A new proposal suggests using stem cell-derived 'minibrains' to create brand-new biocomputers. Such 'organoid computers' could be far off, but ethical questions abound.
Lab-grown"minibrains" could someday be linked together to act as powerful and efficient biocomputers, scientists have suggested.
As organoids share many of the cell types that enable our own brains to acquire and store information, the researchers say that the brain blobs are uniquely suited for computational tasks that require them to learn quickly and without much energy expenditure, before storing the information away in compact neuronal connections.
However, to build sophisticated biocomputers, researchers will first have to cross an ethical minefield, the report authors acknowledged. Until now, the moral implications of building tiny mimics of the human brain have been constrained by the fact that typical brain organoids contain a small number of cells with limited computational power. But to grow organoids fit for computers, the scientists say they will need to scale them up from 50,000 neurons to 10 million.
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