This article is from WeChat public account: love Fan children (ID: ifanr) , author: Lei Jianheng, drawing from the title: the movie” bride of Frankenstein “

Researcher M is amazed by the bloodshot eyes that often stay up late, he is surprised and horrified to watch the pea-sized brain cell clusters in the laboratory dish continuously emit electrical pulses.

There are only two possibilities for this to happen. One is that the electrode is malfunctioning, and the other is that this group of brain cells is emitting brain waves to the outside world.

M keeps telling himself to calm down, but after checking the equipment again, he can’t calm down anymore, because the equipment is not broken, this unshaped “brain” does send out brain waves.

M sat paralyzed on the ground, because he didn’t know whether this discovery was a good thing or a bad thing for humans …

The above paragraph is not a bridge in science fiction. The researcher M is Alysson Muotri of the University of California, San Diego. His experience has also been recorded in his paper and published in the journal Cell Stem Cells.


01. It takes only three steps to cultivate a mini brain

How to train a brain? Just three steps.

The first step is to plant the brain into the soil, the second step is to water and irrigate, and the third step is to wait for the new brain to grow.

You may think I’m joking, but it’s true.

Looking back at the junior high school biology textbook, we have a type of cell in our body called a stem cell. This cell is a kind of pluripotent cell with strong replication ability, and can differentiate into different types of cells under certain conditions.

Stem cell differentiation model

Then you need to culture a cell, it’s almost the same as the above three steps. Stem cells are equivalent to “seeds”, and then a mixture of the right chemicals and growth factors is equivalent to “soil”. As long as the stem cells are cultured in a petri dish having the above mixture, the stem cells replicate themselves and differentiate into brain cells.

Then, these artificially cultured cells will develop into brain tissue on their own, and show some characteristics of brain neurons, and even form the sulcus and brain gyrus.

Nita Farahany, a professor at Duke University who appeared in the above paragraph, expressed his concern after turning his head after exaggerating the discovery:

We need to worry about whether these organoids may develop any human-like abilities.

He believes that after determining that the miniature brains in a petri dish are not simply a “snap” of tissue, it is necessary to consider whether these artificial brains will gain human awareness. If this consciousness exists, then research on organoids may need to change the norm.

The most intuitive thing is to allow scientists to transplant these organoids into humans or animals? After all, relatively simple organoids have now been transplanted into mice. Moreover, I believe that everyone will not hope that “Frankenstein” will really appear in reality.

Farahany believes that in the future, scientists may find a way to keep organoids in the laboratory in full infancy.

Moutri has expressed opposition. Currently, there are only 18 cell types in the miniature brain studied, but there are more than 100,000 in the human brain, which is far from the real brain. Now we are studying the brain organs. It is too early to impose restrictions.

This article is from the WeChat public account: 爱 范 儿 (ID: ifanr) , Author: Lei Jianheng