skywizard
20th August 2015, 15:14
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A fully formed human brain, about the size of one found in a five-week-old fetus, has been
grown in a Petri dish.
The research was presented today by Rene Anand of Ohio State University, Columbus, at the Military Health System Research Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
We know what you’re thinking. Holy engineered human, Batman! Scientists are growing a person in the lab. However, this tiny organ has no sensory stimuli entering it, and is not thinking in any way, Anand told The Guardian.
What’s more, to grow the brain larger would require a network of blood vessels, which would necessitate a beating heart.
A major reason for undertaking such a feat is to give other scientists a way to study developmental brain diseases, understand post traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries and to test drugs for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, all of which could reduce experiments on people and animals.
Anand and his team say they engineered the brain using adult human skin cells, which can be stripped down to their basic stem cell state and reprogrammed to become any other tissue cell, such as brain and nerve cells.
The team claims that their brain is the most complete model ever developed. Not only does it have 99 percent of the brain’s cells and genes, it also has a tiny spinal cord and a retina.
We say “claim” here because Anand and his team did not publish their major scientific advance in a peer-reviewed journal, which is the typical course in scientific circles. This means that a detailed report about how the team grew the brain has been kept secret and so it’s hard to determine whether any part of the process was coaxed unnaturally or if the data was tweaked.
In their reporting, The Guardian contacted several scientists for comment and Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, said it wasn’t possible yet to say whether this announcement represented a major advance. “When someone makes such an extraordinary claim as this, you have to be cautious until they are willing to reveal their data.”
Anand told The Guardian that his team was applying for a patent on the technique, which is why he decided not to reveal the scientific process and publish it in a journal.
Source: http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/pencil-eraser-size-brain-grown-in-lab-dish-150819.htm
peace...
A fully formed human brain, about the size of one found in a five-week-old fetus, has been
grown in a Petri dish.
The research was presented today by Rene Anand of Ohio State University, Columbus, at the Military Health System Research Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
We know what you’re thinking. Holy engineered human, Batman! Scientists are growing a person in the lab. However, this tiny organ has no sensory stimuli entering it, and is not thinking in any way, Anand told The Guardian.
What’s more, to grow the brain larger would require a network of blood vessels, which would necessitate a beating heart.
A major reason for undertaking such a feat is to give other scientists a way to study developmental brain diseases, understand post traumatic stress disorder, brain injuries and to test drugs for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, all of which could reduce experiments on people and animals.
Anand and his team say they engineered the brain using adult human skin cells, which can be stripped down to their basic stem cell state and reprogrammed to become any other tissue cell, such as brain and nerve cells.
The team claims that their brain is the most complete model ever developed. Not only does it have 99 percent of the brain’s cells and genes, it also has a tiny spinal cord and a retina.
We say “claim” here because Anand and his team did not publish their major scientific advance in a peer-reviewed journal, which is the typical course in scientific circles. This means that a detailed report about how the team grew the brain has been kept secret and so it’s hard to determine whether any part of the process was coaxed unnaturally or if the data was tweaked.
In their reporting, The Guardian contacted several scientists for comment and Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, said it wasn’t possible yet to say whether this announcement represented a major advance. “When someone makes such an extraordinary claim as this, you have to be cautious until they are willing to reveal their data.”
Anand told The Guardian that his team was applying for a patent on the technique, which is why he decided not to reveal the scientific process and publish it in a journal.
Source: http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/pencil-eraser-size-brain-grown-in-lab-dish-150819.htm
peace...