Even Frankenstein would grow chills down his spine, knowing that he’s not the only monster spawned from human imagination, trial and error. A world with brains grown in bell jars would be a world of synthetic beings, roaming around like zombies and perpetually asking themselves who they are, where have they come from and where they are heading. At least the classic structures of humanity can satisfy their egos knowing that once upon a time there was this thing called Big Bang which changed everything and has made us magically appear on lands with water and vegetation and other creatures that created an evolutionary pyramid.
Well, where does the pyramid go from the Big Bang? In a bell jar, seemingly, as scientists have grown a human brain in a bell jar and this is not only the review of the latest sci-fi book imagined by a geek who never got out of his house.
This week, a team of biologists from America declared they had made a breakthrough in keeping and growing living brains in a laboratory landscape. They have successfully developed a fetus brain that was biologically five weeks old and had the size of a pencil eraser.
The deed was done by using stem cell technology and the process involved adult skin cells that were turned into stem cells. The team of experts who embarked on this daring, larger than life mission, said that the work is not finished yet, as they plan to grow the brain to that of a 12 week fetus’s brain. That particular age gives a baby the ability to move its eye muscles, squirm, close its fingers and move its toes. The new form of intelligence contains 99% of the cells that we find in our very brains, or the brain of a human fetus.
This is the most fully formed brain model ever engineered and with this type of science application, we surely don’t know what the future holds. As scientists have declared, the new “thing” has its own spinal cord already and the beginnings of an eye, as the study leader told the 205 Military Health System Research Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
When is it exactly that we have failed to be enough for ourselves? Why should we experiment with things that should basically stay in nature’s hands? We are creatures perfectly designed for life, with, certainly advanced abilities to make it evolve, but we dangerously step on the grass of evolution and squash it beneath our feet, to feed our highly intelligent egos and show ourselves that we can destroy nature, be nature, replace nature. Well, we will certainly see what nature has to say about this, if we don’t stop the dangerous play.
Image Source: pixabay.com
