4 ms·

We're growing brains outside of the body

• sundarurfriend 10y ago
  The research is very interesting, but I find the article quite annoying and difficult to get through. It feels badly organized, and overall sounds more like an upstart blogger trying to sound like a fancy NYT (or BBC) journalist - and failing at it. A few choice quotes to function as a poor man's tldr: * Madeleine Lancaster has 300 brains growing in her [...] brand new molecular biology lab in Cambridge * to make [a brain] you could start with any cell type – be it nose, liver, or toenail. [...] next you’ll need to turn your cells into [stem cells]. * Eventually each stem cell will begin to specialise, turning the uniform balls into a jumble of different cell types. Among them will be brain cells. * As the cells begin to starve, most of them will die off, leaving only the brain cells behind. “They are really robust – I don’t think anyone knows why,” she says. * At the moment, Lancaster’s brains aren’t thought to be able to think. [...] "The neurons are working but they aren’t really organised relative to one another,” she says. * the team has been taking individual genes involved in brain development and replacing them with the chimpanzee version – then using these cells to make hybrid chimp-human brains. As they develop, the role of the gene often becomes clear; * Elsewhere, the organoids are being used to study uniquely human diseases, from autism to schizophrenia.