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Nature Podcast

Audio long read: Hybrid brains – the ethics of transplanting human neurons into animals

Nature Podcast

podcast@nature.com

News, Science, Technology

4.5893 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The development of brain chimaeras – made up of human and animal neurons – is an area of research that has hugely expanded in the past five years. Proponents say that these systems are yielding important insights into health and disease, but others say the chimeras represent an ethical grey zone, because of the potential to blur the line between humans and other animals, or to recapitulate human-like cognition in an animal.


This is an audio version of our Feature: Hybrid brains: the ethics of transplanting human neurons into animals


Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:34.2

This is an audio long read from nature.

0:37.3

In this episode, hybrid brains, the ethics of transplanting human neurons into animals.

0:44.3

Written by Kendall Powell and read by me, Benjamin Thompson.

0:51.8

In a darkened room in a laboratory in London, a group of students and researchers watch

0:57.5

a clump of human brain cells settle into their new home, a living mouse brain.

1:04.7

On a computer monitor next to a microscope, the human cells light up in flashes of simultaneous

1:10.5

activity. Over time, the cells

1:13.5

sprouts new connections a few centimetres long and form networks with each other. It's captivating

1:20.2

viewing for his students, says Vincenzo de Paola, who runs the lab at Imperial College London.

1:26.4

It's all they want to do. I can't tear them away, he says.

1:31.1

They have front row seats to an unusual show.

1:35.2

De Paola's group is one of just a handful of labs able to study human neural cells at work

1:40.9

in a live developing brain, a system that is otherwise largely off-limits for both

1:46.6

ethical and technical reasons. We cannot study these processes as they unfold in a fetal human brain,

...

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