Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

We can make parts of the nervous system.

We can put them in various combinations.

But we've never made an entire brain.

Actually, I don't know of any scientist who has as a goal to try to build the entire nervous system as an exact replica of the brain.

So I think...

The words matter a lot.

And in fact, that has been one of the things that we've done over the years.

A few years ago, I thought it would be really important to get most of the scientists in the field together and start thinking about these terms really carefully.

And so we got together, created sort of like an ad hoc consortium, and through many, many calls, one-on-one in various groups, we came up with one paper which was published in Nature a couple of years ago, which really comes as a nomenclature for the field.

We as scientists decided this are sort of like the way we classify them.

These are the terms that we all agreed should be used and not use, not, for instance, you know, project, let's say,

complex terms onto this.

We'll never say that an organoid like C's just because there's a retina, right?

We'll never say that a cortical organoid has intelligence because that's a property of an entire nervous system.

So we think that this is actually quite important, especially in communicating with the public.

And that consortium turned out to be an actually great exercise of getting everybody together and now thinking what are some of the common practices that we should all use when we report this experiment.

So we just had a few months ago another paper that came also as a perspective in science, in nature, where we also laid out the framework for the field.

I think this also speaks to the fact that we're entering a new era in science

Where I think, you know, you would say all these labs are working separately.

They're competing with each other.