
Neuroscientists Wirelessly Control the Brain of a Scampering Lab Mouse - aaronyy
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/neuroscientists-wirelessly-control-the-brain-of-a-scampering-lab-mouse
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sethbannon
If you look more than 50 years into the past, to any civilization on earth,
there are a number of behaviors and norms that were totally acceptable to the
people of the time that modern man/woman would consider morally repugnant. Not
allowing gays to marry, not allowing people of different races to marry, not
allowing women to vote, slavery, ritual sacrifice, etc. It follows then, that
there are likely things we view as morally OK that future generations of
humans will condemn us for. It's a healthy exercise to imagine what those
things might be.

Reading about this research makes me think that this sort of animal
experimentation will certainly be one of those things.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
I dont think they'll condemn us for it, just that they'll do it a better way.

People suffer and die from things that animal research can help us study, and
I don't think that killing a dozen or a hundred or a thousand rats per
lifetime we save is too many. (A human lives about 30 times as long as a rat,
and Id say a human year is worth 30 times a rat year. A little self-centered,
but probably not genuinely that awful.)

Something like 600,000 people in the US die each year of cancer. If you figure
on average they'd get ten more years, that's about 75,000 human lifetimes a
year lost.

So Id be okay with a literal rat holocost: 75,000,000 rats a year on the altar
of science for as long as we can get useful knowledge about cancer from them.

In actuality, I expect we're killing less than 1 rat per human lifetime lost
each year -- and Im so absolutely okay with that cost to make progress against
scourges like cancer, it's legitimately hard for me to understand the other
view.

Do you _really_ believe that future humans will condemn us for killing less
than 1 rat per human lost to try and stem the loss of human potential?

Or is your position that it's just not sufficiently useful to do things about
mental disorders (which cause lifetimes of suffering and disability, instead
of immediate death)?

~~~
MrQuincle
Speciesism, that's what Peter Singer calls it (the philosopher, not the
roboticist). We tend to draw an artificial line between human and nonhuman.

The article describes how it selectively can be used in a hybrid setup. I hope
they can come up with applications that are new, rather than doing the same
experiments over and over again. I often see results and am like duh... It's
like running code, changing a few lines, and running it again to see if
anything changes.

And now an extremely rough statement. If there are so many people dying anyway
we should definitely experiment more with humans. That will make all our
experiments likely to be more humane.

Last, I hope robots won't see us as lab animals. To understand their own brain
we are likely to be their best test subject though.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
> If there are so many people dying anyway we should definitely experiment
> more with humans. That will make all our experiments likely to be more
> humane.

Im not sure I follow: are you suggesting we raise creatures that take longer,
are smarter, and are harder to study just because they're us?

That seems to be increasing the total harm just so it happens to humans rather
than rats, ignoring the humans we do it to didnt have any more choice than the
rat. I find that far _more_ speciesist than recognizong legitimate differences
in human mental powers and complexity from rats.

That being said, we _do_ experiment on humans too, including some pretty
radical things on already dying ones.

The problem comes in that if we're going to create a broken mind just to study
it, we should a) use a simple mind we can actually perform a non-confounded
experiment on and b) use the minimal mind possible to minimize suffering.

So rats rather than 3 year old humans.

~~~
MrQuincle
I'm assuming that if we would treat humans in the same way we treat rats, we
would likely raise standards.

Also rats are able to choose by the way. We just don't give them a choice.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Are lab rats treated poorly? My (limited) experience indicates that scientists
are generally as humane as they can be, and the rat lifestyle isn't any worse
than say... A pet rat. Maybe Im an outlier.

My point is that if your experiment requires a GMO organism, the organism can
never have decided to participate, since it would require choice pre-
conception.

If GMOing a rat in to a forced experiment is bad, isn't doing that to a human
much worse?

It's still worth the cost using humans, but harm reduction would suggest using
rats instead.

~~~
MrQuincle
The question is not about choice w.r.t. a GMO. It's about the underlying moral
values behind a seemingly rhetorical question "isn't doing that to a human
much worse?"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism)

Why is it so much better to force non-humans to partake in our experiments?
Just swap rats and humans in your sentences and the bias is very obvious.

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nacc
There is also the roboroach if you want to have a taste of this on your hand,
with a cockroach.
[https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach](https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach)

In the neuroscience conference they also showed a DIY optogenetic fruitfly
kit, but it's a pity the channelrhodopsin transgenic fly is not available
outside a neuroscience lab.

~~~
deelowe
Wow. That's a neat kit.

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netsec_burn
I can't help but feel sorry for the mice, I can't imagine what it would be
like to not have control of your limbs. I understand the purpose is the
opposite, however.

~~~
rgarrett88
I would not be surprised to find out the brain backwards rationalized it and
the mice from their point of view always thought they wanted to do that.

~~~
jxy
This is the real question here. Unless the mice can explain itself to us, we
really have no way to know. But I'm not so sure about the ethics of conducting
such experiments on humans.

~~~
intended
This question is answered already - we have enough studies and reports of
people who suffer from delusions, spasms etc. to have detailed information on
outliers.

Whats really going to make you lose your equlibrium is that for _normal_ human
beings, the impulse to move a limb (like a hand), preceded the conscious
instruction to move it. See the Libet Experiments, (and the can of rebuttals
and counter rebuttals that threw up)

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return0
Impressive, however nature itself is even more impressive
[http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neuroethology_of_Parasit...](http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neuroethology_of_Parasitoid_Wasps)

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dkarapetyan
I understand this is valid science but at the same time I'm extremely creeped
out. Seems to me like all these findings follow from some physics and
chemistry and the mice didn't need to be implanted with these devices. Don't
really see the point of making them go in circles either.

~~~
derrickdirge
Which findings, specifically?

Because I feel like the article makes a pretty good case for the benefits of
studying optogenetics. These three paragraphs in particular succinctly outline
that case:

 _Neuroscientists study these patterns of electricity, but they’ve been
limited by the imprecision of their tools. Much progress in biology depends on
observation, which means scientists need tools to both meddle with an
organism’s natural bodily systems and watch what happens. Typical neuroscience
techniques rely on electricity, using electrodes on the scalp or implanted
inside the brain to stimulate and record from groups of neurons. These
electrodes are relatively large and crude, though, and can’t target very
specific cells, such as the neurons in the hippocampus that encode distinct
memories._

 _This limitation bothers me. From an engineer’s point of view, the study of
living creatures can seem messy. When I’m tinkering with an integrated
circuit, I can swap out one transistor and check to see if the chip still
works. If it doesn’t, I can be sure the new transistor is responsible for the
glitch. In biological systems, it’s far harder to isolate a variable of
interest._

 _With optogenetic technology, we can turn neurons on and off as if they were
transistors in a circuit. Geneticists have various ways (which we won’t go
into here) to deposit the necessary genes into very specific clusters of
cells. With our light-up devices, we can then switch on a particular set of
neurons. The neurons react to light within milliseconds, making the result of
our tinkering fairly obvious._

~~~
dkarapetyan
Parts that you mention are part of those findings. Seems to me all this could
have been done in vitro. No mice brain cage mutilation necessary to see if a
cell with some genes reacts to a certain wavelength of light.

~~~
rgarrett88
I think it's more intended as a proof of concept to allow researchers to
target specific neurons and a live animal would help demonstrate that. If I'm
understanding correctly they would be able to target the optogentic cells to
very specific parts of the brain.

~~~
lanaius
That's not the purpose of this experiment, as the capability to target
specific neuron types has been well demonstrated in the past. It's approaching
a toolbox technique at this point much like regular electrophysiology and
electrical stimulation.

From the IEEE article (I did not read the original research paper) the goals
of this experiment are lost in the veil of journalism, as it boils down to the
following items:

1\. Implantable chronic optogenetics (fairly novel)

2\. Wireless RF power for said implant (novel context, not necessarily novel
technique)

3\. Use the optogenetics to do "something". This is the worst part of the
article and is the meat of the Neuroscience - which neuron types are targeted
(genetically), with which opsin, and histological evidence of where the opsins
are located are all important features. The article seems to take at face that
making rats pause and run in circles is interesting but scientifically
speaking if you can't say anything about why they run in circles it's not a
particularly good or useful study, as it doesn't actually give people any
information.

