Brain cells on chips, CL1, and Organoids, OH my…

So, I read about new things in science all the time; it’s part of being a curious human, I tell myself. Growing up, I was the nerdy kid reading the Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines in Barnes and Noble. I wish bookstores weren’t disappearing. Well, here’s one idea that people are actually selling!!

They call it putting neurons on chips. Actually, human neurons growing on silicon chips. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror to me. An Australian company called Cortical Labs is shipping a device called the CL1. It will set you back around 35 grand per unit. Inside: 800,000 living human neurons, grown from the skin or blood cells of real adult donors, sitting in a nutrient bath on top of a silicon chip. Part of me is like “cool” the other part “ewwww.” So, the chip part sends electrical pulses to the cells. The cells fire back. And together they learn things like a neurosciencey goopy tennis match. Joking aside, they really taught this “entity” I’ll call it, to play pong!

So where did this cool horror story start?

In the beginning, there were brain cells. Then came the electronics and the cool idea. “Let’s figure out how to make them talk to each other.” Sure, there were those who said “IMPOSSIBLE!” That was until 2013, when organoids were born. Little brain-like blobs made of stem cells, not things you shoot at in an arcade game. Right about now, some of you are saying, “arcade game?! how old are you?”

Cortical Labs’ project was called DishBrain, no points for naming originality. This was the pile of neurons that learned to play Pong in 2022. That year a paper in the journal Neuron (how quaint!) showed the cells learning to track a ball and move a paddle, adapting within minutes. Weird, yes. Hard to believe? Definitely..

So, what’s a CL1 to do? What am i!

The CL1 is a commercial product designed to keep neurons living and doing what lonely neurons do for around six months. It controls and regulates temperature, feeding/nutrients, and waste removal. What do organoids dream of? I doubt it’s electric sheep. They have a “sit on your desk version”, or a cloud version if you don’t have the stomach for the former. It’s, you guessed it, meant for brain disease research. Testing drugs for neurological conditions. So, who do you call to protect them? People for the Ethical Treatment of Brain cells?

Besides gooey brain cells thinking, what makes us uncomfortable about this?

Simple we are talking about human cells that came from a living donor. On top of that, they are learning. Does any of this feel weird or borderline bad? Sure, experts say they aren’t conscious, and so do the scientists. Okay, but it eats, it reacts, it plays Pong… Who says it’s okay to treat it like a lab rat, er, brain? They even noticed that it can hallucinate?!

Strange and questionable things aside

We now have a tool to interact with living human neural tissue in a controlled manner. Real implications for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia. Again, the DishBrain played Pong. The CL1 is in labs. What comes next is hard to predict.

Side note: we also hallucinate

You know that weird moment right before you fall asleep when you have a thought that makes absolutely no sense? Maybe you’re mentally going off about something completely random, or you put two ideas together that make zero sense. Sometimes if this happens, I’ll stop myself and be like “what the heck am I thinking about?” Aside of being the place where ultra-weird movie scripts are born, that’s your neurons misfiring, half-asleep, sending signals that don’t quite connect.

Your own brain hallucinates a little every single night. The neurons in the CL1 are doing something similar in reverse: being woken up, stimulated, asked to respond. Even outside a skull, sitting in a dish, they’re still trying to make sense of things. Poor little guys. Want to go Deeper? Here’s a book to consider Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth.