Vanguard Culture's Breakthrough: The Future Features Cutting Edge Science

Speaker 1: 00:00 This weekend, you don't have to choose between events because Vanguard culture brings together an eclectic mix of treats as it hosts breakthrough the future. It's hopeful visioning of the future combines art, science, music, fashion and pop culture into one event. KPBS arts reporter Beth OCHA Amando speaks with UCS D professor Alison Moultrie at his lab about research on the human brain that he's discussing at Saturday's event. So Speaker 2: 00:28 Alison, I saw you at the Starship Congress talking about one of the projects you're working on and I'll let you do the scientific explanation, but to me what I heard was you are creating mini brains in the lab and you've added like an eyeball to it and had it run a robot. So give us a rundown of what this is and what it's actually called. So we don't like to call them mini brains. We prefer the terms of brain organoid because we don't want to give the impression that what we have is a fully mature organized brain dish. So instead these a bring organized, they came from the STEM cells. These are cells that we teach them how to self aggregate in three D structures that resemble or mimics early stages of brain development. We do that because we don't have access to the material of the human embryo in nutritious. Speaker 2: 01:21 So it's really hard to understand how the human brain is formed in a healthy living fetal brain because we really don't have ways to access experimentally that material. So that's why we rely on these artificial systems outside the body so we can recreate a human neurodevelopment and we can find instances where the process doesn't fully work in trying to fix it. Um, this is, uh, with the goal to help millions of people suffering from neurological conditions. Is there any point at which you look at these things that you're creating in the lab and you wonder, does it have any consciousness or how far are we going with it? So that's a great question and to try to words for that. Last Friday as a top, like a meeting here where we invited the three big philosophers to discuss this issue. So the first question is a valid question that I get all the time. Speaker 2: 02:17 Uh, how far is too far for these organized? Do they ever reach a level of acquiring consciousness or self aware or can they suffer or few pain? So these are a good questions in, um, right now we have no evidence that is the case, but, uh, it is a possibility that in the future as we mature and we prove the model that they might acquire those things. And if they do, we have to agree in on, uh, what is, um, the, the level of consciousness that they have. And, um, probably we need to give them what we call a Moro status. What is the moral status of these organoids? So similar to, uh, research animals, um, that we have here as well as human subjects that participates in clinical trial. They all have moral status and we treated them all following a series of regulations so we can do experiments with them. And I believe that as soon as we give a moral status to these brain organoids, we have to come up with conditions, regulations, consensus platforms, that everybody agrees that this is the way to do it. So that might be a as simple as how you would dispose them. Or, um, we have to justify how many we should grow them to answer a specific research question. Things that we already do, uh, for both animal and human research subjects there are conscious, Speaker 3: 03:42 we feel like in our present day, we've come a long way. We have a lot of science that explains things. But how much do we really know about our human brains? Speaker 2: 03:50 Yeah. Yeah. So we don't know nothing about human brains. It is amazing. And that's part of the reason why I decided to become a neuroscientist is to try to, to give a contribution on how this very complex system actually happens to create memories, uh, feelings. Uh, the fact that I tell you now think about a white elephant in your brain projects, a white elephant. How, how'd that happen? We have no idea how that happened. And so this is part of the reason why I decided to do that. And I think for the past years we have been looking at the 40 mature brain and he studying it by admire, fascinating with its complexity. But what I think we should do is, is try to recreate it from scratch. And that's why I focus on these brain organized because we start really from the raw material, from single pluripotent cells. That's exactly how the angrier does. And then we can fully control all the steps in the learn how the cells do it because they do it by themselves is always genetically encoded. So if you learn what are the major steps on brain formation, uh, we will learn how the brain can acquire such a level of complexity Speaker 3: 05:05 and you're going to be doing a presentation as part of Vanguard culture's event. And what can people expect from that? Where Speaker 2: 05:12 would we expect to see what is, uh, the new technology that's coming from the STEM cells, how far we are, what are the potential applications? We, we discuss a few of them, but there are others, for example, can I use the STEM cells to understand how the brain evolves? How the our brain is compared to our, uh, relatives that are extinct such as the Neanderthals? Can we learn something about a what maker's humans? It is a lot of focus on, uh, on disease in how, how far we are to understand and to provide the new treatments. But also there is lots of fundamental, basic science, uh, that is done to get to that level that have also important implications. For example, can we use how the brain computes, create a new form of artificial intelligence that would be more humanlike. So these are the kinds of things that are cooking in the lab. And I think people would be fascinated by hearing about them. That was Beth Amando is speaking with Alison wooo. Tree about his presentation at Vanguard cultures breakthrough the future happening this Saturday at idea one.