News Human brain organoid bioprocessors now available to rent for $500 per month

[ThomasKinsley]

There is a whole industry trading in human remains for various medical and non-medical uses. There are ways to do it that some would consider ethical, mostly involving informed consent without any form of coercion or duress. Some would say people shouldn't sell their remains, and therefore no exchange of money should be involved. I can see both sides of that argument, but it's probably best not to open that particular can of worms.

Better we open the can now rather than let it fester.

I think the challenges needed to grow a near normal human brain in vitro are numerous and non-trivial. However, it's fair to ask where the cutoff should be, which we'd certainly want to know well in advance of when we reach it. I'd say it should be a couple orders of magnitude before the point where we believe sentience and conscious thought can occur.

Sentience isn't quantifiable. A Google engineer recently claimed their AI was sentient. He was promptly ignored, which demonstrates the futility of such claims. Not everyone agrees at what specific point sentience and conscious thought occurs, nor can they provide proof that this threshold has not already been crossed.

I don't see a fundamental problem with that. Human organs are already being grown in pigs for transplantation to human recipients.

There is a clear difference between growing legs to help someone walk and growing legs so your robot vacuum cleaner can get in the tough-to-reach spots. When body parts are incorporated into machinery and not to save human lives, it cheapens them.

IMO, the only ethical problem with growing human organs or limbs is just around securing the rights to use the cell line.

Cell lines cannot be legitimately secured without express consent from the individual, and even then the question of appropriateness goes beyond consent.

You're like 100 years too late, then. If the topic interests you that much, it's basically an entire field by now. You should probably plan to do some reading...Again, you're like super late to this party. Probably hundreds of books, academic papers, and even entire academic journals have been written on the subject. I think it'd be a good idea what some really smart medical ethicists have written on the subject.

You're right that I'm 100 years too late. I was not around to speak out against lobotomies nor the forcible sterilizing of indigenous and disabled peoples. Neither was I there to stop eugenics nor rail against the Holocaust as it happened. Forgive me for not being 120 years old, yet I can still see the horrors that such acts have done in the name of science. I am late, but I can still use my hindsight to condemn such practices along with their modern counterparts. I would hope others would do likewise.

Doesn't seem like it, based on the other articles on it that I've seen. At this price, neuroscience and a few AI researchers will probably try it out and I'd wager it would quickly be found out if fraudulent.

Some scams take decades to uncover. Let us not forget the modern tech scams of our time, including Theranos which lasted nearly 20 years before it was shut down. If frauds were always detected immediately, then there would hardly be any frauds at all.

Quite frankly, the price strikes me as almost too low. As a scam, I think it wouldn't be a very good one. They should charge more like $10k, so they'll at least make enough to be worth their trouble before they get outed.

Remember that Juicero was around $500 as well.

Okay, so basically you're advocating to virtually stop medical research. At some point or another, most medical research aimed at eventually saving human lives and alleviating human suffering involves in vitro tests on human tissue. So, that's quite an extreme position, if you're saying no human tissue should be used outside of direct medical interventions.

No, I support medical research. I am advocating to not put my neighbor's braincells in my smartphone so my AI will one day become more efficient. The fact that I even have to type this tells me how dark this world has already become.

 

[bit_user]

Sentience isn't quantifiable.

I think that's probably not true. I believe you don't know how to quantify it, but you're not an expert in the field. Just because you have a brain and use it to think doesn't qualify you as an expert in cognition.

One can probably outline specific cognitive abilities needed for what we consider "general intelligence". You can further probably show how many layers and what sort of connectivity are needed for those abilities to emerge. We can also look at lots of empirical evidence that has been amassed about animal intelligence and their brains, in order to further inform what's possible with differing numbers of neurons.

There's also a very practical way that field experience plays into this. The medical community has a pretty good understanding of how much impairment different brain injuries and developmental defects have on cognitive capacity. You're simply not going to have a meaningful conversation with someone with a brain 1/10th the size of yours. At something like 1/100th the size, it's way smaller than most of the animals we raise and eat for food.

A Google engineer recently claimed their AI was sentient. He was promptly ignored,

And we now understand that they were right to ignore him, because LLMs are not sentient. He was a relatively low-level tech who lacked expertise in AI. He made a big fuss without taking the time to understand what he was talking about, and it blew up spectacularly.

When body parts are incorporated into machinery and not to save human lives, it cheapens them.

Biology is never "cheap". Particularly when we're dealing with human tissue. Due to the regulations and potential for bad PR, nobody would choose to deal with human tissues if they had other alternatives. I'm sure these brain organoids will primarily be used for the purpose of furthering brain science. This sort of thing could be just what's needed to improve our understanding of conditions like schizophrenia, alzheimers, parkinsons, bipolar, autism, etc. and develop better treatments.

IMO, their industrial value is almost nonexistent. I think the article is clickbait, in that respect.

You're right that I'm 100 years too late. I was not around to speak out against lobotomies nor the forcible sterilizing of indigenous and disabled peoples. Neither was I there to stop eugenics nor rail against the Holocaust as it happened. Forgive me for not being 120 years old, yet I can still see the horrors that such acts have done in the name of science. I am late, but I can still use my hindsight to condemn such practices along with their modern counterparts. I would hope others would do likewise.

You're missing my point, which was that people have been doing in vitro research on human tissues for at least that long. Most of modern medical science probably wouldn't have been possible without it.

I think you like to paint with a broad brush. You're digging up the worst abuses and using them to argue against the entire field. IMO, if you're going to advocate for very draconian restrictions, the justification should be very deep, well-founded, and all alternatives should be thoroughly exhausted.

The way I look at it is to see what can go wrong with a certain practice, and then what ethical, legal, and other barriers we can put in place so that the benefits can still be derived from medical research without the downside risks.

Basically, it's like the difference between someone reading about some horrific car crashes and then advocating to ban cars. The alternative would be to actually look at the particulars of the crashes and try to see how cars, roads, signals & signs, laws, and driving culture can all be modified to reduce the frequency and severity of those kinds of collisions.