Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

How complex can a circuit like this become?

Is there any form of learning, of computation?

Of course, some people have raised the issue that perhaps there is sentience or awareness, consciousness.

Are they feeling pain?

So for instance, that has been like one critique for one of the recent work that we've done.

Of course, in that case, we know

You know, the emotional component of pain is processed in different brain regions.

We don't have those in a dish.

So we know that they're not really feeling pain.

We have the pathway of pain.

But it also speaks to the fact that we need to be very careful about how we communicate this type of research.

Even just using terms that are trivializing can actually create a lot of confusion.

And the classic example in our field has been to call these preparations, these organelles or assembloids, to call them mini-brains.

Then it may seem like as a trivial joke that it can do anything, you know, any harm.

But you hear that for the first time, scientists have made mini brains in a dish, right?

And what do you think?

You think, oh, it must be a miniature human brain that they're keeping in a dish, right?

Isolated.

And of course, that's not true.

We have not made the entire nervous system.