The recent news from NPR.org that a team at Stanford has created mice whose brains are partly human was nothing short of appalling. I mean, have we now tired of trials to bring dinosaurs, wooly mammoths and ancient viruses back to life? Well good! But that's no reason to now venture into another verboten territory: transplanting human brain cells in mice! What good is that? Oh righto, "the research could be life-saving because it provides us access to human brain function that would be very difficult to stud otherwise." Uh, ever heard of PET scans, EEGs etc.?
No, it's far more dramatic to go this route - involving another mammal species - to discover how human brain cells function in a mouse neural environment. But, what if the result is unintended? Say hyper-intelligent rodents that think like humans?
I am thinking here of the mouse named Algernon in the science fiction movie 'Charly'. The story of a retarded man (played by Cliff Robertson) who undergoes an experimental brain surgery to enhance his IQ to the level of a veritable rocket scientist - or neuro -scientist. Early in the film the mouse is totally able to put him away in a complex miniature maze, and he is shamed by repeated defeats at the hands of 'Algernon'. Even after the surgery, Charly must struggle to get as adept as Algernon is in racing to the end of the maze, but, of course, he finally is.
But what if a human-brain engineered mouse - say from Stanford's experiments - in "xenocortificatIon" - is created that's never been beaten in a similar maze race? Do we say 'Uh oh' and then just kill it? Leading to the assorted "ethical concerns" lead researcher Sergiu Pasca's work raises. So concerned was he that last year he convened a symposium of 70 scientists, ethicists, patient advocates, on the need to do oversight.
The results:
- Decentralized
International Oversight: The participants called for
a flexible, internationally aligned oversight infrastructure. This
framework is designed to respect regional and cultural differences while
continuously evolving alongside rapid advancements in the science.
- A
Balanced Approach to Regulation: Patient advocates at the
meeting strongly emphasized that while rigorous oversight is necessary for
public confidence, new guidelines must not slow down medical research
aimed at finding cures for devastating psychiatric and neurological
conditions.
- Public
Engagement and Accurate Terminology: The working groups
established a consensus on the vital need to keep the public informed and
to use accurate scientific terms—such as "neural organoids"
instead of sensationalized media phrases like "mini-brains"—to
prevent public confusion regarding animal consciousness.
- Defining
Strict Boundaries ("Red Lines"): While
Pașca and other researchers noted that current experiments on rodents do
not pose a realistic risk of human-like cognitive capacities due to
evolutionary distance and small brain sizes, they drew distinct
boundaries. For instance, Pașca explicitly asserted that transplanting
human brain organoids into primates is entirely unjustified and
represents a clear ethical red line.
So, in other words it's okay to create mice with human parts (organoids) but not chimps or other primates. Oh, and we must steer the public away from terms like mice with human "mini brains." Well, that remains an issue for debate when we learn the details, namely that "clumps" of human brain tissue were grown from skin cells. The transplants then thrived, "swelling to as many as 4 million human neurons and wiring themselves into the mice brains and spinal cords."
Oh yeah, "some of the organoids even developed into cell types that turn up in primates but never in mice."
In other words, the mice with the transplants reached cell types typical of primates, say like "Carlo" the monkey in Barbados:
Stay tuned for the next chapter in the adventures of human-brained mice!
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