Most complete human brain model to date is a ‘brain changer’
news.osu.edu
news.osu.edu
This model is in its infancy. It still needs a lot of experimental work (5 years? 10 years?) and in general the more complex models take a longer amount of time to be validated and widely trusted. A great example is the humanized mouse model, which is super complex (though not as complex as a brain) and took somewhere between 3 and 10 years depending on who you ask to go from the point of the OP model to mainstream accepted usage for some purposes. Maybe 5 years down the line we'll see something come out of the new brain model.
Brain science isn't my expertise, but there's a couple of other tidbits that caught my attention about this model. First, its vascular structure is missing entirely. I'm guessing the level of oxygenation of the fetal brain is important, but there may be ways of controlling for this gap. Second, gene expression isn't 100% equivalent to an actual human fetal brain at this level of development. There are probably ways to control for this also, but it's still a flaw. We don't expect models to be 100% true to reality (after all, it's a model), so I expect that these holes aren't going to prevent this model from being successful and useful.
I suspect that will help its adoption. Not so many ethical or para-ethical issues for the press to get upset about. It's just meat.
I mean, more seriously I am pro-choice, but do we draw a line somewhere? "The main thing missing in this model is a vascular system. What is there – a spinal cord, all major regions of the brain, multiple cell types, signaling circuitry and even a retina – has the potential to dramatically accelerate the pace of neuroscience research"
Of a 5 week old fetus? Is it ok to make 10,000 of these for random experiments? What about 10 weeks, or 15 or 19 or 40 weeks maturity?
I'm not saying I believe this in and of itself is unethical, but it seems extremely dangerous to do this research and publish and promote it without even beginning a discussion of, where would we draw a line? Does anyone really believe the line will be here, and not an inch farther?
Reading the article again, this model seems less of a 'hey we have a brain in a jar lets poke it' and more of a platform for studying neurological diseases/ethically generating brain tissue structure, as opposed to cells. This seems more like raw material, rather than harvesting life.
I think the crucial question is does this 'model' have the capacity to develop those things. If it does, that creates a serious problem for continuing research along these lines. If not, then I don't really see them problem - in that case I would compare this to growing and running test on kidney or liver.
"These humans, they might have agency and free will, but they don't have fuqismatk or missildrigg like we do and so it's ethical"
let me help you take your example further:
"These humans, they might have agency and free will, but they don't have fuqismatk and missildrigg, so us gakimiking and monikiking their brain should be ok."
I don't buy this argument, I only feel like I have free will, as a model of my brain would. How could you convince me otherwise?
Under what conditions would you say an entity would (hypothetically) have "free will"?
We cause pain and suffering in hundreds of thousands of lab animals a year, not to mention our livestock, etc. While acknowledging that pain, we've determined it doesn't matter (or more precisely, that an animals pain has less weight in our moral/ethical considerations than equivalent human pain - if such a thing could be said to exist).
We've determined that any pain a fetus may or may not experience in an abortion is less meaningful than any social or economic pain the mother might experience (not trying to start a pro-life/pro-choice debate, here, but it's kind of hard to talk about this without looking at how we as a society handle abortion). What makes this different from using aborted fetal tissue? What meaning should we attach to potential pain in an organism created specifically for scientific study (assuming this was a living organism, which it doesn't seem to be, but I could be misreading the article).
Sorry for the rant, I'm still working out all the questions this raises and some of that spilled into this comment.
The ethical boundaries for experimenting on living mice are, in my opinion, a bit perverse at the extremes. There's a general consensus that mice are sensate and can experience in some form basic emotions and learning behaviors. Despite this, it's acceptable to do experiments which deplete or wildly manipulate various neurotransmitters or neural circuits inside of the mouse's brain far beyond normal physiology.
Imagine having 100% of the "feel good" chemicals removed from your brain and replaced with 10,000% the normal concentration of "feel bad" chemicals. Obviously this is a huge simplification, but it's pretty clear that it would be hellish-- and that experiment has actually been done using mice. Sure, it's not as bad as if it were done with a real person, but it'd be much better if we could spare the mice and use a model brain in a vat instead.
It seems reasonable to me that we should monitor this train of research closely, and I'm pretty confident people will.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3g31m0/are_fetu...
Meanwhile, I would argue this is much less scary than moving to a monodiet in terms of genetic variety in what we eat, having a 9-5 job during peak sunlight, surrounding ourselves with artificial light, and having no idea what any of my neighbors' names are. Frankly, I'm not entirely sure I would object to literally growing fetus brains so long as we understood what we were scared of. But not flipping on a neural network because it "might" be conscious, thus ensuring ethical questions, strikes me as.... premature moralizing. We already know this model doesn't describe anything that could actually form into a brain, just see other comments on the vascular structure. It's like saying "hey, we discovered radioactivity, so let's put a moratorium on it so nobody makes a bomb".
"We are thrilled to have finally created a living human brain in a vat. This is an exciting experiment and one that has absolutely no possible ethical ramifications of any kind whatsoever, now or wherever it may lead in the future," the not-evil scientist Anand added enthusiastically and without visibly fighting the urge to twirl his totally not-evil mustache.
"It's simply completely obvious that this is a great direction to go in and one that will never give anyone any pause. More biscuits?"
So yeah, it sucks that when you read a headline, you don't know if it's talking about an animal model, an in vitro model, a computational model, or something in between. But that's how it is. They're all models.