Brain Balls

Wait, you're listening to radio lab radio from W and wise Okay, Lulu. Yeah, we're gonna start today Back in 2010 in a lab in Vienna. Oh, jumping right in. Yeah, just picture sort of a lab with microscopes, computers, experiments, and often one corner. Hello, hi, how's it going? We're in glasses and a white lab coat is this scientist named Dr. Madeline Lanekastor Madeline is just finished her PhD and moved to Austria just joined the lab to start her postdoc research I was still sort of making friends still trying to make a good impression getting to know people You know, and one of the first things her boss asked her to do was something called a screen Just basically looking for specific genes in mouse neural stem cells. So that's like a baby brain cells of mice Yeah, now she hadn't done exactly this kind of gene screen before and that's probably why I didn't really You know, I was kind of naive about it all hmm But so anyways, she got to work with this enzyme on it. Just preparing the baby mouse cells The cells all become loose and apart from each other That part she'd actually done before so you know easy enough Yeah, but then something she hadn't done before she needed to get those cells to stick flat to the glass bottom of her dish So that she could do that screen and to do that She needed to use special organic proteins as a glue and I hadn't they hadn't come in yet I'd ordered them but they hadn't come in yet and instead of just you know waiting for them to arrive I don't know. I was so anxious to do the experiment She decided to improvise and so I just kind of like rummaged through the freezer found a random tube of glue-like proteins I don't know how old they were and anyway, and I used those squirted it on the dishes pipe headed in the cells pop them in the incubator And went home for the night Next morning came in took a look in her petri dishes hoping to see a nice clean clear layer of cells like flat on the dish But instead everything in there was really cloudy. Hmm. Shouldn't be cloudy. Cloudy means those cells are floating freely around in there Which means that those tubes of protein glue she used, you know We're no good and the cells hadn't stuck and if the cells aren't stuck in the protein that means they're probably dead Yeah, all the cells are dead. I'll just throw it away. And I don't know why I did this but right before she tossed it She thought, you know, but I'll check it. I'll just take a peek. Why not? So she slides these cloudy dishes under the microscope Peers into the eyepiece and in the circle of light she sees these weird Blobs the cells weren't dead. They were alive and healthy and clumped into three or four blobs Yeah, can you as vividly as you can describe them? I mean they're like a sort of beige color like an off-white tiny About the size of a grain of sand or these floating balls of cells And she's like huh weird so she zeroes in on one of these blobs turns the dial on the microscope to zoom in until she's looking basically inside the blob And that's when she sees a tube A tube yeah, so she's like looking down into like one end of the tube so it looks almost like a donut shape What had you ever seen anything like that before? No, no Huh, yeah, I mean as far as she knew if the cells weren't in that protein stuff stuck you know flat to the bottom They should sort of die and fall apart and make a big random mess But these ones seem to be coming together to make this shape So she gets up from the microscope and start sort of going around the lab a little bit subtly at first kind of just like Hey, has anybody ever like seeing cells do funny things, you know Huh clump up together And everybody was just sort of like oh well if they're they're supposed to be laying flat if they're not laying flat You you screwed it up like they just weren't that interested no So I just kind of like put it in from aldehyde Put it away in the fridge for a little while and was like okay Let's try this gene screen again, but this time no floaty clumps gonna get those cells To stick flat on the bottom and eventually she decides to try something new this thing that I had read about called Basically cellular crazy glue like she's not taking any chances I'm just gonna put a whole bunch in my dish so she squirts a lot of it on there Okay, she puts her cells on top and again pops them in the incubator crosses her fingers and goes home for the night She comes back in the morning. Yeah, same thing go to the incubator you take it out of the incubator You look at it and I was like okay This is weird Once again, there's a bunch of stuff floating in there, huh I was like okay, well the matrix L didn't work like it was supposed to again It seemed like the cells had started clumping together and that's when I then took them put them on the tissue culture microscope Look down the eyepiece and again There they were Funny shaped balls these ones were also beige-ish off white kind of color, but they were bigger And they sort of have like bulges coming off of them and this time when she looked inside she saw full on architecture There was a tube but also a little circle sort of oblong shaped thing and a fat layer of tightly packed cells all lined up around a space in the middle They were making structures. They were making things kind of like what cells do as an embryo is developing Which to Madeline didn't make any sense everybody had always taught me that cells need things coming from other tissues in the body You know of the embryo that are necessary for building that embryo and here was a situation where nothing was telling them what to do because they'd been completely taken out of the embryo And they were like forming structures With no instructions. She's like oh my god like this is like there are things developing here but toward what Well to Madeline it kind of looked like they were building a brain So these are these are neural stem cells which inside a developing mouse starts out As a sheet of cells and then they fold up and close and form a tube And then the neural tube elongates and that becomes a spinal cord one end of it Balloons out and that becomes the brain. And that's what it looked like the cells in Madeline's dish We're doing it. It seemed like these cells on their own. We're starting to try to make themselves Into a mouse brain at the time. Yeah at the time I was I was just kind of confused so she showed some other people around the lab what she'd seen I showed some of these structures tubes the circles the lines But several people in the lab were just kind of I think they were just totally bored They were like I don't know sometimes things just grow weird you probably just did the gel wrong and the director of the lab Her boss was like I thought you were gonna do a screen. You know make a flat dish of cells to screen for jeans I was like don't worry. I'm working on it And so over the next few months Madeline focused on getting a nice flat layer of mouse neural stem cells on the bottom of her Petri dishes So she could do those screens and so that was like mostly what I was talking about with people in the lab. Yeah But at the same time off by yourself in a little corner when no one was paying attention I was always still playing around with matragel growing these weird balls of cells tweaking the recipe Trying to make sure I could get it to happen reproducibly and then one day She gets her hands on some human stem cells cells that come from skin or blood that you can reprogram to an embryonic state Where do you get those from? I think these were actually made from discarded human for skin Wow so specific. Okay bet what a detail. All right Thank you for that because it's just bit of tissues. It started ways. Yeah, right of course of course literally thrown away All right, okay, so uh wow. Yeah, so anyway, so then we so she got these human stem cells She put them in the matragel swirled them around in this nutrient-rich fluid so they could kind of eat and She would watch as these formerly foreskin cells Started forming into clumpy parts of a human brain And then she kept tweaking when and how much of the matragel she would add and she would just watch these Blob shapes over time get bigger. I mean they can get as big as like a pencil eraser side note at the time She was pregnant. Yeah, my oldest. I was pregnant with her So she said she had this extra maternal instinct that she was like just really nurturing these little brain balls Yeah, and then one day a couple months after she's been tweaking her ball recipe and I looked under the microscope inside Yeah On this beige lump she could see a perfect ring Of black pigment and that was just I looked at that. I was like that's a developing eye Shut up and it was is growing on a developing human brain. - You're like, no, what? - Yeah. - No, you, what? - And then, then. - That was then when she went to her weekly lab meeting. - I presented this data. I showed this picture of this beginning of an eye, and I remember hearing audible gasps. - And then she showed them pictures of the cells forming tubes and lobes and-- - Ventacles, like an actual brain. - Everybody in the lab started to get it. They were like, hey, wait a second. It's like you have a version of an early human brain in this dish, and you can actually watch the earliest stages of this process of development. - That we know almost nothing about. Is that true though? Do we not know anything about early human brain development? I just think you get all these little-- - Like, when you're pregnant, you get a scan here, a scan there, maybe we know something from animal models, but this was literally the first time anyone in human history had ever watched the early brain develop right from the beginning like this. - Yeah. - Which is especially important when something in the brain has gone wrong. - Now we can actually watch this process instead of just looking at the end when the person is already severely suffering. We can try to understand how it got there. - So Madeline and her boss, Yurigan Kenoblek, who's on board with the whole project now. In 2013, they team up with a bunch of other researchers and publish a paper in the journal Nature. In that paper, they describe how this disorder microcephaly develops in a fetal brain. And they were like, oh, and to see all of this, we use these tiny 3D brain balls, which we have decided to call cerebral organoids. - That's when, like, everything changed. - If you were studying human brain development, it was like someone just invented the microscope. Yeah, yes. You can see things that were invisible before. - So this is Carl Zimmer, science journalist, New York Times columnist, book writer. - Ah, you got Zimmer. - Yeah, as soon as I heard about this stuff, of course, he's my first phone call. And he was all over it. - Sort of, like, humanoid, organoid, very sci-fi. - And the first thing that he pointed out is that there are so many neurological disorders where the key moments are during development. - It's like the key plot points are happening when we can't watch the movie. - Right, totally off limits. - But 2013. - Madeline and Jurgen published their paper and boom. - We could watch human progenitor brain cells give rise to parts of the brain. - But what would you do with that? Like, what would you see? - So one example is a, there's a scientist at Stanford Marine Sergio Pasca and he studied a very rare disease called Timothy Syndrome. - It's caused by a genetic mutation that causes severe neurodevelopmental problems. And he basically created an organoid with that mutation so that he could see how a brain with Timothy Syndrome develops like from the beginning. - Yeah. - Now you can actually see what Timothy Syndrome is about. - So when, what did he see? - So there are certain kinds of cells called interneurons and they make very important connections between different parts of the brain. And with kids with Timothy Syndrome, they just don't. They just fail to get where they need to go. And now that he knew what was going wrong. - He started testing out some drugs to see if they could fix that. - Yeah. - And he and his colleagues actually ended up finding a small drug that actually did help these neurons to find their way in an organoid. - Well, so he cured it in an organoid. - Right. - And they are on track to actually start clinical trials with that drug next year. - Wow. - And you could imagine that's one disorder. - That's right. A lot of other conditions. - Epilepsy schizophrenia, fetal alcohol syndrome, any of these brain conditions that have an issue starting in development or where we might even suspect they might start that early but aren't sure yet, now you can see it. - A lot of people in the field said, whoa, I gotta try this. - This whole field of neural organoids has just totally exploded. I think there's thousands of labs actually using these tools now. - The study of the brain is fundamentally different now. - That's what we are doing on Radio Lab today. We are just, Lulu, we're gonna jump into the ball pit of brain balls. - Okay. - In which there are tons of new opportunities but also confounding questions. - Are there thoughts in there? Is there thinking in there? How brainy are these balls? - We are gonna get there after the break. (upbeat music) (thunder rumbling) - All right, here we are. I'm in the 72nd Street Subway station and I am walking to go see a fridge full of brains. - Hey, I'm Luffy Nazar. - I'm Lulu Miller, this is Radio Lab. - More specifically, a fridge full of brain organoids. - Just before the break, we learned from Madeline that now thousands of labs around the world are growing these brain organoids and it turns out that one of them happens to be just up the street from our studio in New York City. - Only when you're recording are you truly conscious of like how much you breathe. - So we sent our producer, Mona McGowker. - Laboratory caution, hazardous materials. - To check them out. - Where are we entering? - So we're entering. So we have special rooms called cell culture rooms where we grow, oops, we grow the organoids. - This is Dr. Howard Fine. - I'm a medical and neural oncologist. - And this is his lab at the Wild Cornel Medical Center where he studies brain cancer. - A type of brain tumor known as a glial blastoma. - A very bad kind. - Probably now the most lethal of all human cancers. The average survival is about 15 or 16 months. - And Dr. Fine says around 15 years ago or so, he hit a wall in his research. - We've probably made the least amount of progress with. - So he'd been studying glial blastoma, mostly of course in mice, right? And he admits he actually calls this at the time. It was the dirty little secret of oncology that for all this research, they were basically getting nowhere. - Whoa. - But then, you know, he came across Madeline's work on organoids. - And it was Laman Caster's paper. I read it in nature and it's like a like literally, not many times, you know, it was my 37 career. Did I truly have a light bulb moment? And I read that paper and said, this is what we're looking for. - And even though-- - And that's when he pivoted away from mice and started making brain organoids. - Can we see him? - We're going to take a look. - Okay, so he's opening the incubator and he's pulling out. So this are the stem cells. - They look just like Madeline described. - They're kind of like a beige color. They look like a kidney bean or like a nerd candy. - Little beige balls floating in liquid and it is. - It was surrounded by a major cell. - And under the microscope, I see like a dark shape and then I see these little bubbles off the side, almost like little popcorn-y shapes. - You could see structure. - Dr. Ryan, these are from specific patients, like your patients? - Yes. - But the difference between these organoids and Madeline's organoids was that these ones had cancer. - So the idea is we're going to make a mini brain from an individual patient. - And then? - Oh, these are the glioma cells. - Right. - Wow. - They take cells from that patient's brain tumor. - Almost just looks like sugar that hasn't dissolved in tea. - And then we retroengineer the patient's own glioma stem cells into the mini brain. - Basically, they can put a version of your brain tumor on your brain, on a version of your brain, and they can basically make a bunch of those. - We can test hundreds or thousands of drugs. - And then try a bunch of medicines on them. - To look for the drugs or combination of drugs that might be most effective. - So you're saying that you can try every chemotherapy that's out there and decide which one? - Everything only limited by resources. See, as you could imagine. - Oh my God, that is beautiful. I mean, that, just thinking about a way of like a kind of bespoke medical future exploration. - Right, way better than just using mice. - Oh my gosh. - Partly because it also could help us leapfrog one of the biggest reasons on average, 90% of clinical trials for neurological drugs fail. And for brain cancer, by the way, that number is even higher, 95%. They're failing because they're not predicting whether the drug actually works on the disease. - And this is something that Madeleine told me too. - You might have a drug that works really well for treating mouse spinal cord injury. - Like it's like, okay, great, this is not gonna kill you. - Because you've got the animal work to show you that it's safe, but it also doesn't make them better after there's spinal cord injury. - But now, sure, they can do a mouse trial for safety, but they can also test that drug to see if it works on a spinal cord organoid, which is, you know, just a tiny version of an actual human spinal cord. - Wait, what? I thought we were talking brain organoids. Are there spinal cord organoids? Spinal cord organoids? - Yeah, okay. So as Madeleine was developing her brain organoids, independently, around the same time, other scientists all over the world, are growing. - Intestinal organoids. - Long organoids? - Liver organoids. - Muscle organoids, gain organoids. - Anchories organoids. - Estemic organoids. - Heart organoids, kidney organoids. - Breast tissue organoids that actually produce milk. - Ah. - They can have a breast tissue organoid that can make milk? - Yes. - Weird. Has anyone tasted that milk? - I certainly haven't, I've only read about it. I don't know. I don't know, that's a good question. - Anyway. - That's science writer Carl Zimmer again. And he says, now you can make an organoid of basically any part of the body. - And then you can connect them. - What? You can like, you can, does that work? You can do that? - Oh yeah, they call them assemblodes. - assemblodes? - Yeah. - No, like you can Mr. Potato Head assemble. - Correct. - But then do they attach to each other? - They attach to each other, yeah. - And do they communicate with each other? - They communicate with each other, yeah. - Okay, and then what do what? With your charm, bracelet, human body? - So here's an example. So I started to do a pasca. - Neuroscientist at Stanford University. - And his colleagues thought, can we use an assembloid to study pain? - The pathway of pain. So they started with. - The finger? - A finger organoid? - No, no, no, sorry. Just a nerve in the finger. - Okay. The sensory organoid, connect that. Like with some other cells in the dish. - Another organoid, the spinal cord. - Yeah, it's the little teeny piece of spinal cord. - Now we're gonna connect that to a brain organoid that is specifically. - A thalamus, which is the central hub in the brain that direct signals in all sorts of different ways. - And finally, we're gonna connect that one. - To one more brain organoid. - The cortex organoid. - Whoa, this is so weird. I mean, it's like Legos. - It's like Legos. - With the human body. - Correct. - So then they took capsaicin, that's the molecule in. - In like spicy food, is that right? - In spicy food, and chili breads, yeah. It can be very painful to the skin. - Okay. - And they said, okay, let's hit it with capsaicin and see what happens. - Uh-huh. - Boom. - Immediately, that sensory organoid goes, "Shhh, right." - And starts sending really strong signals. - And as signals Carl says, zoom right up through this assembly. - To the spinal cord, the thalamus, to the cortex. - Just like it would in your own body. - And they can see some kind of registering? - Correct. And when you watch the way the signal travels, which is something that's normally hidden inside a body, - They've discovered all sorts of things about what happened when we feel pain, that they didn't know about it before. - Like, for example, signals from different parts of the assembly began firing together in these synchronized waves of signals. - Okay. - And the more you know about how those signals work or move, the better chance you have it stopping them. - You could, for example, say, okay. Can I put a molecule into this assembly that will stop the pain? - Oh, wow. - But so if they're using these things to study pain, is it feeling pain? - No, probably not. - These organoids are just little bits of human tissue in order to feel pain the way we feel pain. There are other parts of the brain that come into play. - The assembly is just a super basic circuit that you send a signal through. So, this pain, it seems to be superficially registering it. - Like, what is it, I think? - The capricion in that case. - No, no, no, I'm the first to eat. - It's like, it is this little ball, but it's a thing. Like, what is it? - Well, they crackle with electricity. They form connections called synapses. They replicate parts of the human brain with astonishing accuracy. - But Carl says. - They're not brains. - That's right. - If there's like a slider, and on one end is brains, and then on the other end is just like some neurons in a dish, where is this on the slider, and how do you, yeah? - I would say that it's closer still for the time being to the neuron end of the slider, simply based on numbers. - Our brain has something like 80 billion neurons. - And the biggest human brain organoids contain about two million cells. - That's 0.0025%. - Well, under 1%, yeah. - And, you know, these things don't have blood vessels, so that is a very important limiting factor to how big and complex it can get. - Yeah. - And they're not in a body. So they can't interact with the world in like a meaningful way. - Okay. - Well, but when I was talking to Carl about this, - So, he said that a lot of that might no longer be true. - Some scientists have, you know, taken organoids from human cells. - Yeah. - And I put them into the brains of rats. - What? - So basically what they did is they basically took a rat, and they like carved out a chunk of its brain. - But they left some of it. - They left most of it. - Okay. - And it's like, think about it. It's almost like they gave a rat a little human tumor or something. - Yes. - But the tumor is like just brain, human brain. - It's human brain. - It's human brain. - And these human organoids are pretty happy in there. - It sort of wired in. - They connect up with the rat neurons. They get supplied by the rat blood system. - So they have made in a real sense like a new kind of being. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, that did not exist before this. Correct. - Okay. Feels like there should have been a bigger press release. But okay, do the rats act any differently? Are they suddenly like into podcasts and coffee? - When you do studies on these rats, behavioral tests, memory tests, all sorts of things, they're just rats. There seems to be nothing humany about them. - Okay. - But one thing they did notice, when you tickle its whiskers, yeah. - You can actually measure signals from the human brain-organoid neurons. - The human part of the brain lights up. - What? Yeah. - So it's registering the feeling? - They are receiving signals from the rats senses. I mean, strictly speaking, they are receiving signals from the rats senses. Are they feeling it? Feeling it gets hard because it's kind of the pain question again. - But yeah, but now they're in a body. I mean, they're in a being. - Yes, but they're not the like driving force of that being. They're like a house guest in the attic. - Okay, Latif, would you put make a brain ball, brain-organoid of your brain cell and put it in a rat? - If I'm being honest, probably not. - Would you, would you? - Probably not. - Okay, okay, so I don't know, but I just think you're more on my side that this is a little scary than you, in your little, with your reporters wand, are letting onto because yes, there's exciting research, but it just feels like every time you try to comfort me with what we know about these things, you then end up not comforting me, and then the scientists take it one step further anyway. - Okay, well, it's as if you have seen the future and what the next chapter holds, because that exact thing is gonna happen. It's gonna get weirder and creepier and stranger, and that's all after the break. - Stick with us. Latif. - Lulu, radio lab. - We are back talking about brain balls, bitty brains, boba brains, the brain-ish and a dish. - Yes, ha ha, with all your clever wordplay, but you are about to send us into the next existential tailspin about how people are using these things. - It is possible. - So the final thing I was told to do is push record? - Record, yes, that's an important button. Now tell me who you are. - So I'm Brett. - This is Brett Kagan, he's a neuroscientist. - I'm the chief scientific officer here at Cortical Labs. - Cortical Labs. - We're a small tech startup here in Melbourne, Australia. - Did you start it? - Did someone else start it? - No, well, it was founded by, there was a few of us, and I was contacted by Dr. Han Wencheng and the kitchen, and they were looking for a neuroscientist. - Brett had been an academic obsessed with this particular question. - How do you get intelligence at a brain cells that are in a dish? - And this company was like, why don't you leave academia and help us find out? - The question they had was, can brain cells and a dish do anything at all that we might want them to do? - Huh, like, do what? - What better to pick than Pong? - Pong? They're like 70s computer games? - Yeah, the game battles a little ball. - Why that? - Everybody knows Pong, it was one of the first computer games. It was the first thing that machine learning, which people now like to call AI, really was trained on as a big breakout success. - And he figured, the brain runs on electricity. And it's also a shared language that silicon computing. So why wouldn't we be able to get neurons to do something a computer could do? - That exactly, like play a simple video game. - We used some hardware that allowed us to record the activity of the cells, process that, and then deliver small electrical pulses back into the cultures, and they did it. - Scientists just put pieces of human and mice brain on a plate and wired it to a computer, to play Pong. - They learned to track the ball and control a paddle. Seriously, this is one of the craziest things I've ever covered. So here's what's going on. - What? - No. - Yeah, and this wasn't even an organoid. This was just a flat sheet of neurons in a dish. - I mean, how could it possibly be doing that? Like, I mean, can really dumb things do that? Could like a tree do that? - Trees don't have neurons, so I don't think a tree could do that. - Okay, so, but what does this mean? Like, are they learning? - Well, Brett says yes. - I called it learning and I think learning was an incredibly fair definition because what would an improvement over time in a way that would suit a goal be called other than learning? - But other people, including Madeleine Lancaster. - I actually remain to be convinced that anybody has really shown that. - Say no. - Because it's really hard to interpret the signals coming from the neurons. - She says when you teach brain cells to play pong, they're connected to a computer. - So what people do is they use algorithms to sort of decode that message and then send a signal back to neurons and so you kind of have like two black boxes that you've just hooked up. - It's sort of a collaboration between the brain cells and the computer. - And you don't really know what either of them are doing. - Anyway, whatever is happening here, what Brett and his team took away from this is if neurons can do something a computer does, why don't we use neurons as computers? - What? - Yeah, literally a couple months ago, they released their first computer called the CL1 and it is, they don't call it this, but it's effectively a bio-computer. It has neurons in it. - Ew, brain sticky, real human brain matter in it. - Yeah, it's got like little brain organoids in it. It has 800,000 neurons interfaced with a silicon chip. You can use it to do computer stuff with it. - Oh. - Okay, I mean, I can get behind the brain balls being used for neurological disorder research, great. You know what, bespoke cancer treatments? Cool. But why are we hooking up human brain cells to computers to like make money? That to me feels like, not worth the risk. - Well, think about the problems we are having right now with all of these data centers, chugging all this energy. - Yes, absolutely wrecking the planet. - Right, so our brains are so impressively efficient. Energy-wise, we have like a dim light bulb like screwed into our heads, right? That's the amount of energy that we need to do all the complex things that we do. If AI or if some supercomputer was doing the equivalent, it would need millions of times more power. Like the difference between a single light bulb and a large town. - So flattering. - The other thing is that, like think about these AI's, you need to train it on the whole internet, right? A human brain is much quicker to learn. If you could harness that energy efficiency, if you could harness that kind of like a knowledge efficiency in a computer, you could move mountains. - Okay, but I guess my authentic question at this point is like, okay, you have shown us all this stuff at this point, it seems pretty clear that they can definitely register input, right? Like they've, there's the tickle, the pain, the signal they're getting from Pong, okay? And then this Pong example at least shows us they are then able based on that input to produce some kind of output. - Yeah, okay, so let's say it is, yeah. - Okay, so my question is, if they can do those things, wouldn't they have to have some thrombing level of consciousness? - No, actually, no, they really don't. Like just like a bunch of the things you just talk about, AI can do those, is AI conscious? Even going further than that, like a room buck can do. Like navigate a room. - A room buck? - A room buck conscious? That's a signal in and out, right? - Oh yeah, right, a room was going, oh, there's an edge, let me go this way. - That's a signal in and out. - When we talk about human consciousness, we meet self-consciousness, like you are aware of yourself. You have a past, you have a future that you're concerned about, like the continuity of experience. - This is Dr. In Soo Hyun. - I'm the director of the Center for Life Sciences at the Museum of Science in Boston. - He's a bioethicist, and he's worked on a bunch of teams with scientists who are studying brain organomes. - We try to identify what are the emerging scientific and ethical issues. - You're like kind of like their conscience? Is that sort of the thing or what? - Sometimes I feel like a priest in secular clothes. - And he says, at this point, he is not worried about brain organolids having anything like human consciousness. - The brain organolids in the dish don't have that continuity, they don't have all the regias, they don't have the interaction with the outside world. - But when he thinks about the future that Brett and others are trying to create, where maybe people start connecting more and more complicated and even more and more structured clumps of human brain cells to computers, - Maybe you get, it might not even be human consciousness, but some kind of consciousness could emerge. - Yes, hooked up to the world. - Yeah. Okay, so what about this, Latif? I would, if I may, I would like to just issue a commandment that all the smart people who are excited by brain organoids, they all think one year to stop making organoids and use their smarts and their technologies and their labs to like try to understand the consciousness of the organoids that have already been made. You know, like ideally they could all be in a dark room and just have candles and quietly, meditatively watch for any flickers to understand what's going on. And then we have a grand assembly, where everyone reports back and we all collectively decide what to do. - But I know that like some of these scientists have this fire inside them to be like, how many cures am I not gonna find in that year? Like how many people am I not gonna help in that year? Like the glioblastoma, like those people don't have a year. - And those people are telling me to just shut up because this is a piece of discarded foreskin. - That's right. - If we have a tool that we don't use-- - Smaddling Linkaster again. - And there are millions of actually conscious human beings out there that don't have treatments. But we decide, no, we're gonna put the value of organoids higher than those people. That would be unethical. - It's funny, like at the beginning, like you asked me, like would you make a brain ball of yourself? And I said no. And then at some point, like my thinking switch where I'm like, oh, no, unless it would save someone's life. - Well, that's no ball and now I feel even worse saying, I don't know that I would, I just, I mean, yeah. Okay, if it's my own kid, sure. And I don't care if I'm like a little enslaved, human consciousness if it saves my kid. But as you have shown us the scientists are gonna do more, they're gonna try new things, they're gonna build bigger brains and like there is a line and we will cross it and we won't know that we've crossed it, you know? - Right, and one thing about these organoids is that they're already crossing all kinds of lines. You disrupt categories that we thought were so neat and tidy and distinguishable. Life, non-life, human, non-human, human, computer. We thought those were pretty clean categories, but this research is kind of upsetting the very foundations of what we think separates these categories apart. It just feels like it's like, oh, we've created a new category of thing, like a new category of thing that is maybe alive. - It is alive. - We have created a new category of thing that is alive. That is, that is, that is weird. - Oh yeah. - It's hard, it's hard to actually put it into a category that already exists, I think, because, because they're not actual brains that we can say absolutely certainly, but they're also not just a few neurons in a dish, either. - We almost don't really even have the words for it. - I think it's kind of a new, a new thing. (mysterious music) - Latif Nasser. - This episode was produced by Annie McEwen, Monoma Galker, and Pat Walters. It was edited by Alex Neeson and Pat Walters with fact checking by Natalie Middleton and Rebecca Rand. Special thank you shout outs to Lynn Levy, Jason Yamada-Hanth, David Faganbaum, Andrew Verstein, Anne Hamilton, Christopher Mason, Madeline Mason, Mary Arty, plus Howard Fine and his whole team at Wild Cornel for hosting us. And if you're looking for more musings on the nature of life and what it means to be alive, Carl Zimmer has a terrific book out all about this stuff. It's called Life's Edge, the search for what it means to be alive, get it at your local bookstore. That's it for us. from our brain balls to yours. See you next week. - Okay, start now. - No, you don't need to. - You don't need to practice anymore. - We're recording now. - Hi, I'm Ellie Collins, and I'm from Louisville, Kentucky, and here are the staff credits. She's Molly's niece. - Yeah. Radio lab is hosted by Lulu Miller in La Teeth Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindun Nanasam Bandan, Matt Kilti, Mona Maggavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Niesen, Sara Kari and Nissa Vietez, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand, our fact checkers are, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. (laughs) - I love you, Kiko. - Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Simon's Foundation in the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. [MUSIC]