
The boom in mini stomachs, brains, breasts, kidneys and more - sergeant3
http://www.nature.com/news/the-boom-in-mini-stomachs-brains-breasts-kidneys-and-more-1.18064
======
twic
I grew a heart by mistake once.

I was studying the way cells move, and to make cells that moved, we would
dissect hearts out of seven-day-old chicken embryos, shread them into chunks,
and put the bits down on a layer of matrigel in a dish full of tissue culture
medium. After several hours, the cardiac muscle cells would start to
dedifferentiate into fibroblasts (not really fibroblasts, but people call them
that) and start zooming around, at which point you can do science on them.

I painstakingly prepared one of these dishes, then forgot about it, and left
it in the incubator for a week. When i got back to it, the initial chunk of
heart muscle had completely gone, turned into fibroblasts - which had then
spread out over the dish, and turned back into cardiac muscle cells. There was
a thin sheet of muscle strung out across the width of the dish, and it had
started beating.

~~~
Immortalin
Can you grow a human one too?

~~~
twic
I'm still working on the brain!

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Techowl
A few years back, Bill Gates said that he'd be working in biology if he were
still a teenager [0]. There's a lot of exciting work happening in the field,
and if anyone finds this sort of thing particularly inspiring, I'd encourage
them to read up on bioinformatics -- there's plenty of programming work to be
done in the biosciences.

[0] [http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-
biolo...](http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/heres-to-you-biology-
hackers/)

~~~
skosuri
It's a pretty awesome time to be a biologist. Things are happening so quickly
and profoundly. In sequencing alone, imagine having 30 years of Moore's law
progress in 5 [1]; that just happened and we are still catching up to the
consequences. Then there are GWAS, CRISPR, organoids, ESCs/iPSCs, superres
microscopy, immunotherapy, etc. Also it is true that computational approaches
will play a big role [2].

[1]
[http://www.genome.gov/images/content/costpermegabase_apr2015...](http://www.genome.gov/images/content/costpermegabase_apr2015.jpg)
[2] FWIW I'm hiring staff and postdoctoral positions in bioinformatics looking
for folks with experience with genomics, machine learning, and/or CS.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'm not looking to get hired, but I am looking to do statistical
analysis/Manhattan plot for endometriosis variant identification using a
patient group, and develop a therapy using CRISPR. Would you be able to
recommend anyone I could connect with?

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smithkl42
Impressive, certainly. But I'm not quite comfortable with it. Growing a human
brain seems uncommonly close to creating a crippled human being,
intentionally. I don't know where the line is, but it doesn't seem good to me
for society to be walking this close to it.

~~~
malandrew
Without senses (sound, touch, taste, sight, smell), I would imagine that the
human brain would create it's own little world. It's not like you're depriving
it of senses it once had. It's not going to have knowledge of what being
crippled is. It won't be aware that any of those 5 senses exist.

It's almost as if a human missing most of their senses spent their entire life
in a float tank. I don't think it would be humane or inhumane, merely
different. Without tons of advances we wouldn't be able to relate to it, or it
to us. It wouldn't even be aware we existed.

In a way, its possible that the first intelligent alien life we make contact
with will be one we create. As a specie, we've spend an inordinate amount of
time and effort trying to make contact with intelligent life that might exist
beyond our planet. Learning to make contact with artificial brains that we can
hook up to different senses (artificial and mechanical or artificial and
biological) is going to be awesome.

It's even possible that the brain in it's own isolation from us even does
something humans do naturally; it tries to explain and understand its world
and may even form the notion of a god or creator that brought it into
existence. Hopefully one day it will get to meet its creator that brought it
into existence. It likely won't damn us or condemn us because it won't know
any better that it was crippled, just as the religious among us don't damn
their gods for not bestowing us with talents and abilities like omniscience
and omnipotency.

~~~
flipp
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair)

~~~
malandrew

        "With the pit of despair, he placed monkeys between three 
        months and three years old in the chamber alone, after 
        they had bonded with their mothers, for up to ten weeks"
    

"after they had bonded with their mothers"? That's pretty cruel and totally an
apples to oranges comparison. That researcher relied on the curse of knowledge
and self aware to deprive the monkeys of a pleasurable stimulus.

~~~
Houshalter
Where do you get the idea that the monkeys would be even better if they never
got to see their mothers at all? You are saying that suffering is ok as long
as you aren't aware that not-suffering is even possible.

Somewhat reminds me of Genie
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_\(feral_child\))
or Danielle
[http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/](http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2008/reports/danielle/)

~~~
malandrew

        To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the 
        rhesus infants from wire and wood.[10] Each infant became attached to its particular 
        mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next 
        chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth 
        covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a clothed mother 
        and a wired mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a 
        bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food. In the other situation, the 
        cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[10]
    
        Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the 
        cloth mother.[10] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the 
        monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the 
        mother/infant relationship than milk and that this "contact comfort" was essential 
        to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was 
        this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby's assertions on the 
        importance of love and mother/child interaction.
    

Another experiment by Harry Harlow. The interesting things to observe here is
that the money felt attachment to something that provided it with contact
comfort. The brain in question wouldn't even know what "contact" is because it
lacks a sense of touch. With that in mind (no pun intended), what we're left
to speculate is where that complex mass of neurons will venture. Will it
"hallucinate and invent" something that provides the equivalent of a mother
figure?

Alternatively, (and I think this is more probably), it's possible that the
brains we invent for a long time are merely equivalent to evolutionary stages
of brain development from millions of years in the past. That begs the
question, would the precursors of the modern human brain be considered to be
an inhumane condition to the brain we have today? It clearly had a lesser
capacity in all sorts of ways. The ancient human brain cannot comprehend, yet
alone fathom what the modern human brain is capable of. By the time we grow
these brains to the neuronal mass capable of human levels of thought, we will
probably lack the ability and knowledge still on how to make it think like us
because the technology for growing it bigger is going to far outstrip our
capacity to coax it to grow a certain way (assuming we even know what that way
we should grow it to achieve the consciousness of the modern human).

------
fche
For a moment, I thought we were talking about the videos.

~~~
bgilroy26
We are, this is where the demand for embryonic tissue comes from.

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oxide
this is jaw-droppingly awesome. In hindsight it seems almost obvious that
these particular cells would form into these organoids. I suppose that's part
of the beauty of science in general.

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dekhn
I feel like this was pretty obvious given that teratomas appear spontaneously.
Once you appreciate that ESCs contain enough potentiality to form organs, the
research kind of unfolds itself.

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mathgenius
This reminds me of deep-dreaming: here stem cells, give me some kidneyness, go
for it. (And it's just as creepy as deep-dreaming.)

