I was studying the way cells move, and to make cells that moved, we would dissect hearts out of seven-day-old chicken embryos, shread them into chunks, and put the bits down on a layer of matrigel in a dish full of tissue culture medium. After several hours, the cardiac muscle cells would start to dedifferentiate into fibroblasts (not really fibroblasts, but people call them that) and start zooming around, at which point you can do science on them.
I painstakingly prepared one of these dishes, then forgot about it, and left it in the incubator for a week. When i got back to it, the initial chunk of heart muscle had completely gone, turned into fibroblasts - which had then spread out over the dish, and turned back into cardiac muscle cells. There was a thin sheet of muscle strung out across the width of the dish, and it had started beating.
A few years back, Bill Gates said that he'd be working in biology if he were still a teenager [0]. There's a lot of exciting work happening in the field, and if anyone finds this sort of thing particularly inspiring, I'd encourage them to read up on bioinformatics -- there's plenty of programming work to be done in the biosciences.
It's a pretty awesome time to be a biologist. Things are happening so quickly and profoundly. In sequencing alone, imagine having 30 years of Moore's law progress in 5 [1]; that just happened and we are still catching up to the consequences. Then there are GWAS, CRISPR, organoids, ESCs/iPSCs, superres microscopy, immunotherapy, etc. Also it is true that computational approaches will play a big role [2].
I'm not looking to get hired, but I am looking to do statistical analysis/Manhattan plot for endometriosis variant identification using a patient group, and develop a therapy using CRISPR. Would you be able to recommend anyone I could connect with?
I don't really see biology attracting the same kind of intellect that programming does. There is an enormous, and constantly growing, amount of minutiae that must be simply remembered by rote. It seems much closer to law than to computer science.
If, instead, I were choosing exclusively based on the importance of the work for humanity, I would still go for energy research before biology. That is what civilization's survival hinges on.
Impressive, certainly. But I'm not quite comfortable with it. Growing a human brain seems uncommonly close to creating a crippled human being, intentionally. I don't know where the line is, but it doesn't seem good to me for society to be walking this close to it.
Without senses (sound, touch, taste, sight, smell), I would imagine that the human brain would create it's own little world. It's not like you're depriving it of senses it once had. It's not going to have knowledge of what being crippled is. It won't be aware that any of those 5 senses exist.
It's almost as if a human missing most of their senses spent their entire life in a float tank. I don't think it would be humane or inhumane, merely different. Without tons of advances we wouldn't be able to relate to it, or it to us. It wouldn't even be aware we existed.
In a way, its possible that the first intelligent alien life we make contact with will be one we create. As a specie, we've spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to make contact with intelligent life that might exist beyond our planet. Learning to make contact with artificial brains that we can hook up to different senses (artificial and mechanical or artificial and biological) is going to be awesome.
It's even possible that the brain in it's own isolation from us even does something humans do naturally; it tries to explain and understand its world and may even form the notion of a god or creator that brought it into existence. Hopefully one day it will get to meet its creator that brought it into existence. It likely won't damn us or condemn us because it won't know any better that it was crippled, just as the religious among us don't damn their gods for not bestowing us with talents and abilities like omniscience and omnipotency.
"With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three
months and three years old in the chamber alone, after
they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks"
"after they had bonded with their mothers"? That's pretty cruel and totally an apples to oranges comparison. That researcher relied on the curse of knowledge and self aware to deprive the monkeys of a pleasurable stimulus.
Where do you get the idea that the monkeys would be even better if they never got to see their mothers at all? You are saying that suffering is ok as long as you aren't aware that not-suffering is even possible.
To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the
rhesus infants from wire and wood.[10] Each infant became attached to its particular
mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next
chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth
covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a clothed mother
and a wired mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a
bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the
cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[10]
Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the
cloth mother.[10] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the
monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the
mother/infant relationship than milk and that this "contact comfort" was essential
to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was
this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the
importance of love and mother/child interaction.
Another experiment by Harry Harlow. The interesting things to observe here is that the money felt attachment to something that provided it with contact comfort. The brain in question wouldn't even know what "contact" is because it lacks a sense of touch. With that in mind (no pun intended), what we're left to speculate is where that complex mass of neurons will venture. Will it "hallucinate and invent" something that provides the equivalent of a mother figure?
Alternatively, (and I think this is more probably), it's possible that the brains we invent for a long time are merely equivalent to evolutionary stages of brain development from millions of years in the past. That begs the question, would the precursors of the modern human brain be considered to be an inhumane condition to the brain we have today? It clearly had a lesser capacity in all sorts of ways. The ancient human brain cannot comprehend, yet alone fathom what the modern human brain is capable of. By the time we grow these brains to the neuronal mass capable of human levels of thought, we will probably lack the ability and knowledge still on how to make it think like us because the technology for growing it bigger is going to far outstrip our capacity to coax it to grow a certain way (assuming we even know what that way we should grow it to achieve the consciousness of the modern human).
That was the whole point that was being made, that you don't know what you're missing if you never had it. The study doesn't counter that assertion, since these monkeys obviously do know what they're missing.
It's not suffering if you don't have any pain and don't know/desire for anything different. A brain by itself cannot even know there is a such thing as 'better'.
This is an interesting thought; but your assumption that the brain would just "create its own little world" is unfounded. Like other animals, we are born with certain instincts. It's not been definitively proven that the brain is some sort of perfect blank slate.
While I'm not denying that human brains have been shown to hallucinate under sensory deprivation, there's no way to say whether or not a lab grown brain would experience discomfort because of its lack of input, or whether it would even dream up a coherent reality for itself at all. There's simply no way to test this.
If we can prevent consciousness from ever forming (referring 30-50 or more years out on all of this), while growing full-size brain replacements meant to be harvested for repair purposes for injured or diseased people, what would your thoughts on that be?
But these are tiny brains, aren't they? 1cm x 1cm or something on that scale. That is far smaller than most of the animals that we hunt, kill, experiment on etc. It's definitely uneasy though, because it prods away at the fundamental moral distinction between human and animal.
Because morality is not applicable to anything beyond human experience. Science is not actively trying to subvert morality (that would be immoral), it just doesn't care.
this is jaw-droppingly awesome. In hindsight it seems almost obvious that these particular cells would form into these organoids. I suppose that's part of the beauty of science in general.
I feel like this was pretty obvious given that teratomas appear spontaneously. Once you appreciate that ESCs contain enough potentiality to form organs, the research kind of unfolds itself.
I was studying the way cells move, and to make cells that moved, we would dissect hearts out of seven-day-old chicken embryos, shread them into chunks, and put the bits down on a layer of matrigel in a dish full of tissue culture medium. After several hours, the cardiac muscle cells would start to dedifferentiate into fibroblasts (not really fibroblasts, but people call them that) and start zooming around, at which point you can do science on them.
I painstakingly prepared one of these dishes, then forgot about it, and left it in the incubator for a week. When i got back to it, the initial chunk of heart muscle had completely gone, turned into fibroblasts - which had then spread out over the dish, and turned back into cardiac muscle cells. There was a thin sheet of muscle strung out across the width of the dish, and it had started beating.