed into our heads, right? That's the amount of energy that we need to do all the complex things that we do if AI or if some supercomputer was doing The equivalent it would need millions of times more power like the difference between a single light bulb and a large town So flattering the other thing is that like think about these a eyes You need to train it on the whole internet, right a human brain is much quicker to learn if you could harness that Energy efficiency if you could harness that kind of like a knowledge efficiency in a computer You could move mountains. Okay, but I guess my authentic question at this point is like okay You have shown us all this stuff at this point. It seems pretty clear that they can definitely register input, right? Like they've there's the tickle the pain the signal they're getting from pong Mm-hmm Okay, and then this pong example at least shows us they are then able based on that input To produce some kind of output. Yeah, okay, so let's say it is yeah, okay So my question is if they can do those things wouldn't they have to have some Thrumming level of consciousness No actually no they really don't like like like just like a bunch of the things you just talked about AI can do those is AI Conscious even going further than that like a room buck can do like navigate a room A room a conscious. That's that's a signal in and out. Oh, yeah, right a room was going. Oh, there's an edge Let me go this signal in and out when we talk about human consciousness. We mean self-consciousness like you are aware of yourself Mm-hmm. You have a past you have a future that you're concerned about there's like that continuity of experience This is Dr. In Suhyun I'm the director of the Center for Life Sciences at the Museum of Science in Boston He's a bioethicist and he's worked on a bunch of teams with scientists who are studying brain organics We try to identify what are the emerging scientific and ethical issues? You're like kind of like their conscience Is that sort of the thing? What I sometimes I feel like a priest in secular clothes and he says at this point He is not worried about brain organolids having anything like human consciousness the brain organics in the dish Don't have that continuity. They don't have all the reasons They don't have the interaction with the outside world, but when he thinks about the future that Brett and others are trying to create Where maybe people start connecting more and more complicated and even more and more structured clumps of human brain cells to Computers, maybe you get it might not even human consciousness, but some kind of consciousness could emerge Yes hooked up to the world Yeah Okay, so what what about this lot of I would if I may I would like to just issue a commandment that all the smart people who are like Excited by brain organoids. They all think one year to Stop making organoids and use their smarts and their technologies and their labs to like Try to understand the consciousness of the organoids that have already been made You know like ideally they they could all be in a dark room and just have candles and quietly meditatively watch for any flickers To understand what's going on and then and then we have a grand assembly Wherever and reports back and we all collectively decide what to do, but I know that like some of these scientists have this fire Inside them to be like how many cures am I not gonna find in that year like how many people am I not gonna help in that year Like the glioblastoma like those people don't have a year and those people are telling me to just shut up because this is a Piece of discarded force again. That's right if if we have a tool that we don't use Smaddling lane caster again and there are millions of actually conscious human beings out there that don't have treatments But we decide no we're gonna put the value of organoids higher than those people That would be unethical It's funny like at the beginning like you asked me like would you make a brain ball of yourself? And I said no and then at some point like my thinking switch where I'm like oh No Unless it would save someone's life Well, that's no ball and now I feel even worse saying I don't know that I would I just I mean yeah Okay, if it's my own kid sure and I don't care if I'm like a little enslaved human consciousness if it saves my kid But as you have shown us the scientists are gonna do more they're gonna try new things are gonna build bigger brains and like There is a line and we will cross it and we won't know that we've crossed it, you know Right and one thing about these organoids is that they're already crossing all kinds of lines You disrupt categories that we thought were so neat and tidy and distinguishable Life non-life human non-human human computer We thought those are pretty clean categories, but this research is kind of Upsetting the very foundations of what we think separates these categories apart Does feel like it's like oh we've created a new category of thing like a new category of thing that is maybe alive It is alive We have created a new category of thing that is alive that is that is that is that is That is weird. Oh Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to actually put it into a category that already exists I think because Because they're not actual brains That we can say absolutely certainly But they're also not just a few neurons in a dish either We almost don't really even have the words for it. I Think it's kind of a new a new thing You Lot of no sir This episode was produced by Annie McEwen Monoma Galker and Pat Walters It was edited by Alex Niesen and Pat Walters with fact checking by Natalie Middleton and Rebecca Rand Special thank you shout-outs to Lynn Levy Jason Yamada-Hanth David Faganbaum and Droversy and Anne Hamilton Christopher Mason Madeline Mason Mary already plus Howard Fein and his whole team at Wild Cornel for hosting us And if you're looking for more musings on the nature of life and what it means to be alive Carl Zimmer has a terrific book out all about this stuff It's called life's edge the search for what it means to be alive Get it at your local bookstore. That's it for us from our brain balls to yours. See you next week I'm Ellie columns and I'm from Louisville Kentucky and here are the staff credits. She's Molly's niece Yeah Radio lab is hosted by Lulu Miller in La Tief Nasser Soren Wheeler is our executive editor Sarah Sandback is our executive director our managing editor is Pat Walters Dylan Keith is our director of sound design our staff includes Jeremy Bloom W. Harry for tuna David Gable Maria Paz Gutierrez Sindun Nana some band on Matt Kilti Mona Matt Gaff car Annie McEwen Alex Niesen Sarah Kari and this a via test ariane Wack Molly Webster and Jessica young with help from Rebecca Rand our fact checkers are Diane Kelly Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton Leadership support for radio lab science programming is provided by the Simon's foundation and the John Templeton foundation Foundational support for radio lab was provided by the Alfred P Sloan foundation This is Ira Flado host of science Friday for over 30 years the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news Making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI To the tiniest microbes in our bodies audience is trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost With important news they won't get anywhere else and our sponsors benefit from that halo effect For more information on becoming a sponsor visit sponsorship dot wnyc dot org