Today, Explained - Frankenswine

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Maybe you've heard about the pig brains that were resuscitated by Yale researchers? But did you hear about the human brain genes that were inserted into monkey embryos in China? Vox's Brian Resnick and Sigal Samuel explain some scary science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you've got a podcast app, I bet it's there. Brian Resnick, science, Vox, are there really zombie pigs now? Kind of. Kind of zombie pigs? Kind of, yeah. Is it like in the movies? A controversial experiment has some experts questioning what it means to be alive. Scientists at Yale University have successfully restored the brain selectivity of pigs,

which were killed hours earlier. I opened the skull to investigate and found this. The brain, it's gone. How did the pig tracks get on the ceiling? The entire spinal cord is missing. Spider pig, pig, spider pig. Where's the brain and spinal cord gone? Does whatever a spider pig does.

Possibly some animal. Colonel, Colonel, I've lived in these backwoods all my life. Can you swing from a whip? I can assure you there's no animal in these parts or anywhere else for that matter that could do that. No, we can't. He's a pig. Well, whatever the explanation, we'll find it. We must find it. Life! Life, do you hear me? Give my creation life! Brian, how did this happen? Well, these are heads of pigs that have been taken from a pork processing plant,

and then scientists hooked them up to a machine to kind of bring those brains back on. And they kind of did? Kind of, yeah. Remember the Brain Initiative? This was the Obama-era kind of quote-unquote moonshot project to map the human brain and to develop tools to study like the intricate complicated connections between brain regions not really so there's this enormous mystery uh waiting to be unlocked and the brain initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. The initiative is

to better know the human brain? Yeah, like we don't have a great window into the brain. Like the key to understanding brain and brain diseases and stopping things like dementia is examining the complexity of it. Like the tools we currently have to study the brain are really crude. So to better know the human brain, some Yale scientists got a bunch of dead pig brains delivered. How quickly are we talking? So they actually waited four hours. And something kind of really interesting to understand in this whole story is like within those four hours, the conventional wisdom is like that brain should be deteriorating irretrievably. Like the brain cells starve. Any brain, any mammal's brain needs a ton of oxygen. It's like the most hungry organ of your body in terms of like the amount of oxygen it needs, the amount of glucose it needs.

So to think like they could even do this after four hours is pretty astounding. And then they hooked these brains, the disembodied heads, up to this machine called BrainX. What is BrainX? This is wild. Okay, so it's a machine that basically brings the brains back to life. How does it do that? So it contains a lot of different components. It's a really remarkable piece of engineering.

Basically what the scientists are doing is kind of taking conditions that they would have in a Petri dish. Like you can easily keep cells alive in just a dish with some fluids. And they're kind of injecting that into a whole organ. So it's kind of like a heart and a lung machine with Frankenstein-y elements. So basically, they attach the pig's brains to this device through the pig's arteries. Okay. And they turn it on and the device pumps this, they call it a perfusate, but really it's like a synthetic blood that goes through the pig's brain's vasculature and brings it oxygen, takes out carbon dioxide. So it's kind of working like blood.

It brings the cells glucose, sugar, so feeding them. It also has some interesting things in it that help stop cell death. So there's chemicals in it to help preserve the cells so they don't like die and explode. There's also a neuronal blocker. What is that? Yeah, this is kind of key to this, to the creepiness of a lot of this is that, so they included in the fluid, a chemical that would stop any electrical activity in the brain. So it would stop like widespread communication between the different parts of the brain, which would basically like turn the brain back on. And then what? The pigs

come back to life? Not really, because there's no pig. It's just a brain. What is the moment where this happens? So I think there isn't quite a moment. But what this study found was that these brains after 10 hours, so four hours after death and six hours after being on these machines, these brains look kind of intact. And actually, there were signs of life in them. So the researchers were able to see these brains use oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. They were taking up glucose. They were taking up sugar. They were doing their metabolic processes.

Looked under a microscope after those, you know, 10 hours, the cells looked largely intact. Whereas like 10 hours after a pig dies, let's say, what should this organ look like? Like mush. So in one way, yes, these brains are alive. But then in another way, they're kind of not because the cells are alive in this brain. Many of the cells are alive in the brain, but the individual cells are not talking to one another.

There's no like global electrical activity that suggests like this brain has like woken up and is like, I'm in disembodied pig now. And what's what the hell is happening? So like this isn't like a pig's brain that's ready for primetime. If you put in a otherwise healthy pig that pig would not have been like able to no it's still dead they're they're saying this is a clinically dead brain by any measure of clinical death there's no electrical activity as measured by an eeg which is the uh electroencephalogram. So the zombie pig thing is overblown. These were not zombie pigs. There wasn't even a body. There is not a body, but at the same time, this is what's the coolest thing to think about it here.

These brains are alive. Individual cells of the brain are viable. They're intact. They're alive. They're doing things. They're taking in oxygen. They're exhaling CO2. They're intact. They're alive. They're doing things. They're taking in oxygen. They're exhaling CO2. They're using sugar, glucose. They're firing as neurons. They look like a living brain. It's a really crazy space. And also, I should say, this is really uncharted territory. Scientists really don't know what to expect of this partially reanimated brain material.

They don't know what it's really capable of. In the sense, they didn't really even expect this to be possible. Perhaps this opens a window in helping people who have been affected by stroke or other diseases that starve the brain of oxygen and kill brain cells. Maybe those brain cells could be partially revived. I'm talking really far afield of this study here, but it's kind of opening this window into thinking about dead brain material as being more viable than we previously thought. No one has ever thought about how to deal with this question of

what if we induced consciousness in a brain that's not connected to any living animal? So nobody has jurisdiction over that. Because this is uncharted territory, were there ethical questions here? And did people question the methods that were used? Yeah, I'm told like these aren't rogue researchers. They really tried to do all they can to make sure this was ethical. And they had some considerations in place. So when they were running the brains on the BrainX, they were monitoring the brain activity to make sure like if any sign of like consciousness, which is a weird thing, like we don't even know what

consciousness really is, but- Or what it looks like. Or what it really looks like. But one obvious sign is like those EEG, like the electroencephalogram. Okay. And if at any moment, like that pig like seemed to wake up, they were prepared with like anesthesia. They were prepared just to stop the experiment because one of the ethical considerations is when you have dead animals, that is not animal research. Like those animals, you know, you don't have to treat them like animals because they're already dead. But then like suddenly you enter this territory, like if you were to accidentally like provoke

any thoughts in this pig brain, that's not dead. Like is this now animal research? Like there's no protocol for reanimated corpses. There's no ethical protocol. So they were very prepared to just stop the experiment if they detected any sign of this organized electrical activity, which is suggestive of consciousness. It's like, we don't really have a great definition of like, what is like the building block of consciousness? Like, yes, you need like this electrical activity to be conscious,

like, you know, your brain is buzzing right now, mine is, like it buzzes when we sleep. But, you know, what's the smallest unit of consciousness? Like how many, you know, I think there's some 2 billion neurons in a pig's brain. How many of those need to be active for like a thought to exist, for like just a moment of pain? So what's next? Is it trying to answer a question like that? To answer a question like that, they actually need to do more of this research and to see like how active these brains are while on the brain X. Because the payoff is really potentially very high. The next century, we can see some wild things. And this is maybe the start of them. We just have to be careful that we're not like

harming these former pigs or like, I wouldn't even know what to call them. You know, like they're, what do you call a brain that you've induced a thought in four hours after it's dead? Like there's no... Zombie pigs. Zombie pigs, yes, of course. Zombie brine. It was great to talk about zombie brains. Yeah, and this is why I'm pro-zombie, because I should disclose I am one. Yeah, I'll meet for lunch later, Sean. Okay, but wait until you hear about the humanoid monkeys.

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And who can't relate to that? Going through it in podcast apps now. This report that's out there, Chinese researchers say that they have implanted human genes into the brains of monkeys. Seagal Samuel, Future Perfect Vox, we're not just hacking pigs. We're, of course, always hacking monkeys. What is going on with the monkeys? Chinese scientists recently did this experiment where they basically added human brain genes to monkeys. So they took the human brain stuff and put it into a monkey brain?

Yeah. Basically, they didn't slice open the brain of an existing monkey. They put it into embryos, monkey embryos. Oh, like baby monkeys? Yeah. So basically, like what they do is they take these human genes, they stick them in a virus, and then they stick the virus in this monkey embryo. Wow. And then that monkey embryo grows into a monkey monkey. Yeah. A monkey with a little bit of a human-like quality.

Does that monkey start, like, watching Netflix? Well, so they don't exactly become human. We're just making small little genetic changes to the monkeys. So specifically, they took this gene called MCPH1, which scientists have been curious about for a long time because they believe that it really is important to what makes us develop our very human brand of intelligence. And they wanted to see, like, well, what will happen if we put some copies of this gene into some macaque monkeys? What the Chinese scientists saw was two changes.

One, the monkeys' brains developed over a longer period of time. And the other change is that those monkeys did better on memory tasks. So they got a little more human, is what you're saying? Yeah, well, their intelligence became a little bit more human-like. Why monkeys? Is it because monkeys are pretty close to humans as it is, and it's like the closest cousin we have? Yeah, so basically primates are really, really close to humans. And the Chinese scientists doing the experiment were actually setting out to answer a question about evolution. So their question is, like, how did human brains develop the way they developed? Our brains can do all this cool, innovative thinking that our primate cousins can't.

So, like, evolutionarily, what caused us to diverge at some point? So by creating this monkey that's never existed before, that has human genes in it, we're really trying to answer how did we diverge? Exactly. So they're trying to change a variable that will potentially narrow the gap between monkey and human so that they can see, oh, is changing this variable part of what makes us go from being more like other primates to evolving into humans? Yeah. Okay. And so how many of these monkeys exist right now?

Is there like a pen of monkeys somewhere in China that have these human brain variables? Well, so basically for this experiment, they created 11 of these monkeys. Six died. Oh, no. Only five survived. And those five survivors went through a bunch of tests like MRI brain scans and memory tests and that kind of stuff. And the six who died, they died because this was like a traumatic experience? Yeah.

Well, procedures like this can sometimes be lethal. No doubt. So if we have ethical quandaries with these pig brains in Connecticut, I imagine we have many, many more with actual monkeys dying for the sake of this experiment, which is making them more human-like. The ethical issue of the monkeys dying is actually like the least of our worries. So yes, that's already bad. That's a worry that the majority of monkeys in this experiment died. So right off the bat, you see it can be lethal. But the way bigger ethical quandary here is that you are creating a monkey that is more human-like. And then what is going to happen to these monkeys?

What are you going to do? You're going to keep them locked up in a lab? You're going to release them into the wild where they don't have adaptations to be able to live in that environment anymore. And what's the answer? There is no answer. This is why some ethicists are calling this experiment an ethical nightmare, because you're basically creating an organism that has no way to live a meaningful life in any environment. The pig brain situation we talked about at the top of the show came out of this Obama initiative to better know a human brain. What's the genesis of the monkey situation in China?

Scientist who was leading that experiment, Bing Su, has been curious for a long time about, you know, things that make humans humans. Like how do we develop these particular human-like qualities through evolution? This is just one of many such experiments. He's also taking another gene, another human gene, and trying to put it in monkeys to see if that will make them more human-like. So he's saying, hey, we want to understand how humans became humans.

Let's understand how evolution produced our special kind of human intelligence. And how is he defending the ethical nightmare? He says, look, first of all, we do experiments on monkeys all the time. Yes, some of them are going to die. Okay, that's a commonly accepted thing. As far as the other, the bigger ethical quandary of making them more human-like,

he says, calm down, we're not actually making, you know, monkeys that are significantly human-like. We're just making these tiny, isolated little genetic changes. So they're not going to make the monkey meaningfully un-monkey-like. So basically he's saying, relax, but also this is worth it. Yeah. How does this ethical quandary compare to the other recent scientific ethical quandary we saw in China, which was the CRISPR gene editing that we covered on the show? Yeah, so like this is very much in line with that.

So, you know, basically with that experiment, we saw a scientist in China kind of essentially go rogue and do something that is not being done, let's say, in the U.S. So the thing to keep in mind is that China actually has really different norms than we do here in the U.S. about this kind of thing. They're way more open to genetic engineering experiments like these, whether on humans or on primates. They're way more okay with this kind of primate research than the U.S. is. So then moving ahead, I guess we're only going to see more of this? I think so.

I mean, you know, like this guy Bing Su, this scientist behind the monkey experiment, is going ahead and doing similar experiments with other monkeys now, with other human genes. Is the science community internationally capable of establishing some set of norms so that there is an ethical standard here as far as what can be done and what's beyond the pale as far as, I don't know, creating new kinds of monkeys and animals that we've never seen before? I think the international science community has been kind of trying to do that in regards to the CRISPR experiment in China that we just talked about. But I think there's limited effect in terms of, you know,

what creating an international norm can do. Chinese scientists don't want to be seen as like so totally off the grid and, you know, outside of international norms. But at the end of the day, you know, if there are no laws in that country preventing that kind of research, they can go ahead and do it. And American scientists are in some cases collaborating with these Chinese scientists. So even though the U.S. may not be, you know, greenlighting these kinds of studies here, if American scientists continue to participate in these kinds of Chinese experiments, as one did with this monkey experiment, then that's kind of, you know, potentially being complicit in

that sort of research. I mean, bringing it back to the pig brains that came back to life, is it hard for anyone to point at any one experiment and say, hey, that's going too far when the end goal is to better understand Alzheimer's or to better understand how we evolved. I mean, the questions here are so profound and essential, and yet the methods of experimentation are so open to criticism. I'm really glad you phrased the question that way, actually, because that brings up a really important point, which is that there's a huge difference, in my opinion, between doing this kind of experiment to study disease. A lot of times when you see primate research, it's, you know, we're giving a monkey a disease so that we can better understand

how disease works and then develop a better treatment for humans who are suffering from it. This monkey experiment in China was really not that. It is not having a clear application to, you know, improve current human lives, people who are suffering from disease. It is trying to answer a much more theoretical question about evolution, which I would love to know the answer to that question. It's totally fascinating. But the moral trade-off that you're getting, the cost-benefit in doing this experiment, doesn't seem like it shakes out in the Chinese scientists' favor. So that's just for people to decide?

I think so. Seagal Samuel is a writer at Future Perfect from Vox. It's all about finding the best ways to do good in the world. I'm Sean Ramos for M. This is Today Explained. Thanks to Going Through It, a new MailChimp original podcast hosted by Anne Friedman and featuring stories from 14 different women. For supporting this podcast today, Going Through It, you can subscribe and listen now on Apple Podcasts, on Stitcher, on your favorite podcast app, whatever it might be. Blessings.