{"id":78656,"date":"2018-05-14T18:02:22","date_gmt":"2018-05-15T01:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/human-mini-brains-growing-inside-rat-bodies-are-starting-to-integrate"},"modified":"2018-05-17T10:08:21","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T17:08:21","slug":"human-mini-brains-growing-inside-rat-bodies-are-starting-to-integrate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/human-mini-brains-growing-inside-rat-bodies-are-starting-to-integrate","title":{"rendered":"Human Mini-Brains Growing Inside Rat Bodies Are Starting to Integrate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/human-mini-brains-growing-inside-rat-bodies-are-starting-to-integrate2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Stem cell technology has advanced so much that scientists can <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/34757-lab-grown-mini-brain-organoid-evolution\">grow miniature versions of human brains<\/a> \u2014 called organoids, or mini-brains if you want to be cute about it \u2014 in the lab, but medical ethicists are concerned about recent developments in this field involving the growth of these tiny brains in <em>other animals<\/em>. Those concerns are bound to become more serious after the annual meeting of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfn.org\/annual-meeting\/neuroscience-2017\/sessions-and-events\/scientific-program\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Society for Neuroscience<\/a> starting November 11 in Washington, D.C., where two teams of scientists plan to present previously unpublished research on the unexpected interaction between human mini-brains and their rat and mouse hosts.<\/p>\n<p>In the new papers, according to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2017\/11\/06\/human-brain-organoids-ethics\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>STAT<\/em><\/a>, scientists will report that the organoids survived for extended periods of time \u2014 two months in one case \u2014 and even connected to lab animals\u2019 circulatory and nervous systems, transferring blood and nerve signals between the host animal and the implanted human cells. This is an unprecedented advancement for mini-brain research.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are entering totally new ground here,\u201d Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, told <em>STAT<\/em>. \u201cThe science is advancing so rapidly, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/topic\/ethics\">ethics<\/a> can\u2019t keep up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/38240-mini-brains-organoids-rats?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=on_site&utm_campaign=desktop_article-top\">https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/38240-mini-brains-organoids-...rticle-top<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stem cell technology has advanced so much that scientists can grow miniature versions of human brains \u2014 called organoids, or mini-brains if you want to be cute about it \u2014 in the lab, but medical ethicists are concerned about recent developments in this field involving the growth of these tiny brains in other animals. Those [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,30,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-ethics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78713,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78656\/revisions\/78713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}