Human cerebral organoids and consciousness: a double-edged sword

[unspeakablehorror]

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40592-020-00116-y?error=cookies_not_supported&code=84dddb62-8052-48b3-854e-11a86fbc84a4

I advise reading the tags to decide if you want to engage with the contents below the cut or the article itself.  In the contents below, I discuss the implications of the contents of the linked article.

Okay, this...worries me.  I think there's a very real possibility that these human organoids are sentient.  While the fact that they are only a few millimeters across indicates to me that they obviously are not equivalent to a normal human brain, that fact does not preclude sentience.  

Also, I should note that I don't think being pro-choice is equivalent to being pro-experimentation on potentially sentient human tissue.  I am very much pro-choice, even in the case that the fetus has developed sentience, as that is a case where I feel there is a greater duty to look out for the interests of the also sentient human incubating that fetus.  But to me, that represents a different scenario than purposeful experimentation, and it is the different set of circumstances that informs my divergent moral decision there.  

I do not think intentionally creating sentient life for the sole purposes of experimentation is ethical.  I do not know whether these human brain organoids are sentient.  They are, from my understanding, only a few millimeters in size.  They are similar to early fetal tissue, and it is difficult to say at what point a fetus develops sentience.  But I do not share the easy comfort that some may that these rudimentary human lifeforms are either necessarily non-sentient, or that their sentience is of no moral significance. 

I also do not think we should be grafting these cells into non-human animals, as has already been done.  An excerpt from the linked article (emphasis mine):

“Organoid grafts showed progressive neuronal differentiation and maturation, gliogenesis, integration of microglia, and growth of axons to multiple regions of the host brain. In vivo two-photon imaging demonstrated functional neuronal networks and blood vessels in the grafts. Finally, in vivo extracellular recording combined with optogenetics revealed intragraft neuronal activity and suggested graft-to-host functional synaptic connectivity” (ibidem). In an earlier study, researchers “engrafted human glial progenitor cells into neonatal immunodeficient mice. Upon maturation, the recipient brains exhibited large numbers and high proportions of both human glial progenitors and astrocytes” (Han et al. 2013). The outcome was that “long-term potentiation was sharply enhanced in the human glial chimeric mice, as was their learning, as assessed by Barnes maze navigation, object-location memory, and both contextual and tone fear conditioning. Mice allografted with murine glial progenitor cells showed no enhancement of either long-term potentiation or learning” (ibidem).

These mice got smarter because they were implanted with these human brain organoids.  These are mouse-human hybrids showing some degree of more human-like cognition.  Even if the organoids by themselves are not sentient, I think it very likely that these hybrids are, and I do not condone experimentation on them.  While I am against animal experimentation to begin with, I feel that this research is not only a question of the ethics of  animal experimentation, but human experimentation as well.  

Even if we imagine that the organoids themselves are not sentient due to how limited their external stimuli are, the same cannot be said for these human-mouse chimeras.  Perhaps some people are completely  comfortable with considering these as entirely non-human.  But even if so, at what point should a human-animal hybrid be considered to have human rights?  When it can paint a masterpiece?  When it can compose a symphony?  Well, I can't do either of those things, and I should hope I'd be considered as human enough to have human rights.  I should hope that all disabled humans who may be incapable of other things that people consider uniquely human, like spoken language, would be too.

Anyway, I think this is a troubling development that needs to be more closely scrutinized from an ethical perspective.

Comments

a nearly completely irrelevant tangent

[rugessnome]

as the subject/title/[whatever that field is called] says, this is almost entirely irrelevant, and might come across as an irritating, too-literal diversion but I'm curious:

when you say you're against animal experimentation, does that include even behavioral experiments that do not harm or physically alter the animals? For instance—and I don't know if this is a real experiment—observing how a tank of fish reacts to different artwork or scenes being placed on the outside of the glass. Or an experiment trying to determine if individual mice display distinct food preferences. Or if elephants can learn to use a sort of drum.

I just... can see someone being okay with that but maybe even not with medical testing.

(anyway I'm extremely glad I am not in a position to be asked to weigh in on such experimental ethics, because I feel like I'd make the wrong decision somehow regardless. I think I can sort of see a framework within which certain people may rationalize this, but I'm also not informed enough about neuroscience to have my own thoughts on the consequences.

Typically physics experiments don't involve experimenting on living things, though whatever telescope they are trying to put on a sacred mountain in Hawaii suggests externalities that need better consideration. And there's the whole Oppenheimer type stuff... :| (i.e. nuclear weapons testing) Or the guy who accidentally got hit with a particle accelerator beam... sometimes experimenter safety needs to be accounted for!)

Re: a nearly completely irrelevant tangent

[unspeakablehorror]

It's tangential, but I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. When I say I am against animal experimentation, I mean that I am against it as an institution, not that every action toward every animal taken within that framework is something I am morally opposed to.

So for example, I may not have any objection to the particular actions you mention, however, I would still have concerns for animals mentioned in formal experiments of this kind, because I would have concerns about where they came from, what happened to their parents, what overall conditions they were being kept in, if all animals involved in the experiment were treated well, and what happens to them after the experiment is over.

I am not opposed to interaction between humans and other animals, but I think our society promotes exploitive relationships between us rather than relations fostered for mutual benefit. I also think it often does this while casting unequal and exploitive relationships as mutually beneficial. I think humans have the ability to strive to promote more mutually beneficial relationships between themselves and other animals, and I think that is something we should strive for.

Basically, I don't have any objections to the idea of observing or learning from animals in and of themselves, my concerns are only in regards to the harms caused to other animals due to the overall framework in which we perceive and interact with them.

Ethics in biology has so many complications, it's true, though like you said, other fields have their own set of ethical complications. It's just that if you drop a hundred rocks for a physics experiment, whatever other issues that may present, you don't need to ask yourself how the rocks feel about it.