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Scientists just grew human brain cells inside a mouse—and that's only the start! From brain-computer hybrids to DNA-powered calculators and robots with living tissue, this video is a wild ride into the future of bio-tech. Ready to have your mind blown? Hit subscribe for more mind-bending science and drop a comment telling us your favorite part! #science #technology #biotech #computing #future
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@realidadeimpressionante
The Inspired Business Technology de RomanSenykMusic
0:01 - Introducing Human-Animal Brain Hybrids
0:50 - Human Brain Tissue in Mice
3:46 - Discovering Hybrid Brain Function
7:00 - Linking Neural Tissue to Machines
10:07 - DNA as a Computing Medium
13:41 - Emergence of Biological Machine Systems
16:30 - Ethics and Future Boundaries
20:07 - Conclusion: Defining Limits in Biocomputing
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@realidadeimpressionante
The Inspired Business Technology de RomanSenykMusic
0:01 - Introducing Human-Animal Brain Hybrids
0:50 - Human Brain Tissue in Mice
3:46 - Discovering Hybrid Brain Function
7:00 - Linking Neural Tissue to Machines
10:07 - DNA as a Computing Medium
13:41 - Emergence of Biological Machine Systems
16:30 - Ethics and Future Boundaries
20:07 - Conclusion: Defining Limits in Biocomputing
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TechTranscript
00:01Scientists have just created what can be described as a hybrid human-rat brain.
00:07Human brain tissue grew inside a mouse brain.
00:10There, it formed connections with its nervous system.
00:12And then, something happened that the researchers didn't expect.
00:16Okay, but what actually emerged inside that brain?
00:19And this might just be the first part of the story, you know?
00:22Because scientists are also connecting living human brain tissue to computers,
00:26as well as experimenting with integrating it with robots
00:29and even getting DNA to perform calculations.
00:34How far can this go?
00:35And what happens when the line between what is alive and what we created begins to blur?
00:41That is what we are going to explore, starting now.
00:50What you are about to see on your screen in a few seconds is a mouse.
00:53But inside its brain, there is something that normally should never be there.
00:59Living human brain tissue.
01:01Scientists have managed to grow human cells inside a mouse brain,
01:05receive blood flow, form connections, and start functioning
01:08right alongside the animal's nervous system.
01:12And we are not just talking about a small number of stray cells in there, alright?
01:16After three months, the human tissue accounted for about 92% of the total volume of cortical tissue
01:22present in the region and analyzed in these animals.
01:26Okay, but to be very clear, this doesn't mean that 92% of the rat's brain has become human, alright?
01:32But it means that where a large part of the animal's cortex should normally be,
01:38now tissue derived from human cells, predominated.
01:42And when the researchers started investigating what was going on inside this hybrid brain,
01:46they found something they simply didn't expect.
01:49The human cells were developing in a way they couldn't reproduce when they kept them alone in the lab, for
01:55example.
01:55And to understand how that was possible, we need to go back a little bit to the beginning of the
02:00experiment.
02:02The team worked with structures called cortical organoids.
02:05These are small three-dimensional clusters grown from human stem cells that reproduce some features of developing brain tissue.
02:12But there's a major limitation here.
02:15Inside a Petri dish, these organoids are practically isolated.
02:19They don't have a body, they don't receive sensory information, and they're also not part of a complete nervous system.
02:25So the researchers decided to do something radical.
02:27They created genetically modified mice in which a large part of the structures that would normally form their neocortex and
02:34hippocampus didn't develop.
02:36And that, of course, left room inside the skull.
02:40A few days after the animal's birth, human organoids, which had been cultured for about two months, were placed inside.
02:46And what happened next?
02:47It completely changed the experiment.
02:50The rat's body began to sustain the human tissue.
02:53Blood vessels penetrated the graft, the cells survived, and the tissue began to grow rapidly.
02:59Between the second and third month, its volume increased approximately 4.7 times, but groin was not enough.
03:05Because a piece of human tissue surviving inside a rat would already be quite impressive, wouldn't it?
03:10But the experiment would get a lot stranger if those neurons could actually do something else.
03:16Communicate with the rat's nervous system.
03:18And that was exactly what the researchers found.
03:21The human neurons began sending projections to other regions of the brain.
03:25And some of those connections reached even farther, reaching the spinal cord.
03:30And when the scientists observed that tissue while the animals were awake, they found organized neural activity.
03:36At that point, we were no longer just talking about human cells surviving inside another species.
03:41That tissue was being incorporated into a living circuit.
03:46And that allowed them to ask an even more important question.
03:49Was this new organism also changing what the rat was doing?
03:52Okay, the animals didn't become extraordinarily intelligent.
03:55They didn't turn into master splinter or anything, alright?
03:58They didn't start exhibiting human behaviors.
04:01And there's zero evidence that they developed any kind of human consciousness.
04:05But it's worth noting that they didn't go through the experiment without consequences, okay?
04:10The researchers found specific differences related to limb coordination and also the organization of spontaneous behaviors.
04:17In some analysis, the animals with human cortical tissue showed intermediate characteristics between normal mice and those that lacked the
04:25corresponding cortical structures.
04:27In other words, the human tissue was alive and active inside the animal.
04:31It was connected.
04:32It was showing activity.
04:33And yes, there were signs of functional participation in that system.
04:37Except that the real unexpected part of this experiment was still hidden inside that system.
04:42When researchers analyzed which cell types had developed there, they found extremely unusual neurons.
04:47called von Economo neurons.
04:50These are large specialized cells that are found in the human brain and also in a few other large-brained
04:56animals.
04:57Animals with complex social behavior, including great apes, elephants, and cetaceans.
05:03But there was a particularly interesting detail in all of this.
05:07Scientists couldn't properly reproduce these cells in conventional organoids kept in the lab.
05:12The genetic instructions were there.
05:14The human cells were there.
05:15But something, apparently, was still missing.
05:18Until those very same organoids were placed inside the rat's brain.
05:22That's when the von Economo neurons appeared.
05:25And that might be one of the most important discoveries of this entire experiment.
05:29Because it suggests that some characteristics of human brain development might depend not only on the information carried by the
05:36cells,
05:36but also the environment in which they grow, blood circulation, space, maturation time,
05:42and interaction with other circuits of a living organism.
05:46So the researchers took another step.
05:48They would reduce the oxygen levels for a few hours.
05:51The idea was to find out if that hybrid brain could also serve as a model for human diseases and
05:56injuries.
05:57The human brain tissue suffered damage.
05:59That was very clear to them.
06:01And the animals that depended on it began to have difficulty maintaining a steady walk and their balance.
06:06The controls didn't show the same pattern of behavior.
06:09And this is where the experiment that seems straight out of science fiction reveals its practical use.
06:15In the future, models of this kind could allow researchers to observe up close diseases and injuries affecting living human
06:22brain tissue,
06:23but integrated with blood circulation, muscles, and a complete nervous system.
06:28All this could help in the study of injuries caused by oxygen deprivation during development and of different neurological diseases,
06:34but there's an even more curious consequence hidden in this discovery, alright?
06:39Because the rat might have solved precisely one of the organoid's biggest limitations.
06:44It gave that tissue an environment, a body, circulation, inputs, connections.
06:50A whole new world it could interact with.
06:53So an almost inevitable question arises in all of this.
06:56What happens if we take the animal out of the equation again?
06:59But this time we give the living human tissue another kind of world to interact with.
07:04Not a biological body, but rather a machine.
07:14Another group of researchers tried to do exactly that.
07:17The experiment was named Brain Aware.
07:19At the center of the system is once again a cerebral organoid produced from human cell.
07:24But this time it wasn't transplanted into an animal.
07:27It was placed on an electrode array.
07:29And it was through these electrodes that the computer was able to send electrical stimuli to the tissue,
07:34as well as recording the way its neurons were responding.
07:37On one side, conventional electronics.
07:40On the other, a network of living human neurons.
07:43But simply having the two sides exchange signals was not the main goal.
07:47The researchers wanted to find out something much more interesting.
07:51Could that tissue take part in a computation?
07:54And to test this, they used something quite unexpected.
07:57Human voices.
07:58Recordings of people pronouncing sounds in Japanese
08:01were turned into electrical stimulation patterns and sent to the organoid.
08:06Each input triggered a response in the neural network.
08:09Those responses were then recorded by the computer
08:11and used to try to identify who was speaking in the beginning the performance was limited.
08:16But during the training,
08:18the responses and the functional connectivity of the organoid itself began to change.
08:22And the performance on the speech recognition task improved significantly.
08:25Besides that, in another experiment,
08:27the researchers also used the system to predict a nonlinear dynamic equation.
08:31That didn't mean there was a little brain inside a machine trying to understand Japanese.
08:36Okay?
08:36There's no evidence whatsoever that the organoid knew the meaning of those sounds.
08:40What the researchers were exploring was something much more fundamental.
08:44And maybe that's also precisely why it was so useful, plasticity.
08:47Biological neural networks don't always respond the exact same way.
08:50Even with repeated stimuli, their connections and activity patterns can change.
08:56And BrainAware leveraged that dynamic as part of a system called reservoir computing.
09:01Instead of a conventional processor performing all the necessary transformations on its own,
09:06part of them happens within the living neural network's own response.
09:09And that creates a pretty curious interaction.
09:11For decades, we tried to make machines imitate the brain.
09:15We created artificial neural networks, neuromorphic chips,
09:18algorithms directly inspired by the way our neurons function.
09:21Now, some researchers are following the opposite path.
09:25Instead of trying to build neurons using silicon,
09:28they are putting real living neurons inside the computing process.
09:31And this line of research even got a name, organoid intelligence.
09:35Yes, it is still an experimental field.
09:38An organoid is incomparably simpler than an actual human brain.
09:42It has no body, it lacks our sensory systems,
09:45and there is zero evidence that these systems have a mind or are conscious.
09:50But Brian Ware demonstrated an important idea.
09:53A machine doesn't have to be built solely with electronic components to perform computation.
09:58Part of it can indeed be biological.
10:01And this is precisely where this story takes another turn, you know?
10:04Because neurons are quite complex, as we know.
10:08They need to stay alive and depend on extremely specific conditions.
10:11But maybe it's not necessary to build something that actually resembles the brain
10:15to make biology itself compute.
10:17There is another, much simpler molecule that already performs another essential function
10:22inside virtually all of our cells.
10:24It stores information in extraordinary amounts.
10:27Yeah, it's DNA.
10:28And now scientists have managed to program DNA not just to store information,
10:33but also to perform calculations.
10:41For virtually the entire history of modern computing,
10:44performing calculations meant moving electrons around.
10:47From the earliest computers to the most advanced artificial intelligence chips,
10:51almost everything we use, relies on electronic circuits executing operations.
10:55Now, researchers from Ireland have demonstrated a completely different path,
10:59using DNA molecules to calculate.
11:02Yeah, the team from Maynooth University developed a system called
11:06the Yaz Scaffolded DNA Computer, or SDC.
11:09And look, forget any traditional image of a computer, okay?
11:13There's no monitor, there's no motherboard,
11:15and there's no conventional processor hidden inside somewhere.
11:17Where the computer is inside a tiny drop of salt water containing billions,
11:22and, in some cases, trillions of DNA molecules,
11:25the logic behind it exploits a property that life itself has been using for billions of years.
11:30The bases of DNA have specific partners.
11:33Adenine binds to thymine.
11:35Cytocine binds to guanine.
11:37And researchers simply designed sequences
11:39so that these particular molecules could fit together in specific ways.
11:43So they heated the solution and let it cool down for a little while there.
11:47As the temperature dropped, the molecules began finding their partners and binding together.
11:52But the researchers had already determined through the sequences used
11:56which combinations could actually happen.
11:58That is why, as the molecules organized themselves,
12:01the calculation was taking place,
12:03and the molecular structure produced at the end encoded the answer.
12:07The team programmed 10 different operations, including subtraction, multiplication, and division.
12:12A simple calculation like 10-3 could be solved in about 30 seconds.
12:16And beyond that, the system was able to perform 100-bit additions
12:19working with numbers that reached into the tens of millions.
12:22In that case, the calculation could take approximately 14 hours.
12:26For a conventional computer, that's absurdly slow.
12:29A modern chip would solve that instantly.
12:31So why did they do this?
12:33Because competing with a conventional processor in speed isn't the interesting part.
12:37After that initial thermal pulse,
12:39the system doesn't need to keep billions of transistors
12:41continuously consuming electricity to search for the answer.
12:44The interactions between the molecules drive the system toward the result.
12:48And even while working with billions of them at the same time,
12:51the researchers were able to perform 100-bit calculations
12:55without an external error correction mechanism.
12:57In addition, they performed up to 25 consecutive calculations using that same droplet.
13:01And that happened without any observed loss of performance.
13:05But the feature that can make this kind of computing truly different
13:08emerges when we think about size.
13:10DNA is extremely compact, biocompatible,
13:14and can exist in places where putting a conventional computer would be simply impossible.
13:19Like inside a cell, for example.
13:21In the future, molecular systems could be designed to detect specific molecules
13:25inside a living organism and execute a logical sequence.
13:28Disease detection is one of the future possibilities mentioned by the researchers,
13:32although this is still far beyond what this current experiment demonstrated, you see?
13:36And stop for a moment to analyze and realize how we got here, to this point.
13:41We started with live human brain tissue inside another animal, a rat in this case.
13:47Then we connected human neurons to electronics.
13:52But we've even removed neurons from this equation and made DNA do the math.
13:56They are different technologies, yes, but there is an inversion happening across all of them.
14:01For decades we built machines trying to reproduce characteristics of biology.
14:06Now we're figuring out how to turn parts of biology itself into machine components.
14:10Except one thing was missing, at least until now.
14:14These systems were essentially confined to a rat's brain, a lab dish or a drop of water.
14:19And what would happen if we gave biological computing back something that the first organoid had inside that mouse?
14:27A body capable of perceiving and acting in the real world, in the physical world.
14:32Except this time, that body wouldn't be a living beings. It would be. Let's see it now.
14:41That experiment I mentioned right at the very end of the previous topic has already begun, okay?
14:47The system was named BrainBrinobot.
14:49Research has connected the brain organoid to a robotic system.
14:52And the difference compared to brainware is an important one.
14:56There, the responses from the brain tissue were used in computational tasks.
15:00But with BrainBrinobot, the goal was to place it inside a closed loop of interaction with the physical world.
15:05In other words, the robot receives information from the environment.
15:08And these signals enter a system that uses the organoid as a processing layer.
15:13And the response then plays a role in determining the action performed by the machine.
15:17In the demonstration described by the researchers, the system was applied to a humanoid platform.
15:22It performed tasks like grasping objects and tracking a laser dot.
15:26Okay, I know, this needs to be kept in perspective, right?
15:29There is no evidence whatsoever that a small conscious human brain was piloting a robot.
15:34This organoid didn't decide it wanted to chase anything.
15:37And there is another very important limitation that needs to be mentioned.
15:41The work is still a preliminary study.
15:43Therefore, its results still need to undergo the formal peer review process.
15:47But as a proof of concept, the shift is pretty fascinating, isn't it?
15:51In the previously mentioned BrainAware, a living neural network received stimuli and its response was used for computing.
15:57Now, basically, that same idea is being put inside a loop.
16:01Perceive, process and act.
16:03And this right here creates a situation that didn't exist in the early experiments we saw in this episode.
16:09Biological tissue can now take part in a system that produces consequences in the physical world.
16:14Think about the exact path we've traveled to get here.
16:16At the beginning of the episode, we gave human brain cells a rat's body.
16:19Then, we put neural tissue inside a computer.
16:22We used DNA to compute.
16:24And now, researchers are experimenting with giving systems such as neural tissue, for instance, a mechanical body.
16:30And it is precisely at this point that a question stops being just interesting and starts becoming necessary.
16:38Extremely necessary.
16:39It is not about what these systems might be capable of feeling nowadays.
16:43We have no evidence that they feel anything.
16:46The question is about what happens if we keep increasing their complexity in the days ahead, down the line.
16:52And scientists have already realized that it might not be a good idea to wait for the answer to appear,
16:57just to then decide when they are going to establish the rules for all of this.
17:07In September, 2026, over 70 scientists, ethics experts, patient advocates and other participants gathered in a Stanford-led initiative.
17:17The goal wasn't to create another organoid or a thinking machine.
17:21It was, in fact, to discuss how to keep track of what we are doing with all of this.
17:26And some of the questions raised showed how this field is really entering very familiar territory.
17:32Who is responsible for an organoid made from a person's human cells?
17:37And under what circumstances could this tissue be transplanted into an animal and into another human?
17:43Would that be possible?
17:44Would it be ethical to do that?
17:46But there is an even more delicate question.
17:49Could structures like this ever develop complex properties that would require new considerations,
17:55like the ability to feel pain, for example?
17:58The key word here is, someday.
18:01To date, there is no evidence whatsoever that the brain organoids we've seen have developed consciousness,
18:08or sentience, much less that there's a little human mind trapped inside them.
18:12That possibility remains purely hypothetical, and maybe that's precisely why this discussion is happening right now.
18:19Waiting until an entirely new property emerges to then start discussing the rules.
18:25Might be too late, right?
18:26And there's a second question that's even less obvious.
18:29Whose cells are these?
18:31Many organoids start with cells donated for biomedical research.
18:35But some of those donations happened back when applications like biocomputing weren't even part of the discussion.
18:41Other researchers have already warned about the possibility of a person donating cells for medical research,
18:47and the tissue derived from them ending up, in the future, being used in biocomputers.
18:52Yeah, my friends, suddenly the boundary we started out looking for inside that mouse got a lot bigger, didn't it?
18:58And it wasn't just between human and animal, nor just between brain and machine.
19:02It's also starting to emerge now between what we are technically capable of building.
19:07Because the rat from the beginning of this episode doesn't have a human mind.
19:11At least that's what they say.
19:13Brainware hasn't shown consciousness.
19:15And the DNA computer isn't alive the way we think an organism is.
19:19And the brain on brainware isn't a human brain controlling a robot, at least for now.
19:24Confusing any of these things would make these experiments seem way more advanced than they actually are.
19:30But maybe there's no need to exaggerate, because what has actually happened already is strange enough, isn't it?
19:37We made human brain tissue grow inside another species, among other things we saw in this episode here.
19:43None of these technologies mentioned on their own created what we would call a new conscious life form.
19:49But together they showed that some boundaries that once seemed far too obvious are beginning to require much more precise
19:55definitions.
19:55And in my opinion, this is the most important part of this whole story.
20:00Because science will keep trying to find out how far it can go.
20:04The question that is starting to arise now is a different one, okay?
20:07How do we ensure that we, as human beings, can decide where the limit is before everything has already crossed
20:13that line?
20:14In your opinion, would it be necessary to cross it to realize we're doing the wrong thing?
20:18If you liked this episode, you know the drill.
20:21Leave a like and make sure you're subscribed.
20:22Remember, if you like science fiction stories, basically like the ones I just told about computing, artificial intelligence, and other
20:29things like that, you know what to do.
20:30The link to my book is down here in the description and also in the pinned comment.
20:34You can buy it both as a physical copy and as an e-book.
20:38See you in the next video.