Cyborg computer with living brain organoid aces machine learning tests

Loz Blain

New Atlas

Originally posted 12 DEC 23

Here are two excerpts:

Now, Indiana University researchers have taken a slightly different approach by growing a brain "organoid" and mounting that on a silicon chip. The difference might seem academic, but by allowing the stem cells to self-organize into a three-dimensional structure, the researchers hypothesized that the resulting organoid might be significantly smarter, that the neurons might exhibit more "complexity, connectivity, neuroplasticity and neurogenesis" if they were allowed to arrange themselves more like the way they normally do.

So they grew themselves a little brain ball organoid, less than a nanometer in diameter, and they mounted it on a high-density multi-electrode array – a chip that's able to send electrical signals into the brain organoid, as well as reading electrical signals that come out due to neural activity.

They called it "Brainoware" – which they probably meant as something adjacent to hardware and software, but which sounds far too close to "BrainAware" for my sensitive tastes, and evokes the perpetual nightmare of one of these things becoming fully sentient and understanding its fate.

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And finally, much like the team at Cortical Labs, this team really has no clear idea what to do about the ethics of creating micro-brains out of human neurons and wiring them into living cyborg computers. “As the sophistication of these organoid systems increases, it is critical for the community to examine the myriad of neuroethical issues that surround biocomputing systems incorporating human neural tissue," wrote the team. "It may be decades before general biocomputing systems can be created, but this research is likely to generate foundational insights into the mechanisms of learning, neural development and the cognitive implications of neurodegenerative diseases."

The info is here.

Here is my summary:

There is a new type of computer chip that uses living brain cells. The brain cells are grown from human stem cells and are organized into a ball-like structure called an organoid. The organoid is mounted on a chip that can send electrical signals to the brain cells and read the electrical signals that the brain cells produce. The researchers found that the organoid could learn to perform tasks such as speech recognition and math prediction much faster than traditional computers. They believe that this new type of computer chip could have many applications, such as in artificial intelligence and medical research. However, there are also some ethical concerns about using living brain cells in computers.

Why are scientists growing human brain cells in the lab?

Hannah Flynn

Medical News Today

Originally posted 24 OCT 22

Here is an excerpt:

Ethical boundaries

One of the limitations of using organoids for research is that it is observed in vitro. The way an organ might act in a system, in connection with different organs, or when exposed to metabolites in the blood, for example, could be different from how it behaves when cells are isolated in a single tissue.

More recently, researchers placed an organoid derived from human cells inside the brain of a rat, in a study outlined in Nature.

Using neural organoids that had been allowed to self-organize, these were implanted into the somatosensory cortex — which is in the middle of the brain — of newborn rats. The scientists then found that these cortical organoids had grown axons throughout the rat brain, and were able to contribute to reward-seeking behavior in the rat.

This breakthrough suggested that the lab-created cells are recognizable to other tissues in the body and can influence systems.

Combining the cells of animals and humans is not without some ethical considerations. In fact, this has been the focus of a recent project.

The Brainstorm Organoid Project published its first paper in the form of a comment piece outlining the benefits of the project in Nature Neuroscience on October 18, 2022, the week after the aforementioned study was published.

The Project brought together prominent bioethicists as part of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative of the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the project.

Co-author of the comment piece Dr. Jeantine E Lunshof, head of collaborative ethics at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, MA, told Medical News Today in an interview that existing biomedical research and animal welfare guidelines already provide a framework for this type of work to be done ethically.

Pointing to the International Society for Stem Cell Research guidelines published last year, she stated that those do cover the creation of chimeras, where cells of two species are combined.

These hybrids with non-primates are permitted, she explained: “This is very, very strong emphasis on animal welfare in this ISSCR guideline document that also aligns with existing animal welfare and animal research protocols.”

The potential benefits of this research needed to be considered, “though at this moment, we are still at the stage that a lot of fundamental research is necessary. And I think that that really must be emphasized,” she said.

The info is here.

Can Brain Organoids Be ‘Conscious’? Scientists May Soon Find Out

Anil Seth

Wired.com

Originally posted 20 DEC 21

Here is an excerpt:

The challenge here is that we are still not sure how to define consciousness in a fully formed human brain, let alone in a small cluster of cells grown in a lab. But there are some promising avenues to explore. One prominent candidate for a brain signature of consciousness is its response to a perturbation. If you stimulate a conscious brain with a pulse of energy, the electrical echo will reverberate in complex patterns over time and space. Do the same thing to an unconscious brain and the echo will be very simple—like throwing a stone into still water. The neuroscientist Marcello Massimini and his team at the University of Milan have used this discovery to detect residual or “covert” consciousness in behaviorally unresponsive patients with severe brain injury. What happens to brain organoids when stimulated this way remains unknown—and it is not yet clear how the results might be interpreted.

As brain organoids develop increasingly similar dynamics to those observed in conscious human brains, we will have to reconsider both what we take to be reliable brain signatures of consciousness in humans, and what criteria we might adopt to ascribe consciousness to something made not born.

The ethical implications of this are obvious. A conscious organoid might consciously suffer and we may never recognize its suffering since it cannot express anything.

The info is here.

Scientists 'may have crossed ethical line' in growing human brains

Ian Sample
The Guardian
Originally posted October 20, 2019

Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn.

The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies.

Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation.

On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab.

“If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.”

The info is here.

Fresh urgency in mapping out ethics of brain organoid research

Julian Koplin and Julian Savulescu
The Conversation
Originally published November 20, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

But brain organoid research also raises serious ethical questions. The main concern is that brain organoids could one day attain consciousness – an issue that has just been brought to the fore by a new scientific breakthrough.

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, recently published the creation of brain organoids that spontaneously produce brain waves resembling those found in premature infants. Although this electrical activity does not necessarily mean these organoids are conscious, it does show that we need to think through the ethics sooner rather than later.

Regulatory gaps

Stem cell research is already subject to careful regulation. However, existing regulatory frameworks have not yet caught up with the unique set of ethical concerns associated with brain organoids.

Guidelines like the National Health and Medical Research Council’s National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research protect the interests of those who donate human biological material to research (and also address a host of other issues). But they do not consider whether brain organoids themselves could acquire morally relevant interests.

This gap has not gone unnoticed. A growing number of commentators argue that brain organoid research should face restrictions beyond those that apply to stem cell research more generally. Unfortunately, little progress has been made on identifying what form these restrictions should take.

The info is here.

We’re Worrying About the Wrong Kind of AI

Mark Buchanan
Bloomberg.com
Originally posted June 11, 2018

No computer has yet shown features of true human-level artificial intelligence much less conscious awareness. Some experts think we won't see it for a long time to come. And yet academics, ethicists, developers and policy-makers are already thinking a lot about the day when computers become conscious; not to mention worries about more primitive AI being used in defense projects.

Now consider that biologists have been learning to grow functioning “mini brains” or “brain organoids” from real human cells, and progress has been so fast that researchers are actually worrying about what to do if a piece of tissue in a lab dish suddenly shows signs of having conscious states or reasoning abilities. While we are busy focusing on computer intelligence, AI may arrive in living form first, and bring with it a host of unprecedented ethical challenges.

In the 1930s, the British mathematician Alan Turing famously set out the mathematical foundations for digital computing. It's less well known that Turing later pioneered the mathematical theory of morphogenesis, or how organisms develop from single cells into complex multicellular beings through a sequence of controlled transformations making increasingly intricate structures. Morphogenesis is also a computation, only with a genetic program controlling not just 0s and 1s, but complex chemistry, physics and cellular geometry.

Following Turing's thinking, biologists have learned to control the computation of biological development so accurately that lab growth of artificial organs, even brains, is no longer science fiction.

The information is here.

Man-made human 'minibrains' spark debate on ethics and morality

Carolyn Y. Johnson
www.iol.za
Originally posted September 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Five years ago, an ethical debate about organoids seemed to many scientists to be premature. The organoids were exciting because they were similar to the developing brain, and yet they were incredibly rudimentary. They were constrained in how big they could get before cells in the core started dying, because they weren't suffused with blood vessels or supplied with nutrients and oxygen by a beating heart. They lacked key cell types.

Still, there was something different about brain organoids compared with routine biomedical research. Song recalled that one of the amazing but also unsettling things about the early organoids was that they weren't as targeted to develop into specific regions of the brain, so it was possible to accidentally get retinal cells.

"It's difficult to see the eye in a dish," Song said.

Now, researchers are succeeding at keeping organoids alive for longer periods of time. At a talk, Hyun recalled one researcher joking that the lab had sung "Happy Birthday" to an organoid when it was a year old. Some researchers are implanting organoids into rodent brains, where they can stay alive longer and grow more mature. Others are building multiple organoids representing different parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, or the cerebral cortex - the seat of cognition - and fusing them together into larger "assembloids."

Even as scientists express scepticism that brain organoids will ever come close to sentience, they're the ones calling for a broad discussion, and perhaps more oversight. The questions range from the practical to the fantastical. Should researchers make sure that people who donate their cells for organoid research are informed that they could be used to make a tiny replica of parts of their brain? If organoids became sophisticated enough, should they be granted greater protections, like the rules that govern animal research? Without a consensus on what consciousness or pain would even look like in the brain, how will scientists know when they're nearing the limit?

The info is here.

The ethics of experimenting with human brain tissue

Nita Farahany, and others
Nature
Originally published April 25, 2018

If researchers could create brain tissue in the laboratory that might appear to have conscious experiences or subjective phenomenal states, would that tissue deserve any of the protections routinely given to human or animal research subjects?

This question might seem outlandish. Certainly, today’s experimental models are far from having such capabilities. But various models are now being developed to better understand the human brain, including miniaturized, simplified versions of brain tissue grown in a dish from stem cells — brain organoids. And advances keep being made.

These models could provide a much more accurate representation of normal and abnormal human brain function and development than animal models can (although animal models will remain useful for many goals). In fact, the promise of brain surrogates is such that abandoning them seems itself unethical, given the vast amount of human suffering caused by neurological and psychiatric disorders, and given that most therapies for these diseases developed in animal models fail to work in people. Yet the closer the proxy gets to a functioning human brain, the more ethically problematic it becomes.

The information is here.

Growing brains in labs: why it's time for an ethical debate

Ian Sample
The Guardian
Originally published April 24, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

The call for debate has been prompted by a raft of studies in which scientists have made “brain organoids”, or lumps of human brain from stem cells; grown bits of human brain in rodents; and kept slivers of human brain alive for weeks after surgeons have removed the tissue from patients. Though it does not indicate consciousness, in one case, scientists recorded a surge of electrical activity from a ball of brain and retinal cells when they shined a light on it.

The research is driven by a need to understand how the brain works and how it fails in neurological disorders and mental illness. Brain organoids have already been used to study autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia and the unusually small brain size seen in some babies infected with Zika virus in the womb.

“This research is essential to alleviate human suffering. It would be unethical to halt the work,” said Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University in North Carolina. “What we want is a discussion about how to enable responsible progress in the field.”

The article is here.

Tiny human brain organoids implanted into rodents, triggering ethical concerns

Sharon Begley
STAT News
Originally posted November 6, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

He and his colleagues discussed the ethics of implanting human brain organoids into rats, including whether the animals might become too human. “Some of what people warn about is still science fiction,” he said. “Right now, the organoids are so crude we probably decrease” the rats’ brain function.

Ethicists argue that “not a problem now” doesn’t mean “never a problem.” One concern raised by the human brain organoid implants “is that functional integration [of the organoids] into the central nervous system of animals can in principle alter an animal’s behavior or needs,” said bioethicist Jonathan Kimmelman of McGill University in Montreal. “The task, then, is to carefully monitor if such alterations occur.” If the human implant gives an animal “increased sentience or mental capacities,” he added, it might suffer more.

Would it feel like a human trapped in a rodent’s body? Because both the Salk and Penn experiments used adult rodents, their brains were no longer developing, unlike the case if implants had been done with fetal rodent brains. “It’s hard to imagine how human-like cognitive capacities, like consciousness, could emerge under such circumstances,” Kimmelman said, referring to implants into an adult rodent brain. Chen agreed: He said his experiment “carries much less risk of creating animals with greater ‘brain power’ than normal” because the human organoid goes into “a specific region of already developed brain.”

The belief that consciousness is off the table is in fact the subject of debate. An organoid would need to be much more advanced than today’s to experience consciousness, said the Allen Institute’s Koch, including having dense neural connections, distinct layers, and other neuro-architecture. But if those and other advances occur, he said, “then the question is very germane: Does this piece of cortex feel something?” Asked whether brain organoids can achieve consciousness without sensory organs and other means of perceiving the world, Koch said it would experience something different than what people and other animals do: “It raises the question, what is it conscious of?”

The article is here.