Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk
nature.com
nature.com
The commute is exhausting — on occasion he has even flown to Beijing, done experiments, and returned the same night. But it is worth it, says Courtine, because working with monkeys in China is less burdened by regulation than it is in Europe and the United States"
I personally know researchers who have to take similar measures to be able to do their research.
When we are happy as a society to slaughter billions of animals every year for food (usually keeping them in appalling conditions beforehand) I don't understand how we can justify the restrictions we put on scientists.
That's my guess.
To be honest I haven't found a bigger cognitive dissonance than the love animals / eat animals one.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2352-just-2-5-of-dna-...
I mean, 99% is off limits, but what about 98%? 95%? where's the cut off?
I don't think gene commonality is a useful metric for this. Not really sure what would it be though, and I agree that it seems creepy to do experiments on an animal that looks a lot more like you than a worm or a rat.
But I also think it's appalling the way we treat our food sources and would love for this to improve, regardless of whether they look like me or not, and regardless of the amount of genes we have in common. Just out of basic respect for life (I also don't like cutting trees and plants just because).
Unfortunately I still like meat and bacon and other cow products, and while I try to eat less red meat, it's very hard to do.
Cars kill much more animals each day in any case, for no reason and including lots of humans. Maybe people fairly concerned about animal pain could use their skills and time to solve this much more serious problem. Wouldn't be a great goal? You'll save much more lives in an hour than in an entire life of lab rat rescue.
Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it.
Whilst I appreciate the scientists mean well, and I do understand how this could benefit humanity; this sort of research still seems unethical to me, and at the very least makes me feel sick.
As a software developer and reverse engineer, this feels like hacking anyway. It's not particularly scientific just to "capture and replay" data without much understanding of how it works.
As to whether it's unethical--it sickens me too. It's horrifying but what if it gives us the key to solving spinal paralysis? It's a classic moral dilemma. I highly recommend this short story, which explores this sort of dilemma:
http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.p...
Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature.
Instead I recorded observations of software operating under normal use (USB traces) and identified patterns in this. Only once I'd spent a long time determining patterns and built a model did I decide it was safe to perform some experimentation.
To be fair, biological systems are much more complicated than computer systems written by other humans. However, observation should always come first! This study seems crude to me.
(Source: doi:10.1038/nature20118)
Is that kind of what you mean?
Of course they use technology to observe and record normal and pathological "use". Do you think brain implants are made without using scanner, IRM...?
You need to debug this software without a keyboard, mouse, monitor. The language is an assembly language written by aliens with no documentation that uses quantum states in protons to manage the machine. Oh by the way, it's encrypted and obfuscated into nothing but MOV instructions. And there's 100 billion MOV instructions.
That's the kind of complexity we are talking about here. So get off your highhorse and let the experts who just made a paralyzed monkey walk do their jobs.
There are parts of this study that seem quite legit (another poster referred to them above).
However, the paralysis, surgery, and replay of data into the nervous system, just to be the first to "claim" they made a monkey walk was not one of them.
I already mentioned software is very different to biology, my issue is with reckless experimentation that has caused a lot of harm to a creature and provides no real gain. What were they actually hoping to achieve with this part of the experiment? It's already well understood that we can interface with nervous system, this is nothing new.
P.S. concern for the well being of other creatures isn't a particularly high horse. It's called empathy.
Here's a practical application for this research. Someone with a disease will eventually suffer from paralysis due to the degen. nature of the disease. Applying the technique from the research, we could record their body movements before they become paralyzed and then restore their ability to walk later.
I think that's a pretty real gain. Just because it's in a fledgling stage of research doesn't mean it's worthless. Medical research is a much longer timeline than even complex software. You make incredibly small baby steps precisely because you don't have tools like a debugger, logic analyzer, etc, etc.
Ok, let's not do anything then because actually putting this understanding to use involves touching actual brain matter and seeing what works.
well, yes, but in a lot of neuroscience research, mainly the fundametal research, the initial observation stage led to the knowlegde that you first need controlled experimentation in order to perform any further valid/interesting observation at all
An example: We didn't start to learn about electricity until we started messing with it. That's because there was very little to observe passively. Touching electric fish, rubbing amber to make static electricity, flying a kite into a thunderstorm--these sorts of actions produced the early observations that started us down the path toward the knowledge we have today.
Your example was observing USB traces. In order to do that, you had to plug a well-understood sensor into a well-understood interface. You did something, and observed the results. You just think of it as passive observation because you're taking for granted the enormous amount of prior knowledge that made it possible.
Reasonable observations would consist of using electrodes to monitor left leg movements vs right leg movements. Running vs walking, joint extension etc.
Build a waveform generator and compare the generated waveforms vs real waveforms and iterate.
(The scientists did actually do this.)
Once you've got a fair degree of confidence then you can try apply your work.
Paralysing a monkey just to replay captured data when we already know we can interface with the nervous system is totally unnecessary.
Edit: It should really go without saying that when it does come time to apply your work you do everything within your power to avoid harming a non-consenting creature. Does applying the work even require paralysing a monkey? Can it be temporary? What about sedation and then interfacing with the nervous system whilst sedated?
Research of this nature requires reading the electrical spike trains of small sets of neurons (often even individual cells).
EEG will give you a measurement of the combined electric field of every single neuron that is active in the entire brain. You can use multiple electrodes and run machine learning algorithms to get a qualitative measure of a macroscopic chunk of brain activity. So, terrible spatial precision.
MRI gives you anatomical information.
fMRI gives an idea of blood flow in the brain (about millimeter precision which is also not good enough) which is a time-lagged (a few seconds) _response_ to sustained neural spiking in a region.
Think of it like this: The brain is a computational organ where there is very little hardware-software separation. We're not going to be able to patch the software (say, to treat paralysis) without patching the hardware (say, with implants)
1. Humans do volunteer and it does happen, but even with full consent, regulations will always be stricter on human experimentation than on animals.
2. We don't understand the brain very well and it is easy to make mistakes when working with neural tissue. The consequences of causing irreversible damage/death are much higher when the brain belongs to a human being. On the other hand, most people eat animals for pleasure.
Cellular level investigations are obviously important but getting a wire in somewhere is not going to happen at a level this small
It does happen, there exist small electrode array implants that can be placed in neural tissue to both induce (for example, cause sensations that one can feel) and read-out activity. Such implants are in fact used in some human subjects (there are issues such as development of scar-tissue however).
A decent MR DTI can help when you want to know where the fibres go, but as you say, the hardware/software division isn't quite so clear with live things.
Yeah, for neural interfacing a connectome is not enough, you need to work at the neural code level. Reading out each spike with full spatial resolution from a distance will probably never happen.
Believe me, neuroscientists do not enjoy the fact that invasive experimentation has to be performed on blameless animals; unfortunately it has to be done, unless people are willing to live with the level of understanding/treatments we have now and never move forward.
"Cellular level investigations are obviously important but getting a wire in somewhere is not going to happen at a level this small It does happen, there exist small electrode array implants that can be placed in neural tissue to both induce (for example, cause sensations that one can feel) and read-out activity. Such implants are in fact used in some human subjects (there are issues such as development of scar-tissue however)."
What I mean - in a human subject the placement of any implant is not going to be guided by anything approaching a cellular level of imaging resolution. It will mostly use conventional radiological image guidance to get close and then measure electrical signals once close. Or is this in fact what you are saying?
Sorry about my formatting - phone.
Neural lace looks promising. But wouldn't be the first to volunteer for one :)
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v13/n10/full/nmeth.3969....
Sidenote: I feel slightly uneasy about all this stuff.
On one level it is progressing our knowledge, but both the methods of the research (animal testing) and potential implications of deep human+machine symbiosis, combined with CRISPR on animals and humans, feel instinctively bad. It won't stop at curing disease.
Also, for me intelligence is besides the point. If someone is suffering, I don't factor their IQ into whether or not I should help them. What I am saying is that if we are happy to accept animals suffering for our benefit, then we should not be selective about it.
There's also a large amount of speciesism involved in how we feel that's not concerned with intelligence or sentience. As an example, I can conceive of a scenario where someone with a severe learning disability might be less aware and less capable of abstract problem solving than some corvids are. That wouldn't affect my decision of which one to assist in a disaster.
There is no accumulator for suffering, each state exists independent of the next.
If it already happened once, how is it any different if it happens again?
Dairy cows spend more than half a decade being repeatedly raped and abused until they're slaughtered because their bodies have been destroyed by the milking process, and they spend that half a decade having their young snatched away from them over and over again. If having the emotional intelligence to mourn your stolen young isn't enough to justify ending the inhumane treatment then it's certainly not intelligence that humans care about.
If this research is unethical then learn about gestation crates, which immobilise pigs for months of their pregnancy.
http://nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10...
I do wonder whether a place like NZ might then have a rat problem. Rats also do real damage to native species, including birds as they eat eggs. Removing a key rat predator inside cities might have repercussions.
www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/313828/self-resetting-rat-traps-20-times-better-than-standard-traps-study
The intelligence remark I made was with regard to why society might perceive these differently. I'm not suggesting that logic is necessarily valid.
Americans would be astounded to learn the usual settlements awarded for deaths due to traffic accidents (as an example I'm familiar with) in South America.
Payments of 25.000 dollars aren't uncommon. Colombia and Uruguay pay around U$ 150.000 per death. Heck, even first world countries like Spain can pay less than that.
So, an expensive monkey pet can be more expensive than a human.
http://www.therichest.com/luxury/most-expensive/10-most-expe...
https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Most-Expensive-Pets/
(Spanish) http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/04/08/actualidad/13...
By that reasoning, oughtn't we grant the same rights to a sea sponge?
It's not clear to me that animals, as a general class, deserve any particular care or rights beyond what we might extend to living creatures in general. So far as we grants rights to animals, the clear criteria seems to be complexity (especially of the intellectual sort) and closeness to humanity.
If we want AI to treat us well in the far future, we should treat monkeys and apes with dignity and respect today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient
This is why I think it's ok to swat a mosquito that's being annoying, but not to euthanize a monkey that's being annoying.
Mean EQ for mammals is around 1, with carnivorans, cetaceans and primates above 1, and insectivores and herbivores below. This reflects two major trends. One is that brain matter is extremely costly in terms of energy needed to sustain it.[19] Animals which live on relatively nutrient poor diets (plants, insects) have relatively little energy to spare for a large brain, while animals living from energy-rich food (meat, fish, fruit) can grow larger brains. The other factor is the brain power needed to catch food. Carnivores generally need to find and kill their prey, which presumably requires more cognitive power than browsing or grazing.[20][21] The brain size of a wolf is about 30% larger than a similarily sized domestic dog, again reflecting different needs in their respective way of life.[22]
(Except for birds and fish, but hey...)
Although I'm probably not being critical enough. All of the cultures that have survived to this stage are fairly aggressive and generally destructive.
The problem I have with this is that like in so many other subjects, a too general term has been used to describe a specific type of practice. Traditional farming is very different than factory farming (which seems to be what you are describing), and there are many levels between them. You may still have problems with how a traditional farm is run, and that's fine, you can present those. But presenting features of factory farming as problems with "livestock farming" implies that all livestock farming is like that, and that's untrue.
If you believe all livestock farming is immoral, please use, or at least add justification for the cases where it's not factory farming if you are going to call out all livestock farming. If you are instead specifically targeting factory farming, please endeavor to accurately label it.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/12/why-free-r...
It changes things considerably whether livestock can be raised ethically. If they can, we can try to do that. If they can't, then the only ethical solution is to stop raising livestock. So discussing that 1% has practical implications.
I can't picture the day where people stop eating meat. It just won't happen, not matter what arguments you present.
The best way to go is replacing it, and the perfect postulate is lab meat, which I hope, is going to be massively produced at low cost in the next ten years. And even if it doesn't ill people, tastes the same as natural meat, you will find resistence.
So, to summarise: lab meat at lower cost than natural meat, demands plunge, billions of animals are saved every year.
A less vulgar correlary is that once horse racing is outlawed, horses will mostly go extinct as well, as the racing industry is responsible for being able to acquire feed/hay/veternary care for the average horse owner. Without it will be practically impossible to keep 'pleasure' horses.
We humans are nasty creatures.
First, that would only possibly be true if we constrained ourselves to meat production. The original comment I replied to specifically called out dairy, and it's partially what I was thinking of when I replied.
Second, that doesn't make sense because it's useful to discuss alternatives when discussing problems. Even if they aren't a feasible drop in replacement, that doesn't mean there aren't aspects that can possibly be encouraged. Also, it may help narrow the arguments and objections to the core problems people have. For example, is factory farming undesirable because animals are confined, animals are in pain, or because animals deserve a better lifestyle, where they can exist at least somewhat like they would in nature (i.e. do animals deserve not to be tortures in ways that are not just physical)? Focusing only on factory farming may yield reforms that address symptoms, not the problem.
Inaccurately aimed or qualified criticism leads to arguments from people who may agree in principle. It's counterproductive.
Dogs and livestock are quite different. We keep them around for entirely different reasons.
I'm sure you don't explicitly mean this, :)
It seems very similar to intentionally placing an animal in a cage it can't move around in and leaving it to live in that condition. The conditions are, as I understand it, more cruel and unusual than "experimental surgery/procedures."
Think about how the medical field developed... for biological science you often are going to have to break a few eggs. It sucks... I really understand the motivations you have behind your feelings about hurting animals for human gain, but there isn't any "manual" for biology, hacking away is often the only way to test hypotheses.
I'd argue in cases like these the European regulations are actually a good thing, mainly considering the animals' welfare: in China rules like minimum cage size are either a fraction of European standards or non-existing/not checked. Of course there's always the argument 'I keep my monkeys healthy otherwise they won't work well for the experiments' but if experiments must be done, wouldn't we rather have the animals housed in a spacious area with daylight vs in a cage of 2m^3 in a dark basement?
It reminds of the skeptics about China achieving fusion for one minute, as well as China's new rocket capable of landing taikonauts on the moon.
It seems to me China is doubling down on scientific research. Their methods or ethics might be frowned on the West, but it is clear from recent news that pace of scientific discovery is accelerating in China.
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-carrying-out-millions-of-illegal-organ-transplants-annually-report-finds-a7107091.html
When I'm not working, I would rather be home. For some people, home is a place, and for others, home is people. Either way, if you can't move home to China, but you can move your workplace there, you will have to commute there at intervals.
I personally think eastern world and more paganic religions like that of native Indians are perhaps more right to not see these issues as black and white based on fixed line but instead see our relationship with nature as much more flexible co-dependence. Like a mother who uses her own metabolism to feed her little child and the child who eventually tries to get rid of that dependence.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5c2ljz/brain_impla...
They could record the way my brain sends walk signals and if I end up paralysed they have the data to train the model.
There are multiple spinal conditions that result in paralysis after not be been paralysed, not everyone who ends up in a wheelchair gets their by an accident.
But maybe it is. You can also put people on a VR environment and have them "walk" there (see experiments by Nicolelis et. al.) and try to capture signals like that
Then you would have an entire generation thinking millions of times deeper, broader, and faster than the previous one, and communication mostly broken. I sort of fear this scenario because I would be on the wrong side of it.
Do you use it?
Bio is like that. We really don't know what is going on with a body most of the time. When we try to leverage it, it gives totally nutto results. Like, yeah, water is good for you! Like, maybe we should make it inhale-able! Or yeah, caffeine is alright, makes you wake-up! You should just take NoDoz and never sleep again!
Those are absurd examples, but I hope they illustrate that in bio, 'leveraging' something typically means you are gonna die either real soon or you are gonna get cancer. Fen-phen is a great example of 'leveraging' something in bio [0]. Yeah, you loose weight, but then you blow your heart valves out and end up as worm food.
So when you say that we can just throw computers at the problem, you make a huge mistake with that idea. Your input data is everything. You have to run a LOT of experiments in the real world to get the right data, not just noise you think is data. Living things are really good at staying alive until they aren't. They are not just noisy, they are also altering the experiment along with the experimenter. Homeostasis is a real thing and bodies and living things try to stay happy, healthy, and alive. Like, here is the thing, your experimental test-bed is alive and thinking and is, in some cases, trying to experiment-on/kill-you right back. Try feeding that into a computer! You have 300k+ dependent variables (that you know of) and 10 equations (if you trust those other authors). You are trying to find the mean of N interacting Poisson/Gaussian data sets (you hope they are normal) in N dimensional space and you know that you don't know all the variables and you can only do this on 5 rats.
Let's guess that each person's unique representation for walking does not change, or changes slowly. That seems reasonable since it is at least partially based on the physical arrangement of neurons.
We could bank it on a regular basis--recording via a device we wear around for a month every 5 years, for example. Then if we are paralyzed, the most recent recording is used to map an implant.
Personally, I will not surprised if we find that each person's nervous system is so different from the next that nothing significant is generalizable. Rather than each person running an "OS on standard hardware" we might find that a more accurate analogy is that each person has constructed their own custom logic circuit and then wrote custom software on top of that.
I saw this story on a canadian news show a couple days ago, a show that regularly does spots on human exploration of Mars. The stories are similar. The headline feel-good story is about the shiny new mars habitat or spacesuit someone is testing, but they haven;t figured out how to actually get it to mars. The result is the false impression that the dreamed future, colonizing Mars and curing paralysis, is closer than is true.
Typically with recording electrodes you can either 'jiggle' them to shake off the scarring cells or pass a small amount of current between the combined electrodes to kill off the cells. These recording electrodes are typically only a few microns apart, so long range damage is a non-issue if the subject is not connected to ground in another way. You can go for ~6 months like this before the gliosis really builds up, and honestly, by that time the recording electrode has probably broken anyway or the subject has bonked the implant and it broke that way too, or as is typically the case with monkey subjects, it tore out the implant and ate it, stabbed another monkey with it, or tried to have sex with it. Monkey studies are rare and hard, not just because of ethical issues, but because monkeys are clever little assholes.
But speaking of the electrodes, how long do they last in human subjects? Docs have been implanting various electrodes in human nerves/brains for decades and I assume a paralyzed person in a research study isn't going to rip them out. With enough current can the gliosis be overcome perpetually?
(lol, spellcheck went with 'parallelized' and 'gigolos'. That might say something about my normal writing subjects.)
Human electrodes can last a lifetime if they are properly done. Look at a pace-maker. They last decades. Granted they are not for individual neuron recordings, but they work great. The first deep brain stimulation patients are about 5 years old now and they seem to be doing fine as a whole, the Parkinson's disease symptoms are significantly lessened and their quality of life is very improved. It'll take more time and effort, but yeah, I think we can overcome the gliosis, though it is probably gong to be a drug interaction with the mechanical/electrical that will do it, not just electrical alone.
"we demonstrated stable multiplexed local field potentials and single-unit recordings in mouse brains for at least 8 months without probe repositioning"
http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v13/n10/full/nmeth.3969....
Animal research is something that we as a society are going to struggle with for many years into the future. I would like to be able to argue that it is for the greater good of the planet, but I don't think that I could put up a good argument that we are being proper stewards of the planet.
One of the major problems with human spinal lesions is the loss of control of the trunk of the body (ie the core). Humans have dozens of muscle groups that control balance and posture through minute movements. Without fine grain control over these muscles balance is going to be extremely difficult.
On the other hand it's quite possible that if you implanted the same equipment into humans right now that it could work with a bit of tweaking. It's kind of hard to say till someone tries it.
I fundamentally disagree. We have models, sure, but they're approximative, not predictive, and I don't see any indication we'd be able to get prediction ever. It's very difficult to understand how biological approximation layered over chemical and physical approximation could give any benefit we get now from experimentation.
Among other things, there is no such thing as model verification.
If we are extrapolating results from rats to humans, why can't we just simulate a rat brain and avoid torturing more? Probably because rats are cheap, and supercomputers, well, are super expensive.
I don't think it would be difficult to simulate a fully functional rat brain with state-of-the-art technology and bright people.
One day we may be able to do that, and when we can, I agree it would be nice to stop torturing rats.
We could probably make a computer model of tiny arthropods in 2017, if someone were willing to throw piles of money at the problem. A computer model of a human will be more difficult.
But also consider that an acceptably accurate model of the human brain would be an AI. You would still be experimenting on a person.
But that's talk for another topic. On this case, you'd want to emulate only the physical functioning of our brain and body and not our minds.
If you try something clever, like disconnecting all motor controls and sensory inputs, you now have a person who is blind, deaf, numb, anosmic, and paralyzed. The horror of that situation is compounded if you are emulating over a scanned copy of a cadaver's brain.
In addition, actually modeling a brain is not the same thing as having the computing power to do so. Our current chips have billions of transistors. However, our most sophisticated neural networks have a million nodes or so, I believe.
So we're a ways away from simulating a brain, human or otherwise. It's definitely more than 10 years. Probably 20 or more. And since we can't really predict computing power that far out, it's really hard to predict meaningfully.
Also you don"t need to cut the spinal cord todo data analysis.
Its something different to experiment on a living animal.
However I do understand its important for research. However its a difficult subject.
When George Church and ithers called for a moratorium on CRISPR based research, Chinese scientists said suit yourself and cintinued doing research on it. When the day comes that wr can cinduct research like this with simulations and can spare beasts unnecessary pain, im all for it.
I find it more peculiar that people will treat a dog or other subhuman creature better then they will homeless person.
Maybe a tad off topic, but as a older millennial growing up in "dog" culture, thank you for saying this. The times I have seen my fellows, heck even my places of employment, bend over backwards to help the "Humane" society (ironic name, isn't it?), or hold puppy adoption events, or donate supplies to local shelters is astounding. Certainly commendable, but I wish the same enthusiasm was met for our fellow human beings as well. I wish we held "Adopt a child" events as much as we held "adopt a stray or rescue" events. I like those ads I hear sometimes about "You don't have to be perfect to be a foster parent" My wife and I are considering it. Maybe if it was more visible it would help push us over the cliff, and many others as well.
I tend to agree that western nations will lag, but I don't think that makes a good argument for doing it.
Do you find animal testing in the service of medical research unethical? I'm not advocating for animal testing for cosmetics, fashion, or profit, but in the service of saving human lives or something similar to the simian heroes of NASA