Stanford Scientists Grow Human Brain Tissue Inside Mice
Part-human part-mouse brain developed in science breakthrough
Stanford neuroscientists engineered mice to lack their own cerebral cortex, then implanted human brain organoids that connected to the animals' neural circuits. The mice behaved normally, with no cognitive enhancement. The goal is to study human-only psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders like epilepsy and autism, which often fail in animal trials. The work, published in Nature, raises ethical questions about altering animal cognition.
You're keeping the human program inside the mouse environment – like the mouse is an incubator.
- theseamusjames
Great news: we're excellent at curing mice of diseases. All this time we've been trying to find drugs that have the same effect in humans as they do in mice, but until now no one has had the insight or bravery to ask the question, "What if we just made people more mouse?" Exciting stuff.
- autoexec
The article walks the headline back pretty quickly. Parts of human brains in mice becomes "pieces of brain-like tissue" made from skin cells and formed into "collections of connected, living cells" followed by a line on how there's "no indication that what's being created here are mice that can think like humans, or a human brain in a mouse body." and that the human cells started to look and function like the outer layer of the mouse's brain as opposed to looking or functioning like a part of a human brain.
It's still kind of neat though and I hope it's actually somehow useful for something.
- bygosh
> The scientists said their work, published in the journal Nature, was carried out with independent ethical scrutiny.
oh, I guess there's nothing to be concerned about.
- jdalsgaard
Forget Artificial Intelligence, _Real Intelligence_ is coming...
(Background material: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Mice)
- zhaoziyuan2000
Does this remind anyone of that novel Flowers for Algernon..?