Scientists Inject Human Brain Cells Into Mice, Make Them Smarter | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Inject Human Brain Cells Into Mice, Make Them Smarter

singularityhub.com

71 pointsolalonde57 comments

Typical of Singularity Hub, this is a link-baity treatment of a story that has already been widely reported. The underlying research study

http://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/abstract/S1934-5909(13)00...

is interesting, and worth replicating with varied experimental conditions, and indeed it may be important for clearing up what glia cells do in the human brain. But in terms of treatments on human beings, this looks a lot more radical and a lot more likely to be expensive and subject to regulation than simply engaging in deliberate practice and finding a good coach.

Do we really want smarter rodents?

(Then again, think if we could secretly outsource loads of PHP SQL-CRUD projects to them..)

They might get some of the bad human traits. Consider religious wars over brands of cheese or colors of automotive electrical wires.

That is a brilliant idea for keeping the world wide mouse population under control!

Being that many religions frown on birth control, being gay, and instead focus on having lots of babies... I don't think that would have the population control effect you are looking for.

This is a good question. HGTG-scenarios aside, what if they become sentient? Do they deserve the same moral weight humans have now?

Aren't they sentient? They are able to perceive and feel things.

People often mix the words sentience and sapience to mean the same thing. Mice clearly can perceive and feel things but they do not show the intelligence we call sapience.

On the topic of AIs, not mice, but very relevant to the questions you mentioned: http://lesswrong.com/lw/x7/cant_unbirth_a_child/

This was my immediate reaction. Pain experiments, as described in the article, are a necessary "evil" in many animal experiments. Human trials have the same conditions, with both the pain of treatment and the suffering of being in the "control" group and having false hopes; however, participants have consented to the experiment.

We empathize much more strongly with animals that behave in human ways. Couple this with the "cuteness factor," which I use to mean that we are sensitive and protective of things that we find to be cute (babies, kittens, Yoda, puppies, etc.) and we have a very irrational, visceral response to the idea of torturing cute, smart, affectionate, best-dog-I-ever-had, animals.

It's not inherently bad but it clouds our judgment on what is right and wrong in terms of our treatment of these animals and the ends that justify this treatment. We (as a species) kill and eat whales, which most of the developed world has agreed to be unacceptable.

I don't know if this is moving in a "Rats of NIMH" or "Planet of the Apes" direction, but the philosophical ramifications of sentience are likely to be explored as a result of this type of "improvement".

We have a huge body of sci-fi, speculation, religion, and thought-experiments regarding sentient non-human forms, including what defines "life" and "personhood". It will be an interesting test of humanity to see how we deal with any positive results of this type of exploration.

Imagine if you could grow yourself a huge brain. I'm finding more and more that the biggest bottleneck in my awesome plans is me.

Or maybe you could grow a second brain and switch them out while one sleeps/defrags.

How would you keep those brains in sync?

Dropbox perhaps could have a service tier for cerebral cortices.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon.

It'll be a problem when someone synched to the service forgets something which removes everyone else's memory of it too.

A cloud brain might be easier, just a good BCI and a connection to the internet would be all that's needed to get started.

Instead of two hemispheres, split your brain into quadrants with high bandwidth and referential locality for task memory.

Also, try to figure out a way to harness hormonal "intelligence" for general purpose cognition.

I for one welcome our new rodent overlords.

You don't know if they are already posting in HN now :-) singularity is near....

What are we doing tonight, Brain?

The same thing we do every night, Pinky...

...Try and take over the world!

"Try to ..."

Reminded me of this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2881

oh and by the way, one of the mice is called Algernon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon#Short_stor...

Just finished that book last night. It was a good read, but deeply unsettling for some strange reason. His intelligence decline at the end makes the reader feel like retardation is a very near threat to all of us. It's one of those threats that seems worse than death, too.

Perhaps the injected mice had less appetite from side effects of the human brain cells, therefore not crazy about the idea of getting hurt for food. Mice are already smart. They can steal and transport cat food in their mouths and stash it for later out of sight. That's not the actions of a stupid mouse.

None of the tests they used were food-related.

If you're curious, pages 13 to 17 of the supplementary data (from "Auditory fear conditioning" onwards) describe the methods they used to test learning and memory: http://download.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/mmcs/journals/1934-5...

Thanks, and good to know it's more than dangling carrots and lost appetite. Although I wonder if injected brains is an effective treatment for mouse depression?

"...all mice were housed in individual cages for 2 months in a single room prior to testing."

Six hours and no reference to the Rats of NIMH?! :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIM...

Beat me by 34 minutes :-)

Just a few more years of research and Brecht's wonderful allegory might finally become reality: http://pamolson.org/ArtSharksMen.htm

I know how this movie ends...

with the whole colony trying to get to the lee of the stone.

This title could be nicely used as a mirror for personal prejudice. If you manage to see through the lazy dust of anthropocentrism, you'll read it as full of horror and pain.

Every species favours its own - humans are not special in that regard.

Only humans perform experiments on other species that we would regard as torture if they were done to us. We argue that it's for the greater good, of course, but the ease and speed with which we rush to accept that is suspicious; in other areas of life we would regard such arguments as obvious self-serving spin. It's not hard to imagine that future generations will look back on many of these experiments with the same moral horror that we have toward some of the past.

I had this feeling when watching the Capuchin monkey fairness experiment in Frans de Waal's TED talk. From an ordinary point of view, it's cute and charming. You laugh along with the audience; the monkeys are funny. You go away with a heartwarming feeling that you've learned something about primate (and thus human) nature. But if the veil drops and you look at it more immediately, the video can also seem horrific. At least it struck me that way. That and other things have got me wondering whether there's something wrong with a science that excludes empathy as a component of knowledge.

> Only humans perform experiments on other species that we would regard as torture.

Because only humans are capable to, do you seriously think overwhelming cognitive advantage would be used any different if we had different traits? If our heads were shaped like the ones of mice? Or if we had 4 stomachs like the cows? And this selfishness and disregard for other animals well being is what made humans growth so quickly and one of the main reasons you and me exist.

The greater good argument should not be dismissed so readily. All of modern biomedicine is laid upon the foundations of animal experimentation - the vast majority of medicines we take for granted today, and the knowledge base they are derived from, would not exist without it. It's a very real dichotomy between human and animal suffering.

I seem to recall, bottlenose dolphins have been known to attack and kill spinner dolphins for "fun" (i.e. they don't eat the dolphin afterwards). Cats play with mice before finally killing them. That's, in my mind, as close to an "experiment" as you get in nature. Don't assume humans are the worst animals out there: while we have our horrible streaks, if we gave our mental capacity over to other animals (say, chimpanzees), the world would be no prettier. At least we've mostly eliminated the murder of our rivals' children so that we can impregnate the mother, unlike our closest genetic relative.

Could they inject human brain cells into dogs, instead of mice? I just feel a dog who knows English would be more lovely than a mouse who knows the same language...

"...and human’s are the smartest of all thinkers"

Christine O'Donnell, 2010 Tea Party candidate for the senate in Delaware, totally saw this coming.

Sign me up for a shot of Einstein astrocytes.

I for one welcome our new mouse overlords.

I bet they named the mouse Algernon.

Playing with fire.

These experiments are cruel. Who has the right to experiment on these animals? Who gave these "scientists" permission to inflict suffering on these mice? Accountability and compassion are lacking here.

When will we as a race start challenging the morality of animal experimentation and vivisection? There needs to be protections afforded to animals. This cruelty needs to stop.

Turn the question on its head. Why is it right to prolong human and animal suffering to minimize the suffering of a few lab animals?

These experiments are incredibly important for science and healthcare.

Am I to believe you? Even if these experiments do have importance, are they more important than being humane and ethical?

We're so damn advanced as a race, yet we can't come up with more humane alternatives?

We have record unemployment and pharmaceutical companies that are making billions in profits, why can't we experiment on humans who give consent and are fairly compensated? It's more humane to animals and people.

Because these experiments kill stuff.

The humans are more valuable, and I'm sorry that you'd rather see them die than a few rodents.

And I'm sorry you lack insight and empathy towards both animals and people who could use the income to have a better life.

The problem is you (as a scientist) don't know that an experimental subject will have a better life, or a life at all, and you don't have enough data about the risks to fairly compensate a person for taking those risks on. You're just making the cost of collecting data much more expensive while shifting the risk (of suffering, disability, death) from animals bred for the purpose to poor people.

While the topic was about animal suffering, you are talking about suffering in human subjects. As far as I know(and that is not much), human studies are done after animal studies. This means the drug is most likely not toxic to animals and by extension humans.

You didn't read the thread. He's suggesting doing human studies instead of animal studies.

Without animal studies, you are exposing human subjects to potentialy toxic drugs.

That's what we said.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/04/animal-studies-in...

"Animal experimentation is horrible and terrible. Even in the most ethical of studies suffering is inflicted upon animals that otherwise would not have happened; entire genotypes of animals doomed to additional suffering have been bred in some cases. But the alternative is far worse: to not perform these animal studies, or rather for some privileged group to use force to prevent others from performing such studies, and so bring progress in medicine to a grinding halt. Without animal studies there would be no new meaningful advances in medical science. It is a harsh and unpleasant aspect of the human condition that forcing suffering upon animals in the course of scientific studies is necessary to advance both human and veterinary medicine. A few suffer for the benefit of many - an equation that should make any sane and compassionate person uncomfortable.

"Animal studies are even required to refine the science needed to move beyond animal studies. Ethics and morality aside, studies employing animals are expensive and time-consuming. Given the choice, scientists would much rather experiment on cells in a dish, or on slabs of unfeeling cultured tissue, or upon simulations of animals, if these methods would generate results of the same quality.

"In comparison to what might be and what is possible, we live in a barbaric age of suffering, war, death, and sundry other horrors that we like to keep behind the curtains and out of the mind's eye. But barbaric as it is, this age is far better than the past by all such measures. We no longer absolutely, definitely need to slaughter animals for food to sustain the populace, for example, and rates of violence between humans are far lower than in the pre-modern era of tribes and universal poverty. The option stands open today for a society of vegetarians: it is practical from a technological and economic standpoint. That we have not moved rapidly in that direction is our shame, and our descendants will look back on us as savages for this and many other reasons.

"Those people who criticize and take action against the use of animals in medical research should first look to their diets, and then to the practice of farming animals. Vast and expansive animal suffering is caused in the name of putting meat into the marketplace - greater many times over each month than in all the animal experiments in modern history. Persuade the omnivores of the human race to relinquish their participation in the meat market before savaging the medical science that will benefit both man and beast.

"In short, the human condition is a rotted, cloying swamp, but we're closer to the edge than we were - no longer up to our necks in it, we now have the luxury of finding more of our surroundings to be disgusting and primitive. The way out to solid ground is forward, through more of the same, until our biotechnology becomes good enough to do away with the suffering we must inflict upon animals in order to build better medicine. Perhaps along the way, societies will arise whose members also reject the needless suffering we presently choose to inflict upon animals in order to eat the same diet as our ancestors."

The animals were bred specifically for such experiments. For example, the mice in these experiments were blind, immunosuppressed mice that would not survive in the wild anyway. Such research is not done with cruelty in mind; the animals are taken care of as well as possible despite their eventual fate - even their deaths are performed quickly and painlessly. In laboratory jargon, they are termed "sacrifices" which I think very positively describes their role - their lives being taken for the greater good of knowledge, enlightenment, and the overall reduction of suffering.

If they don't stop torturing these poor animals, we're going to hunt them down and lock them in cages!

That's the problem with reality, might really does make right.

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