This part in particular I thought was both funny, and also a bit ominous. Though if ethical standards are upheld then obviously there's great potential for medical innovations with advances like this.
Fascinating stuff, thanks for posting!
Giorgia Quadrato, a neurobiologist at the University of Southern California who was not involved in the new study, noted that the human organoids did not make the rats more human. On learning tests, for example, they scored no better than other rats.
“They are rats, and they stay rats,” Dr. Quadrato said. “This should be reassuring from an ethical perspective.”
But that might not hold true if scientists were to put human organoids in a close relative of humans, like a monkey or a chimpanzee. “It would be a good opportunity to set guidelines to operate in the right ethical framework in the future,” she said.
Dr. Pasca said that the similarity between primates and humans might allow the organoids to grow more and take on a bigger role in the animal’s mental processes. “It’s not something that we would do, or would encourage doing,” he said.
