Brain Balls

Summary

Radiolab: "Brain Balls"

Date: January 9, 2026
Hosts: Lulu Miller & Latif Nasser
Guests: Dr. Madeline Lancaster, Dr. Howard Fine, Carl Zimmer, Dr. In Soo Hyun, Brett Kagan

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Overview

In "Brain Balls," Radiolab explores the mind-bending world of brain organoids—tiny, self-organizing clumps of brain cells cultivated in labs. The hosts journey from a serendipitous discovery in Vienna to boundary-pushing biomedical labs in the US and Australia, examining how these “brain balls” are reshaping our understanding of development, medicine, technology, and what it means to be alive (and conscious).

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Accidental Birth of Brain Organoids (00:40 - 12:06)

• Madeline Lancaster’s Discovery:

  • In 2010, Dr. Madeline Lancaster, a postdoc in Vienna, accidentally created the first cerebral organoids—clumps of neural stem cells that spontaneously began to organize into brain-like structures.
  • Quote:

    "The cells weren’t dead. They were alive and healthy and plumped into three or four blobs." — Madeline Lancaster (03:16)

• Initial Reaction & Reproducibility:

  • Early experiments with mouse and human stem cells showed spontaneous formation of structures reminiscent of early brain development, even forming parts resembling eyes (10:11).
  • Initially met with skepticism, her findings were eventually published and recognized as a stunning breakthrough.

• Implications:

  • These organoids allowed scientists, for the first time, to observe early human brain development outside the womb.
  • Quote:

    "Literally the first time anyone in human history had ever watched the early brain develop right from the beginning like this." — Latif Nasser (11:04)

2. Organoids as Windows into Disease (12:06 - 15:12)

• Studying Disorders Directly:

  • Researchers have used organoids to model and observe neurological disorders with developmental origins—like microcephaly or Timothy syndrome—by recreating them in 3D mini-brain models.
  • Example: At Stanford, Sergio Pasca used organoids with a Timothy syndrome mutation to uncover failures in neuron development and test potential drugs (13:12 - 14:06).

• Transformative Impact:

  • Quote:

    "If you were studying human brain development, it was like someone just invented the microscope." — Latif Nasser (12:10)

  • The field has exploded; thousands of labs now use neural organoids.

3. Personalized Medicine: Organoids in Cancer Research (17:24 - 22:08)

• Lab Visit – Brain Tumor Organoids:

  • Producer Mona Mazgowkur visits Dr. Howard Fine at Weill Cornell, where patient-derived brain organoids are paired with glioblastoma cells to create personalized cancer models.
  • This approach allows rapid and tailored testing of treatments.
  • Quote:

    "We can test hundreds or thousands of drugs or combination of drugs that might be most effective." — Dr. Howard Fine (20:23)

• Advantages Over Mouse Models:

  • Organ-specific organoids are providing far better predictions than animal models for drug effectiveness, which is crucial given the high failure rates of neurological drug trials.

4. The Rise of Organoid “Assembloids” (22:08 - 25:05)

• Building Complex Circuits:

  • Scientists are now connecting organoids from different organs (assembling “assembloids”) to study complex biological processes—e.g., the pathway of pain from sensory neuron to brain cortex (23:13 - 24:29).
  • Quote:

    "It's like Legos with the human body." — Lulu Miller (23:55)

• New Discoveries Using Assembloids:

  • By connecting and stimulating them (e.g., with capsaicin, the molecule from chili peppers), researchers can trace and manipulate signal propagation and even search for new ways to halt pain (24:57).

5. Are Brain Balls (Organoids) Conscious? (25:05 - 29:59)

• Are They Feeling Pain or Perceiving Input?

  • Despite electrical activity and signal propagation, the consensus is that current organoids do not possess awareness or the architecture for consciousness. Their complexity is far below a human brain (26:26: 2 million cells vs. 80B neurons in a brain).
  • Quote:

    "I would say that it’s closer still for the time being, to the neuron end of the slider." — Carl Zimmer (26:15)

• Implanting Human Organoids in Rats:

  • Some scientists have transplanted human brain organoids into rat brains, where they connect with rat neurons and blood vessels.
  • When the rat’s whiskers are tickled, signals show up in the human organoid—though the rats' behavior is unchanged (27:05 - 28:34).
  • Quote:

    "The human part of the brain lights up." — Latif Nasser (28:31)

6. The Nature of "Learning" in Dishes: Brains Play Pong (32:12 - 35:13)

• Organoids and AI:
  • Brett Kagan (Cortical Labs) wired flat sheets of neurons to computers that learned to play Pong through feedback (33:03).
  • Debate arises: is it real learning? Madeline Lancaster and others argue interpretation is tricky due to algorithmic mediation.
  • Kagan’s lab is pushing the concept of biocomputing, producing the CL1: a “brain chip” with 800,000 neurons.

7. Future Shock: Brain Organoids and Ethics (36:10 - 42:43)

• Potential & Risks of Biocomputing:

  • Biocomputers using brain organoids could solve massive energy and learning efficiency problems in current AI and data centers (36:10 - 37:08).
  • Hosts debate the moral risks—what if organoids connected to computers became conscious?

• Consciousness Checklist:

  • Self-awareness, memory, continuity of experience are lacking, says ethicist Dr. In Soo Hyun (38:03).
  • However, complexity is increasing—raising “what if?” questions.

• Ethical Tensions:

  • Lulu proposes a research moratorium to investigate organoid consciousness before pushing further, highlighting the paradox between medical benefits and philosophical caution (39:24 - 40:23).
  • Quote:

    "If we have a tool that we don't use...but we decide, no, we’re going to put the value of organoids higher than [human] people, that would be unethical." — Madeline Lancaster (40:30)

• New Category of Life:

  • The episode ends pondering whether brain balls are creating a new, hard-to-categorize form of life.
  • Quote:

    "We almost don't even have the words for it... I think it's kind of a new thing." — Madeline Lancaster (42:39)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• 03:16 – Madeline Lancaster: “The cells weren’t dead. They were alive and healthy and plumped into three or four blobs.”
• 10:11 – Madeline Lancaster: “And that was just—I looked at that, I was like, that’s a developing eye.”
• 12:10 – Latif Nasser: “If you were studying human brain development, it was like someone just invented the microscope.”
• 20:23 – Dr. Howard Fine: “We can test hundreds or thousands of drugs or combination of drugs that might be most effective.”
• 23:55 – Lulu Miller: “It’s like Legos with the human body.”
• 26:15 – Carl Zimmer: “It’s closer still for the time being, to the neuron end of the slider.”
• 28:31 – Latif Nasser: “The human part of the brain lights up.”
• 35:13 – Latif Nasser: “[CL1 is] effectively a biocomputer... you can use it to do computer stuff with.”
• 40:30 – Madeline Lancaster: “If we have a tool that we don’t use...but we decide, no, we’re going to put the value of organoids higher than those people, that would be unethical.”
• 42:39 – Madeline Lancaster: “I think it’s kind of a new thing.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:40 – Dr. Madeline Lancaster introduces her accidental discovery.
• 10:11 – Discovery of a developing “eye” in a brain ball.
• 12:06 – Organoids revolutionize the study of early brain development and disease.
• 17:24 – Lab visit: Brain tumor organoids for personalized therapy.
• 22:08 – Other varieties and “assembloids”: assembling organs to mimic complex systems.
• 25:05 – Assembloids and the study of pain signals.
• 27:05 – Human brain organoids implanted into rats.
• 32:12 – Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong.
• 35:13 – The first “bio-computer” with living neurons.
• 38:03 – Debate over organoid consciousness and ethical guidelines.
• 42:39 – Closing reflections: New forms of life.

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Summary Tone & Style

The episode tone is playful, curious, and occasionally uneasy, balanced between scientific awe and ethical reflection. The dialogue naturally blends jaw-dropping scientific advances with existential questions, echoing Radiolab’s trademark style.

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For Listeners Short on Time

If you want to understand how accidental lab discoveries can spawn new scientific fields, why tiny clumps of human cells are upending neurology and computer science, how they might change medicine forever—and why they make us question what counts as life or consciousness—this episode is a can't-miss. For the full ethical debate and future shock, pay close attention from 36:10 onward.

Transcript

[Latif Nasser]

Radiolab is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Wait, you're listening.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Okay.

[Lulu Miller]

All right.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay. All right.

[Lulu Miller]

You're listening to Radiolab Lab.

[Latif Nasser]

Radio lab from wnyc. Okay, Lulu.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

We're gonna start Today back in 2010 in a lab in Vienna.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, jumping right in.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, just picture sort of a lab with microscopes, computers, experiments. And off in one corner.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Hello.

[Latif Nasser]

Hi. How's it going? Wearing glasses and a white lab coat is this scientist named Dr. Madeline Lancaster.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Call me Madeline. Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

Madeline has just finished her PhD and moved to Austria. Just joined the lab to start her postdoc research.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I was still sort of making friends.

[Latif Nasser]

Still trying to make a good impression.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Getting to know people, you know, and.

[Latif Nasser]

One of the first things her boss asked her to do was something called a screen, just basically looking for specific genes in mouse neural stem cells.

[Lulu Miller]

So that's like baby brain cells of mice.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. Now, she hadn't done exactly this kind.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Of gene screen before, and that's probably why I didn't really. You know, I was kind of naive about it all.

[Latif Nasser]

But. So, anyway, she got to work.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Put this enzyme on, it just cuts.

[Latif Nasser]

Preparing the baby mouse cells.

[Madeline Lancaster]

The cells all become loose and apart from each other.

[Latif Nasser]

That part she'd actually done before. So, you know, easy enough.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

But then something she hadn't done before, she needed to get those cells to stick flat to the glass bottom of her dish so that she could do that screen. And to do that, she needed to use special organic proteins as a glue.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And I hadn't. They hadn't come in yet. I'd ordered them, but they hadn't come in yet.

[Latif Nasser]

And instead of just, you know, waiting for them to arrive, I don't know.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I was so anxious to do the.

[Latif Nasser]

Experiment, she decided to improvise.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And so I just kind of, like.

[Latif Nasser]

Rummaged through the freezer, found a random tube of glue, like proteins, I don't know how old.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And anyway, and I used those, squirted.

[Latif Nasser]

It on the dishes, pipetted in the cells, popped them in the incubator, and went home for the night. Next morning, came in, took a look in her petri dishes, hoping to see a nice, clean, clear layer of cells.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Like, flat on the dish.

[Latif Nasser]

But instead, everything in there was really cloudy. Hmm.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Shouldn't Be cloudy.

[Latif Nasser]

Cloudy means those cells are floating freely around in there, which means that those tubes of protein glue she used, you.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Know, were no good and the cells hadn't stuck.

[Latif Nasser]

And if the cells aren't stuck in the protein, that means they're probably dead.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Yeah, all the cells are dead. I'll just throw it away. And I don't know why I did.

[Latif Nasser]

This, but right before she tossed it, she thought, you know, but I'll check it. I'll just take a peek. Why not? So she slides these cloudy dishes under the microscope, peers into the eyepiece, and. And in the circle of light, she.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Sees these weird blobs.

[Latif Nasser]

The cells weren't dead. They were alive and healthy and plumped into three or four blobs. Yeah. Can you. As vividly as you can describe them.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I mean, they're like a sort of beige color, like an off white.

[Latif Nasser]

Tiny, about the size of a grain of sand.

[Madeline Lancaster]

These floating balls of cells.

[Latif Nasser]

And she's like, huh, weird. So she zeros in on one of these blobs, turns the dial on the microscope to zoom in until she's looking basically inside the blob. And that's when she sees a tube.

[Lulu Miller]

A tube?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. So she's, like, looking down into, like, one end of the tube, so it.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Looks almost like a donut shape.

[Latif Nasser]

Had you ever seen anything like that before? No. No, huh? Yeah. I mean, as far as she knew, if the cells weren't in that protein stuff, stuck, you know, flat to the bottom, they should sort of die and fall apart and make a big random mess. But these ones seem to be coming together to make this shape. So she gets up from the microscope.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And starts sort of going around the lab a little bit subtly at first, kind of just like, hey, has anybody ever, like, seen cells do funny things, you know, like, clump up together?

[Latif Nasser]

And everybody was just sort of like, oh, well, they're supposed to be laying flat. If they're not laying FL you screwed it up. Like, they just weren't that interested.

[Madeline Lancaster]

No. So I just kind of like, put it in formaldehyde, put it away in the fridge for a little while, and.

[Latif Nasser]

Was like, okay, let's try this gene screen again. But this time, no floaty clumps. Gonna get those cells to stick flat on the bottom. And eventually she decides to try something new.

[Madeline Lancaster]

This thing that I had read about called Matrigel.

[Latif Nasser]

Basically cellular crazy glue. Like, she's not taking any chances.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I'm just gonna put a whole bunch in my dish.

[Latif Nasser]

So she squirts a lot of it on There.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

She puts her cells on top and again pops them in the incubator, crosses her fingers and goes home for the night. She comes back in the morning.

[Madeline Lancaster]

You know, same thing. You go to the incubator, you take it out of the incubator, you look at it. And I was like, okay, this is weird once again. There's a bunch of stuff floating in there, huh? I was like, okay, well, the matrigel didn't work like it was supposed to.

[Latif Nasser]

Again, it seemed like the cells had started clumping together.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And that's when I then took them, put them on the tissue culture microscope, looked down the eyepiece, and again there they were. Funny shaped balls.

[Latif Nasser]

These ones were also beige, ish off.

[Madeline Lancaster]

White kind of color, but they were bigger and they sort of have like bulges coming off of them.

[Latif Nasser]

And this time when she looked inside, she saw full on architecture. There was a tube, but also a.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Little circle sort of oblong shaped thing.

[Latif Nasser]

And a fat layer of tightly packed.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Cells all lined up around a space in the middle. They were making structures. They were making things kind of like.

[Latif Nasser]

What cells do as an embryo is developing, which to Madeline, didn't make any sense.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Everybody had always taught me that cells need things coming from other tissues in the body, you know, of the embryo that are necessary for building that embryo. And here was a situation where nothing was telling them what to do because they'd been completely taken out of the embryo. And they were like forming structures with no instructions.

[Latif Nasser]

She's like, oh, my God. Like, this is like there are things developing here, but toward what? Well, to Madeline, it kinda looked like.

[Madeline Lancaster]

They were building a brain.

[Latif Nasser]

So these are neural stem cells, which inside a developing mouse, starts out as.

[Madeline Lancaster]

A sheet of cells, and then they fold up and close and form a tube. And then the neural tube elongates and that becomes the spinal cord. One end of it balloons out and that becomes the brain.

[Latif Nasser]

And that's what it looked like the cells in Madeline's dish were doing. It seemed like these cells on their own were starting to try to make themselves into a mouse brain.

[Madeline Lancaster]

At the time, yeah, at the time I was. I was just kind of confused.

[Latif Nasser]

So she showed some other people around the lab what she'd seen.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I showed some of these structures, tubes.

[Latif Nasser]

The circles, the lines.

[Madeline Lancaster]

But several people in the lab were just kind of. I think they were just totally bored.

[Latif Nasser]

They were like, I don't know. Sometimes things just grow weird. You probably just did the gel wrong. And the director of the lab, her boss, was like, I thought you were gonna Do a screen, you know, make a flat dish of cells to screen for genes.

[Madeline Lancaster]

What are you doing? And I was like, don't worry. I'm working on it.

[Latif Nasser]

And so over the next few months, Madeline focused on getting a nice flat layer of mouse neural stem cells on the bottom of her petri dishes so she could do those screens.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And so that was like, mostly what I. With people in the lab.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Madeline Lancaster]

But at the same time, off by.

[Latif Nasser]

Herself in her little corner when no one was paying attention, I was always.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Still playing around with matrigel, growing these.

[Latif Nasser]

Weird balls of cells, tweaking the recipe.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Trying to make sure I could get it to happen reproducibly.

[Latif Nasser]

And then one day, she gets her hands on some human stem cells, Cells.

[Madeline Lancaster]

That come from skin or blood that you can reprogram to an embryonic state.

[Latif Nasser]

Where do you get those from?

[Madeline Lancaster]

I think these were actually made from discarded human foreskin.

[Latif Nasser]

Wow. So specific.

[Brett Kagan]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

What a detail. All right. Thank you for that.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Because it's just bit of tissue that's thrown away.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, right, of course, of course. Literally thrown away. All right. Okay. So. Wow.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Yeah. So anyway, so then what's.

[Latif Nasser]

So she got these human stem cells, she put them in the matrigel, swirled them around in this nutrient rich fluid so they could kind of eat. And she would watch as these formerly foreskin cells started forming into clumpy parts of a human brain.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, my God.

[Latif Nasser]

And then she kept tweaking when and how much of the matrigel she would add. And she would just watch these blob shapes, over time, get bigger.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I mean, they can get as big as, like, a pencil eraser.

[Latif Nasser]

Side note, at the time, she was pregnant.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Madeline Lancaster]

My oldest. I was pregnant with her.

[Latif Nasser]

So she said she had this extra maternal instinct, and she was, like, just really nurturing these little brain balls.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

And then one day, a couple months after, she's been tweaking her ball recipe. And I looked under the microscope inside.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

On this beige lump, she could see a perfect ring of black pigment.

[Madeline Lancaster]

And that was just. I looked at that, I was like, that's a developing eye.

[Lulu Miller]

Shut up.

[Latif Nasser]

And it was growing on a developing human brain.

[Lulu Miller]

You're li.

[Latif Nasser]

No.

[Lulu Miller]

What?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. No. You what?

[Madeline Lancaster]

And then.

[Latif Nasser]

Then that was then when she went to her weekly lab meeting, I presented this data.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I showed this picture of this beginning of an eye. And I remember hearing audible gasps.

[Latif Nasser]

And then she showed them pictures of the cells forming tubes and lobes and ventric.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Like an actual brain.

[Latif Nasser]

Everybody in the lab started to get it. They were like, hey, Wait a second. It's like you have a version of an early human brain in this dish and you can actually watch the earliest stages of this process of development that.

[Madeline Lancaster]

We know almost nothing about.

[Lulu Miller]

Is that true though? Do we not know anything about early human brain development? I just think you get all these.

[Latif Nasser]

Little, like when you're pregnant, you get a scan here, a scan there. Maybe we know something from animal models, but this was literally the first time anyone in human history had ever watched the early brain develop right from the beginning like this.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

Which is especially important when something in the brain has gone wrong.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Now we can actually watch this process instead of just looking at the end. When the person is already severely suffering, we can try to understand how it got there.

[Latif Nasser]

So Madeline and her boss, Jurgen Knoblich, who's on board with the whole project now in 2013, they team up with a bunch of other researchers and publish a paper in the journal Nature. In that paper, they describe how this disorder, microcephaly, develops in a fetal brain. And they were like, oh, and to see all of this, we use these tiny 3D brain balls which we have decided to call cerebral organoids.

[Madeline Lancaster]

That's when like, everything changed.

[Latif Nasser]

If you were studying human brain development, it was like someone just invented the microscope. Yes.

[Carl Zimmer]

You can see things that were invisible before.

[Latif Nasser]

So this is Carl Zimmer, science journalist, New York Times columnist, book writer.

[Lulu Miller]

Ah, you got Zimmer.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. As soon as I heard about this stuff, of course, he's my first phone call and he was all over it.

[Carl Zimmer]

Sort of like humanoid organoid, very sci fi.

[Latif Nasser]

And the first thing that he pointed out is that there are so many.

[Carl Zimmer]

Neurological disorders where the key moments are during development.

[Latif Nasser]

It's like the key plot points are happening when we can't watch the movie.

[Carl Zimmer]

Right. Totally off limits.

[Latif Nasser]

But 2013, Madeline and Jurgen published their paper and boom.

[Carl Zimmer]

We could watch human progenitor brain cells give rise to parts of the brain.

[Latif Nasser]

But what would you do with that? Like, what would you see?

[Carl Zimmer]

So one example is a. There's a scientist at Stanford named Sergio Pasca, and he studied a very rare disease called Timothy's syndrome. It's caused by a mutation that produces.

[Latif Nasser]

Autistic behavior as well as a bunch of other things like seizures. And he basically created, created an organoid with that mutation so that he could see how a brain with Timothy syndrome develops. Like from the beginning.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah. Now you can actually see what Timothy syndrome is about.

[Latif Nasser]

So. And what did he see?

[Carl Zimmer]

So there are certain kinds of cells called interneurons, and they make very Important connections between different parts of the brain. And with kids with Timothy Syndrome, they just don't. They just fail to get where they need to go.

[Latif Nasser]

And now that he knew what was.

[Carl Zimmer]

Going wrong, he started testing out some drugs to see if he could fix that.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

And he and his colleagues actually ended up finding a small drug that actually did help these neurons to find their way in an organoid.

[Latif Nasser]

So he cured it in an organoid. Right. Huh.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they are on track to actually start clinical trials with that drug next year.

[Latif Nasser]

Wow.

[Lulu Miller]

And you could imagine that's one disorder.

[Latif Nasser]

That's right.

[Carl Zimmer]

A lot of other conditions, epilepsy, schizophrenia, autism.

[Latif Nasser]

Any of these brain conditions that have an issue starting in development or where we might even suspect they might start that early, but aren't sure yet. Now you can see it.

[Carl Zimmer]

A lot of people in the field said, whoa, I gotta try this.

[Madeline Lancaster]

This whole field of neural organoids has just totally exploded. I think there's thousands of labs actually using these tools now.

[Carl Zimmer]

The study of the brain is. It's fundamentally different. Now.

[Latif Nasser]

That's what we are doing on Radiolab today. We are just Lulu. We're gonna jump into the ball pit of brain balls, okay. In which there are tons of new opportunities, but also confounding questions.

[Lulu Miller]

Are there thoughts in there? Is there thinking in there? How brainy are these balls?

[Latif Nasser]

We are gonna get there after.

[Brett Kagan]

Foreign.

[Lulu Miller]

Hi, I'm Lulu Miller, and this episode is sponsored by Better Help. Well, happy New Year out there. You know what this time of year means. You might be seeing a lot of people making resolutions about how they are going to transform themselves. They are going to have the perfect routine, the perfect discipline, and a wicked strong body. But what if we resolve to just be more okay with who we are? Life's short, and the you inside you is the only companion you are guaranteed to have for the whole ride. So why not love on that little you inside you? Work on how to give it some breathing room, some care, whatever the you inside you needs help with. I can say that therapy has absolutely helped me come to more peace with me. But finding an affordable, accessible therapist can be hard. BetterHelp is a great place to start. You fill out a short questionnaire and they help match you to someone they think you'll like. BetterHelp says they typically get it right the first time, but if it's not a good fit, switching is very fast and easy. If you want to try it out, you can sign up right now and get 10% [e-mail] Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Jane Lindholm]

Kids, you have a lot of questions.

[Latif Nasser]

Is a crocodile a dinosaur? Why do people vote? How does your food turn into your poop?

[Madeline Lancaster]

But why?

[Jane Lindholm]

A podcast for curious kids has answers. I'm Jane Lindholm. Join me as we dig deep into everything from science to history, nature, emotions, and sometimes even the weird.

[Latif Nasser]

Why are jellyfishes made of jelly or olive? Are they be jelly find.

[Jane Lindholm]

But why? Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

All right, here we are. I'm in the 72nd street subway station, and I am walking to go see a fridge full of brains.

[Latif Nasser]

Hey, I'm Latin of Nasser.

[Lulu Miller]

I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

More specifically, a fridge full of brain organoids.

[Latif Nasser]

Just before the break, we learned from Madeline that now thousands of labs around the world are growing these brain organoids. And it turns out that one of them happens to be just up the street from our studio in New York City.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Only when you're recording are you truly conscious of, like, how much you breathe.

[Latif Nasser]

So we sent our producer, Mona Mazgowkur.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Laboratory caution hazardous materials to check them out. Where are we entering?

[Dr. Howard Fine]

So we're entering. So we have special rooms called cell culture rooms, where we grow.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Oops.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

We grow the organoids.

[Latif Nasser]

This is Dr. Howard Fine.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

I'm a medical and neuro oncologist.

[Latif Nasser]

And this is his lab at the Weill Cornell Medical center, where he studies brain cancer, a type of brain tumor.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

Known as a glioblastoma, a very bad kind, probably now the most lethal of all human cancers. The average survival of about 15 or 16 months.

[Latif Nasser]

And Dr. Fine says around 15 years ago or so, he hit a wall in his research.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

Disease, we've probably made the least amount of progress with.

[Latif Nasser]

When I was a, he'd been studying glioblastoma, mostly, of course, in mice. Right. And he admits, he actually calls this at the time, it was the dirty little secret of oncology that for all this research, they were basically getting nowhere. Whoa. But then, you know, he came across Madeline's work on organoids, and it was Lancaster's paper.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

I read in Nature, and it's like. Like, literally not many times. And then, you know, my 37 career, did I truly have a light bulb moment? And I. I read that paper and said, this is what we're looking for. And even though.

[Latif Nasser]

And that's when he pivoted away from mice and started making brain organoids.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Can we see them?

[Lulu Miller]

We're gonna take a look.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Okay. So he's opening the incubator, and he's pulling out.

[Latif Nasser]

These are the stem cells. They looked just like Madeline described.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

They're kind of like a beige color. They look like a kidney bean or like a nerd candy.

[Latif Nasser]

Little beige balls floating in liquid.

[Carl Zimmer]

And it is surrounded by a matrix.

[Latif Nasser]

And under the microscope, I see, like.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

A dark shape, and then I see these little bubbles off the side, Almost like little popcorny shapes.

[Latif Nasser]

You can see structure.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Dr. Vine, these are from specific patients, like your patients.

[Latif Nasser]

Yes. But the difference between these organoids and Madeline's organoids was that these ones had cancer.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

So the idea is we're going to make a mini brain from an individual patient.

[Latif Nasser]

And then.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Oh, these are the glioma cells.

[Latif Nasser]

Wow. They take cells from that patient's brain tumor.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

Almost just looks like sugar that hasn't dissolved in tea.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

And then we retro engineer the patient's own glioma stem cells into the mini brain.

[Latif Nasser]

Basically, they can put a version of your brain tumor on your version of your brain, on a version of your brain. And they can basically make a bunch of those.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

We can test hundreds or thousands of.

[Latif Nasser]

Drugs and then try a bunch of medicines on them to look for the.

[Dr. Howard Fine]

Drugs or combination of drugs that might be most effective.

[Mona Mazgowkur]

So you're saying that you can try every chemotherapy that's out there and decide which one?

[Dr. Howard Fine]

Everything only limited by resources, as you could imagine. These are.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, my God. That is. That is beautiful. I mean, that. Just thinking about a way of. Like a kind of bespoke medical future exploration.

[Latif Nasser]

Right. Way better than just using mice.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, my gosh.

[Latif Nasser]

Partly because it also could help us leapfrog. One of the biggest reasons, on average, 90% of clinical trials for neurological drugs fail. And for brain cancer, by the way, that number's even higher. 95%.

[Madeline Lancaster]

They're failing because they're not predicting whether the drug actually works on the disease.

[Latif Nasser]

And this is something that Madeline told me, too.

[Madeline Lancaster]

You might have a drug that works really well for treating mouse spinal cord injury.

[Latif Nasser]

Like, it's like, okay, great, this is not going to kill you, because you've.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Got the animal work to show you that it's safe. But it also doesn't make them better after the spinal cord injury.

[Latif Nasser]

But now, sure, they can do a mouse trial for safety, but they can also test that drug to see if it works on a spinal cord organoid, which is, you know, just a tiny version of an actual human spinal cord.

[Lulu Miller]

Wait, what? I thought we were talking brain organoids. Are there spinal cord organoids? Spinal cord organoids, yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay. So as Madeline was developing her brain organoids Independently, around the same time, other scientists all over the world are growing.

[Carl Zimmer]

Intestinal organoids, lung organoids, liver organoids, muscle organoids, skin organoids, pancreas organoids, stomach organoids, heart organoids, kidney organoids, breast tissue organoids that actually produce milk.

[Latif Nasser]

Ah, they can have a breast tissue organoid that can make milk?

[Carl Zimmer]

Yes.

[Latif Nasser]

Weird. Has anyone tasted that milk?

[Carl Zimmer]

I certainly haven't. I've only read about it. I don't know.

[Latif Nasser]

I don't know.

[Carl Zimmer]

That's a good question.

[Latif Nasser]

Anyway, that's science writer Carl Zimmer again, and he says now you can make an organoid of basically any part of.

[Carl Zimmer]

The body and then you can connect them.

[Latif Nasser]

What, you can, like you can. Does that work? You can do that?

[Carl Zimmer]

Oh, yeah, they call them assembloids.

[Latif Nasser]

Assembloids, yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

No, like you can Mr. Potato Head assemble.

[Latif Nasser]

Correct.

[Lulu Miller]

But then do they attach to each other?

[Latif Nasser]

They attach to each other.

[Lulu Miller]

And do they communicate with each other?

[Latif Nasser]

They communicate with each other, yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, and then what? Do what with your charm bracelet? Human body.

[Carl Zimmer]

So here's an example.

[Latif Nasser]

So Sergio Pasca, neuroscientist at Stanford University.

[Carl Zimmer]

And his colleagues thought, can we use.

[Latif Nasser]

An assembloid to study pain, the pathway of pain?

[Carl Zimmer]

So they started with the fingers.

[Lulu Miller]

A finger organoid.

[Latif Nasser]

No, no, no, sorry. Just a nerve in the finger.

[Lulu Miller]

Oh, okay.

[Carl Zimmer]

The sensory organoid.

[Latif Nasser]

Connect that like with some other cells in the dish.

[Carl Zimmer]

Another organoid, the spinal cord.

[Latif Nasser]

Just a little teeny piece of spinal cord.

[Carl Zimmer]

Now we're going to connect that to.

[Latif Nasser]

A brain organoid that is specifically the.

[Carl Zimmer]

Thalamus, which is the central hub in the brain that directs signals in all sorts of different ways. And finally, we're going to connect that.

[Latif Nasser]

One to one more brain organoid, a cortex organoid.

[Brett Kagan]

Whoa.

[Lulu Miller]

This is so weird. I mean, it's like Legos.

[Latif Nasser]

It's like Legos with the human body. Correct.

[Carl Zimmer]

So then they took capsaicin. That's the molecule in.

[Latif Nasser]

In like spicy food. Is that right?

[Carl Zimmer]

In spicy food? In chili peppers? Yeah, very. It can be very painful to the skin.

[Brett Kagan]

Okay.

[Carl Zimmer]

And they said, okay, let's hit it with capsaicin and see what happens.

[Latif Nasser]

Uh huh. Boom.

[Carl Zimmer]

Immediately that sensory organoid goes and starts sending really strong signals.

[Latif Nasser]

And those signals, Carl says, zoom right up through this assembloid to the spinal.

[Carl Zimmer]

Cord, the thalamus to the cortex, just.

[Latif Nasser]

Like it would in your own body.

[Lulu Miller]

And they can see some kind of registering.

[Latif Nasser]

Correct. And when they watch the way the signal travels, which is something that's normally hidden inside a body, they discovered all.

[Carl Zimmer]

Sorts of things about what happens when we feel pain that they didn't know about before.

[Latif Nasser]

Like, for example, signals from different parts of the assembloid began firing together in these synchronized waves of signals. Okay. And the more you know about how those signals work or move, the better chance you have at stopping them.

[Carl Zimmer]

You could, for example, say, okay, can I put a molecule into this assembloid that will stop the pain?

[Latif Nasser]

Oh, wow.

[Lulu Miller]

But so if they're using these things to study pain, is it feeling pain?

[Latif Nasser]

No, probably not.

[Carl Zimmer]

These organoids are just little bits of human tissue. In order to feel pain the way we feel pain, there are other parts of the brain that come into play.

[Latif Nasser]

The assembloid is just this super basic circuit that you send a signal through. So, like this pain, it seems to be superficially registering it, but like, what is the it? I think the capsaicin in that case.

[Lulu Miller]

No, no, no, I'm the first. It's it. It's like it is this little ball. But is it a thing like it. What is it?

[Carl Zimmer]

Well, they crackle with electricity.

[Latif Nasser]

They.

[Carl Zimmer]

They form connections called synapses. They replicate parts of the human brain with astonishing accuracy.

[Latif Nasser]

But Carl says they're not brains. They're not brains.

[Carl Zimmer]

That's right.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay, so if there's like a slider and on one end is brains, and then on the other end is just like some neurons in a dish, where is this on the slider? And how do you.

[Carl Zimmer]

Yeah, I would say that it's closer still for the time being, to the neuron end of the slider. Simply based on numbers, our brain has.

[Latif Nasser]

Something like 80 billion neurons.

[Carl Zimmer]

And the biggest human brain organoids contain about 2 million cells.

[Latif Nasser]

That's 0.0025%.

[Carl Zimmer]

Well under 1%. Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

And you know, these things don't have blood vessels, so that a very important key limiting factor to how big and complex it can get.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Latif Nasser]

And they're not in a body, so they can't interact with the world in, like, a meaningful way. Okay, well, but when I was talking to Carl about this, so he said that a lot of that might no longer be true.

[Carl Zimmer]

Some scientists have, you know, taken organoids from human cells.

[Brett Kagan]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

And have put them into the brains of rats.

[Latif Nasser]

What? So basically what they did is they basically took a rat and they, like, carved out a chunk of its brain.

[Lulu Miller]

But they left some of it.

[Latif Nasser]

They left most of it.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

And it's almost like. It's like. Think about it. Like, it's almost like they gave a rat a little human Tumor or something? Yeah, I mean, it doesn't.

[Lulu Miller]

But the tumor is like just brain.

[Latif Nasser]

Human brain.

[Lulu Miller]

Brain. It's human brain.

[Latif Nasser]

It's human brain.

[Carl Zimmer]

And these human organoids are pretty happy in there.

[Latif Nasser]

It's sort of wired in.

[Carl Zimmer]

They connect up with the rat neurons. They get supplied by the rat blood system.

[Lulu Miller]

So they have made, in a real sense, like a new kind of being.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That did not exist before this. Correct.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay. Feels like there should have been a bigger press release, but. Okay. Do the. Do the rats act any differently? Are they suddenly like into podcasts and coffee?

[Carl Zimmer]

When you do studies on these rats, behavioral tests, memory tests, all sorts of things, they're just rats.

[Latif Nasser]

There seems to be nothing humany about them.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay.

[Latif Nasser]

But one thing they did notice. When you tickle its whiskers.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah.

[Carl Zimmer]

You can actually measure signals from the human brain organoid neurons.

[Latif Nasser]

The human part of the brain lights up.

[Lulu Miller]

What?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

So it's registering the feeling.

[Carl Zimmer]

They are receiving signals from the rat's senses.

[Latif Nasser]

I mean, strictly speaking, they are receiving signals from the rat's senses. Are they feeling it? Feeling it gets hard. Cause it's kind of the pain. Question again.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah, but now they're in a body. I mean, they're in a being.

[Latif Nasser]

Yes, but they're not the, like, driving force of that. They're like a. They're like a house guest in the attic. Okay.

[Lulu Miller]

Latif, would you put. Make a brain ball. Brain organoid of your brain cell and put it in a rat?

[Latif Nasser]

If I'm being honest, Would you? Would you? Probably not.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, so I don't know, but I just think you're more on my side that this is a little scary than you in your little. With your reporter's wand are letting onto. Because, yes, there's exciting research, but it just feels like every time you try to comfort me with what we know about these things, you then end up not comforting me. And then the scientists take it one step further anyway.

[Latif Nasser]

Okay. Well, it's as if you have seen the future and what the next chapter holds. Because that exact thing is gonna happen. It's gonna get weirder and creepier and stranger. And that's all after the break.

[Lulu Miller]

Stick with us. Hi, I'm Lulu Miller, and this episode is sponsored by Better Help. Well, happy New Year out there. You know what this time of year means? You might be seeing a lot of people making resolutions about how they are going to transform themselves. They are going to have the perfect routine, the perfect discipline, and a wicked strong body. But what if we resolve to just Be more okay with who we are. Life's short, and the you inside you is the only companion you are guaranteed to have for the whole ride. So why not love on that little you inside you? Work on how to give it some breathing room, some care, whatever the you inside you needs help with. I can say that therapy has absolutely helped me come to more peace with me. But finding an affordable, accessible therapist can be hard. BetterHelp is a great place to start. You fill out a short questionnaire and they help match you to someone they think you'll like. BetterHelp says they typically get it right the first time, but if it's not a good fit, switching is very fast and easy. If you want to try it out, you can sign up right now and get 10% [e-mail] Radiolab that's betterhelp.com Radiolab.

[Jane Lindholm]

Kids, you have a lot of questions.

[Latif Nasser]

Is a crocodile a dinosaur? Why do people love? How does your food turn into your poop?

[Madeline Lancaster]

But why?

[Jane Lindholm]

A podcast for curious kids has answers. I'm Jane Lindholm. Join me as we dig deep into everything from science to history, nature, emotions, and sometimes even the weird.

[Latif Nasser]

Why are jellyfishes made of jelly or are they made out of jelly?

[Madeline Lancaster]

Find.

[Jane Lindholm]

But why? Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Latif Nasser]

Latif, Lulu, Radiolab, we are back talking about brain balls. You know, bitty brains, boba brains? The brainish in a dish.

[Lulu Miller]

Yes. Ha ha. With all your clever wordplay. But you are about to send us into the next existential tailspin about how people are using these things.

[Latif Nasser]

It is possible.

[Brett Kagan]

So the final thing I was told to do is push record.

[Latif Nasser]

Record. Yes. That's an important button. Now tell me who you are.

[Brett Kagan]

So, I'm Brett.

[Latif Nasser]

This is Brett Kagan. He's a neuroscientist.

[Brett Kagan]

I'm the chief scientific officer here at Cortical Labs. Cortical Labs, We're a small tech startup here in Melbourne, Australia.

[Latif Nasser]

Did you start it? Did someone else start it?

[Brett Kagan]

No. Well, it was founded by. There was a few of us. And I was contacted by Dr. Hong Weng Chong and Andy Kitchen, and they were looking for a neuroscientist.

[Latif Nasser]

Brett had been an academic obsessed with this particular question.

[Brett Kagan]

How do you get intelligence out of brain cells that are in a dish?

[Latif Nasser]

And this company was like, why don't you leave academia and help us find out?

[Brett Kagan]

The question they had was, can brain cells in a dish do anything at all that we might want them to do?

[Lulu Miller]

Hm, like, do what?

[Brett Kagan]

What better to pick than Pong Pong.

[Lulu Miller]

The, like, 70s computer game?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, the game with the paddles and a little ball.

[Lulu Miller]

Why that?

[Brett Kagan]

Everybody knows Pong. It was one of the first computer games. It was the first thing that that machine learning, which people now like to call AI really was trained on as a big breakout success.

[Latif Nasser]

And he figured the brain runs on.

[Brett Kagan]

Electricity, and it's also a shared language of silicon computing.

[Latif Nasser]

So why wouldn't we be able to get neurons to do something a computer could do, exactly, like play a simple video game?

[Brett Kagan]

We used some hardware that allowed us to record the activity of the cells, process that, and then deliver small electrical pulses back into the cultures.

[Latif Nasser]

And they did it. Scientists just put pieces of human and mice brain on a plate and wired it to a computer to play pong. They learned to track the ball and control a paddle.

[Lulu Miller]

Seriously, this is one of the craziest things I've ever covered.

[Latif Nasser]

So here's what's going on. What?

[Lulu Miller]

No.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. And this wasn't even an organoid. This was just a flat sheet of neurons in a dish.

[Lulu Miller]

I mean, how could it possibly be doing that? Like, I mean, can really dumb things do that? Could, like, a. Could, like, a tree do that?

[Latif Nasser]

Trees don't have neurons, so I don't think a tree could do that.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, so. But, well, what does this mean? Like, are they learning?

[Latif Nasser]

Well, Brett says, yes, I called it learning.

[Brett Kagan]

And I think learning was an incredibly fair definition, because what would an improvement over time in a way that would suit a goal be called other than learning?

[Latif Nasser]

But other people, including Madeline Lancaster, I.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Actually remain to be convinced anybody has really shown that, say no, because it's really hard to interpret the signals coming from the neurons.

[Latif Nasser]

She says when you teach brain cells to play Pong, they're, you know, connected to a computer.

[Madeline Lancaster]

So what. What people do is they use algorithms to sort of decode that message and then send a signal back to neurons. And so you kind of have, like, two black boxes that you've just hooked up.

[Latif Nasser]

It's sort of a collaboration between the brain cells and the computer, and you.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Don'T really know what either of them are doing.

[Latif Nasser]

Anyway, whatever is happening here, what Brett and his team took away from this is if neur something a computer does, why don't we use neurons as computers?

[Lulu Miller]

What?

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah, literally, couple months ago, they released their first computer called the CL1. And it is. They don't call it this, but it's. It's effectively a biocomputer. It has neurons in it.

[Lulu Miller]

Ew, brain sticky. Real human brain matter in it.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. It's got like little brain organoids in it. It has 800,000 neurons interfaced with a silicon chip. You can use it to do computer stuff with.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay. I mean, I can get behind the brain balls being used for neurological disorder research. Great. You know what? Bespoke cancer treatments.

[Latif Nasser]

Cool.

[Lulu Miller]

But why are we hooking up human brain brain cells to computers to like, make money? That to me feels like not worth the risk.

[Latif Nasser]

Like, well, think about the problems we are having right now with all of these data centers chugging all this energy, right?

[Lulu Miller]

Yes, absolutely. Wrecking the planet.

[Latif Nasser]

Right? So our brains are so impressively efficient energy wise. We have like a dim light bulb, like screwed into our heads, right? That's the amount of energy that we need to do all the complex things that we do. If AI or if some supercomputer was doing the equivalent, it would need millions of times more power. Like the difference between a single light bulb and a large town.

[Lulu Miller]

So flattering.

[Latif Nasser]

The other thing is that, like, think about these AIs. You need to train it on the whole Internet. Right? A human brain is much quicker to learn. If you could harness that energy efficiency, if you could harness that kind of like knowledge efficiency in a computer, you could move mountains.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, But I guess my authentic question at this point is like, okay, you have shown us all this stuff at this point, it seems pretty clear that they can definitely register input, right? Like they've. There's the tickle, the pain, the signal they're getting from Pong. Okay. And then this Pong example at least shows us they are then able, based on that input, to produce some kind of output.

[Latif Nasser]

Yeah. Okay, so let's say it is. Yeah.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay. So my question is, if they can do those things, wouldn't they have to have some thrumming level of consciousness?

[Latif Nasser]

No, actually, no, they really don't. Like a bunch of the things you just talked about. AI can do those. Is AI conscious even going further than that? Like a Roomba can do, like navigate a room. A Roomba. A Roomba conscious. That's a signal in and out, right?

[Lulu Miller]

A Roomba's going, oh, there's an edge. Let me go this way.

[Latif Nasser]

That's a signal in and out.

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

When we talk about human consciousness, we mean self consciousness. Like you are aware of yourself. You have a past, you have a future that you're concerned about. There's like that continuity of experience.

[Latif Nasser]

This is Dr. In Soo Hyun.

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

I'm the director of the center for Life Sciences at the Museum of Science in Boston.

[Latif Nasser]

He's a bioethicist and he's worked on a bunch of teams with scientists who are studying brain organoids.

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

We tried to identify what are the emerging scientific and ethical issues.

[Latif Nasser]

You're like, kind of like their conscience. Is that sort of the thing?

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

You know what? Sometimes I feel like a priest in secular clothes.

[Latif Nasser]

And he says at this point, he is not worried about brain organoids having anything like human consciousness.

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

The brain organoids in the dish don't have that continuity. They don't have all the Regis have the interaction with the outside world.

[Latif Nasser]

But when he thinks about the future that Brett and others are trying to create, where maybe people start connecting more and more complicated and even more and more structured clumps of human brain cells to computers, maybe you get, it might.

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

Not even be human consciousness, but some kind of consciousness could emerge. It's hooked up to. To the world.

[Lulu Miller]

Yeah. Okay, so what about this? Latif? I would. If I may, I would like to just issue a commandment that all the smart people who are, like, excited by brain organoids, they all take one year to stop making organoids and use their smarts and their technologies in their labs to, like, try to understand the consciousness of the organoids that have already been made. You know, like, ideally, they could all be in a dark room and just have candles and quietly, meditatively watch for any flickers to understand what's going on. And then we have a grand assembly where everyone reports back and we all collectively decide what to do.

[Latif Nasser]

But I know that, like, some of these scientists have this fire inside them to be, like, how many cures am I not going to find in that year? Like, how many people am I not going to help in that year? Like, the glioblastoma. Like, those people don't have a year.

[Lulu Miller]

And those people are telling me to just shut up because this is a piece of discarded foreskin.

[Latif Nasser]

That's right.

[Madeline Lancaster]

If. If we have a tool that we don't use.

[Latif Nasser]

Madeline Lancaster again, and there are millions.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Of actually conscious human beings out there that don't have treatments, but we decide, no, we're going to put the value of organoids higher than those people, that would be unethical.

[Latif Nasser]

It's funny, like, at the beginning, like, you asked me, like, would you make a brain ball of yourself? And I said, no. And then at some point, like, my thinking switched where I'm like, oh, no. Unless it would save someone's life.

[Lulu Miller]

Well, that's noble. And now I feel even worse saying, I don't know that I would. I just. I mean, yeah, okay, if it's my own kid. Sure. I don't care if I'm like a little enslaved human consciousness if it saves my kid. But as you have shown us, the scientists are gonna do more. They're gonna try new things. They're gonna build bigger brains. And, like, there is a line and we will cross it and we won't know that we've crossed it, you know?

[Latif Nasser]

Right. And. Well, and the thing about these organoids is that they're already crossing all kinds of lines.

[Dr. In Soo Hyun]

And you disrupt categories that we thought were so neat and tidy and distinguishable. Life, non life, human, non human, human, computer. We thought those are pretty clean categories. But this research is kind of upsetting the very foundations of what we think separates these categories apart.

[Latif Nasser]

Does feel like it's like, oh, we've created a new category of thing. Like a new category of thing that is maybe alive.

[Carl Zimmer]

It is alive.

[Latif Nasser]

We have created a new category of thing that is alive. That is weird.

[Carl Zimmer]

Oh, yeah.

[Madeline Lancaster]

It's hard. It's hard to actually put it into a cat that already exists, I think, because they're not actual brains, that we can say absolutely, certainly. But they're also not just a few neurons in a dish either.

[Carl Zimmer]

We almost don't really even have the words for it.

[Madeline Lancaster]

I think it's kind of a new thing.

[Latif Nasser]

Latif Nasser this episode was Produced by Annie McEwen, Mona Madgauker and Pat Walters. It was edited by Alex Neeson and Pat Walters with fact checking by Natalie Middleton and Rebecca Rand. Special thank you. Shout outs to Lynn Levy, Jason Yamada, Hanf, David Fagenbaum, Andrew Verstein, Anne Hamilton, Christopher Mason, Madeline Mason, Mariarty, plus Howard Fine and his whole team at Weill Cornell for hosting us. And if you're looking for more musings on the nature of life and what it means to be alive, Carl Zimmer has a terrific book out all about this stuff. It's called Life's the Search for what It Means to Be Alive. Get it at your local bookstore. That's it for us. From our brain balls to yours. See you next week.

[Lulu Miller]

Okay, Start now.

[Ellie Collins]

Let's practice.

[Lulu Miller]

No, you don't need to.

[Madeline Lancaster]

You don't need to practice anymore.

[Lulu Miller]

Shh. We're recording now.

[Ellie Collins]

Hi, I'm Ellie Collins and I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. And here are the staff crackers credits.

[Lulu Miller]

And she's Molly's niece.

[Madeline Lancaster]

Yeah.

[Ellie Collins]

Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz, Gutierrez Sindhu, Nana Sambandan, Matt Kilty, Mona Madgav, Car, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Anissa Viates, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

[Latif Nasser]

I love your giggle.

[Ellie Collins]

Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Simons foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

[Lulu Miller]

Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. In addition to this award winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.