Scientists grow brain in petri dish

The 1 August 2006 article "It's Alive (ish)" on Wired.com [swiped from Rebecca's pocket] seems to suggest that scientists have succeeded in growing a mini-brain in a petri dish. They've hooked it up to some robots, so now the robots can actually think for themselves! The drawback is...they've got Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology figured they could learn more from neuron clumps that acted more like real brains, so they've developed "neurally controlled animats" -- a few thousand rat neurons grown atop a grid of electrodes and connected to a robot body or computer-simulated virtual environment.

The scientists rely on these models because no technology exists to watch live human brain cells in real-time action.

Researchers have found that lab-grown neuron cultures tend to fire in bizarrely synchronized, dishwide waves, eerily echoing the neural patterns seen during Alzheimer's disease.

"It's possible that this is a state of arrested development," Potter said, "or that the networks are asleep because they're missing the parts (humans) use to wake up. It's (also) possible that the networks are in some sort of epileptic state."

The repeated firing may have wiped the animats' memories, Potter said. His group has since learned to reduce the bursts with electric stimuli, which acts as a massage to ease the dish-brain's stress.

While he's quick to disavow any comparisons to Dr. Frankenstein, Potter admits the clumps have a certain amount of awareness.

"Since our cultured networks are so interconnected, they have some sense of what is going in themselves," he said. "We can also feed their activity back to them, to mediate their 'sense of self.'