Last Updated on 06/09/2024 by Arun jain
In 2022, President Joe Biden established the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H for short. The initiative aims to generate transformative innovations in health research and medicine through massive government funding.
ARPA-H recently hired Jean Hebert To research how to regenerate human brains with young lab-grown brain tissue Detailed recently in MIT’s Technology Review. Potential benefits of replacing your brain with fresh brain tissue include extending life, replacing damaged tissue after a stroke, and fighting neurodegenerative diseases.
Hebert is a former professor of genetics and neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which we assure you. There is a very real private medical school in New York City Even though it sounds like the name of a scam organization that you would only learn about when the scammer who ran it was convicted.
Essentially, it seeks to combat the aging process by replacing parts of the human body, including the brain, with better, newer, smaller ones. In his book Reversing AgingPublished in 2020, he suggested that humans could take a cue from car maintenance by completely replacing their aging organs and tissues once in a while.
Hebert focused mostly on the neocortex, the part of our brain that controls our senses, reasoning and memory. The big challenge, he says, is to replace the brain tissue without screwing up the parts that govern your personal identity and basic cognitive functions. It sure looks like we’re dealing with one Ship of Theseus The situation is that the person wants to change your mind while making sure you are still you.
Hebert’s plan to solve the issue of gradually replacing a person’s brain with a new one from a factory involves the addition of brain tissue grown in the laboratory. He has already managed some Preliminary experiments With mice that have shown some promising results. Apparently, small sections of rat brains were successfully replaced with “embryonic cell slurry”.
MIT reports that some members of the scientific community were critical of Hebert’s theories and experiments. Many people are uncertain whether the transplanted brain tissue will mesh perfectly with the aging brain—not to mention Potential ethical implications.
Hebert wants $110 million to upscale his testing to larger animals.
Post A wild, government-funded idea to regenerate human brains with lab-grown tissue appeared first Vice.
Post A wild, government-funded idea to regenerate human brains with lab-grown tissue appeared first Vice.