Could brains in lab jars one day be entitled to rights?
Scientists ponder the implications of a future where 'brain surrogates' exhibit capacity for sentience
Do brains have rights?
That's a question that until now has largely been consigned to science fiction, because when scientists experiment with pieces of human brain tissue in the lab — known as brain surrogates — the surrogates are not conscious or sentient.
For now.
The better the surrogate the sharper the ethical dilemmas become — the more it starts to seem like doing research in human subjects than human tissue.- Nita Farahany, Duke University
But things are changing — neuroscience is becoming increasingly sophisticated.
So now in the journal Nature, 17 scientists, ethicists and philosophers have set out to tackle that question, and its real-world implications.
Nita Farahany is a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, and one of the co-authors of the article. She spoke with As it Happens host Carol Off from Durham, North Carolina. Here is some of their conversation.
Professor Farahany, why did you feel it was important to start this conversation about the ethics of brain research?
It became clear that there are a lot of exciting advances happening in the broader field of brain surrogates. And with significant advances on the horizon, the scientists, ethicists and philosophers all agreed now was the time to really delve into some of the ethical issues raised in that research.
And what are those ethical issues?
Most fundamentally, the better the surrogate — that is the closer it approximates the human brain — the sharper the ethical dilemmas become, because the closer it is to the human brain, the more it starts to seem like doing research in human subjects than human tissue.
Traditionally we've treated human tissue quite differently than we've treated human subjects. And so the question is really whether or not some of those protections would apply.
Has there been any experience that scientists have had when the start to suspect or wonder if the brain tissue they're working on is conscious?
No. Not now. And the likelihood of seeing any kind of sentient-like capabilities in these brain surrogates is a ways off still.
These are tiny brain organoids, on the order of a couple of million cells as compared with the 86 billion cells of the human brain — or a small piece of tissue taken out of a human brain during surgery, as opposed to an entire brain.
Instead, scientists look ahead and say, look, it may be possible to have much bigger pieces of brain tissue that are studied.
At that point you would start to wonder whether some of the sentience capabilities we have might be approximated in those surrogates.
Does it start to feel like you're working in a science fiction film?
People ask that a lot. The more you talk about brain surrogates, the more it touches on a lot of science-fiction ideas.
Sure, in some ways it seems like science fiction. But I wouldn't want people who are science-fiction fans to think that that's the world we live in right now.
These are responsible scientists engaged in incredibly important scientific research who recognize that there may be some ethical issues.
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It goes beyond ethics though, doesn't it — into law, into rights. What rights does the actual tissue have?
I think that's exactly right, no pun intended.
As we think about these issues, and think about whether or not there may be welfare interests at stake for brain surrogates in the future, what that would mean is policy and legal changes that might need to be made.
And we have also pegged definitions of death to the irreversible loss of brain function and capacity for consciousness.
If it turns out that it may be in fact reversible, then that legal concept of death would have to change as well.
So there's a lot at stake here, both ethically and legally.
Written by Kevin Ball and Julian Uzielli. Interview produced by Julian Uzielli. Q&A edited for length and clarity.