Either Daniel Dennett or one of his friends wrote a thought experiment story about the worldwide brain science drive where every participating scientist gets on

Either Daniel Dennett or one of his friends wrote a thought experiment story about the worldwide brain science drive where every participating scientist gets one neuron from the disected brain to keep alive in a tank, observing its firing patterns. One day one of them notices his neuron has died, so he quietly wires the input to the output through a circuit which fires the same way.. (I think this is in "the minds I" (1981)