The protagonist of the film is the product of a baby’s brain tissue that was put inside the brain of a mother who committed suicide after giving birth by the grandfather of a mad experimenter. Such a product is used as an experimental subject to observe the learning process. The protagonist is basically allowed to develop freely, thus showing the process of taming the limbs, developing love, curiosity, knowledge of the world, and self-knowledge in a two-hour film. It also deals with the question of what determines individual self-identity: “You are both daughter and mother”.
Adult Neurogenesis
At noon the day after I saw the film, I listened to a presentation on Adult Neurogenesis.
As documented on Wiki, the field is very new, with the first case observed out of an accident in 1998.
In 2010, there was a very rough estimate. Compare the time-series quantitative data on the adult brain from the first nuclear explosion of the last century, and compare it to the atmospheric curve, and if there is a deviation, it suggests neural neogenesis.
Since the assumption of this post-doc’s work at Karolinska is that all the neural precursor cells of adolescents and adults should be the same as those of children, he is looking for similarly characterised cells by characterising neural precursor cells in the hypothalamus portion of 0-5 year old children and then looking for similarly characterised cells in adult cells.
Considering that actually putting fancy brain-like organs in immunodeficient rats is already a routine experiment, and putting human sources in mice to observe neural connectivity and chemical/electrical response the year before was just a NC, there is always a part for similar means in PhD projects at Karolinska now. Of course, I went and asked the reporter if he wanted to do put precursor cells from human kids into adult mice.
He replied, good idea, they are preparing the appropriate materials.
Algernon
In the evening, I realised, at a hindsight, that this practice of placing the infant’s neroprogenitors into the adult’s brain shell and observing the neurogenesis and connection formation of this chimeric brain, and observing the ways in which the newborn connections can control or lose control of this body. Isn’t this exactly poor things?
Except that, limited to ethics, we can only do experimental animals now, we can’t really do it with people.
Ethics is such an intriguing category. In my school’s ethics class, biomedical ethics was ultimately defined as beyond/regardless of good and evil, as formulated and adopted by the World Ethics Association, and as a common morality and four principles that all human beings (should) agree on. Crucially for biomedical experimentation, the experimenter is also part of the set of humans in the consensus, and the experimental animal is also part of the animal.
After I recommended Algernon to my neighbour who does experimental science, she said that the experimentalists also had problems, knowing that they could fail.
“Failure”? What is failure, and by what standard of failure? By an experimental endpoint of not harming an individual’s health and improving their intelligence? All AD clinical trials based on A beta fail on all clinical endpoints. To be honest I look at a lot of trials with successful clinical endpoints these days, even those that are expected to be heavy hitters because of the large market, with great concern that in reality it may be known in the next century that they are in fact failures. The simplicity and crudeness of the assumptions of some of the means is just too much of a mismatch compared to the complexity of the target system. Human biology is too shallow right now. There are likely to be clinical endpoint’s that are not considered as well. In addition to the market orientated ones such as the pregnancy pills, the lack of knowledge, such as in the growth hormone case, is a hopeless sadness. But there are cases where similar simple ideas have succeeded, such as some antibody and vaccines. What if this works? No one knows if there is no data.
Will the experiment of putting young children’s neural precursors in adult rats fail? The odds are it will fail. Would a trial of putting pancreatic islet $\beta$-cells in the eye socket fail? It’s been done for six years, and how many rats have died. In terms of clinical endpoints, first of all, the endpoints cannot cover all facets about the wholesome of being, usually it doesn’t cover all time course neighther. Preclinical animal testing, if being student projects at a biological or medical institutet, fails 90% of the time, and you know before you do it that the probability is that it will fail. If the only way to do it is to guarantee success, then nothing can be done.
And that doesn’t stop us from doing it, and often doesn’t even really stop pharmaceutical companies and hospitals from conducting human trials in practice. Because people have another kind of success in mind, probably one that at least does something and fails, and better yet comes close to understanding how this failure case failed. If you call the story of Algernon a tragedy, one cause is that the endpoint of the preclinical trials is not long enough to uncover the potential degression later. However, as the eventual protagonist in Algernon wrote: “If you ever reed this Miss Kinnian dont be sorry for me. I’m glad I got a second chanse to be smart becaus I lerned a lot of things that I never even new were in this world and I’m grateful that I saw it all for a litte bit. … Anyway I bet I’m the first dumb person in the world who ever found out somthing importent for sience. … So I guess its like I did it for all the dumb people like me. “ Hopefully the science and technology will be advanced later, which is part of the progress report.
The reality is that there are already some more palliative, clinical trials of neuromodulation based on various principles of materialised biology in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. (Like the person who took the trail of Neuralink and played the Call of Duty first time). If that’s crazy enough with every mention, animal testing is far crazier. The lives of experimental mice exist outside the boundaries of human science and ethics. So lay a bouquet of flowers in their honour.
What defines a being?
Personal identity, the body or the brain, or the neuroendocrine system of physiology. Personally, I think the brain, including the cortex and other brain regions as well as the spinal cord and the endocrine functions of the nervous system are different in the thickness of the arrows in the bidirectional regulation of other organs. And in terms of cognition, all perceptions are projected to the cortex after a great intensity of large neuronal information post-processing, the perception of the world and their own based on this then, it should be said to a large extent is who the brain is, who the person is.
But at present, humans cannot easily change their shells. If the shell is completely changed at any time, the person’s common sense of personal identity may change. The meaning of some terms might be lost or changed. Or, would such a process be hindered out of man’s possessiveness of his recognised form of existence?
On the other hand, the basis of existence below consciousness, prior to the formation of complex life, is at its most basic, metabolism, (later in complex life the digestion), with the rest of the physical body with its neuro-endocrine system functioning in its way. Could it be that the reason aliens can’t be found is that their existence is no longer corporeal just antennae clouds that have a way of grabbing energy to sustain consciousness floating in some planet with an atmosphere?
