— Irina Vasilievna, you are the first Russian researcher to grow the brain in a test tube and prove that it “thinks”, that is, transmits an electrical signal. It’s been 15 years since then, she. There are currently tens of thousands of Petri dishes in your lab where various brain cells are growing. Why are you growing them?
“Our brain is a tissue that physiologically works according to measurable parameters that we understand. But it also shows the subjectivity of the substance called consciousness. With its help, we communicate with you and gain insight into this world. Does the brain tissue we grow in the lab have consciousness? This question was asked in 1970, when they learned how to grow neuronal cultures on electrical sensors that could take potential from these cultures. That is, it can be assumed that the brain in a test tube “thinks” because it transmits a very complex electrical signal.
In 2008, a bioengineering group I led started working on this topic. We have achieved what scientists abroad for 30 years have done in five years, thanks to our immediate possession of the developing technology. And they created a fabric on the electrodes of which multielectronic matrices (chips) of various productions (Japanese, American, German) began to grow.
– I remember that in your laboratory a perennial nervous tissue called “Alexander Gennadievich” grew …
Yes, he lived 9 months.
– That’s too much?
– In general, yes. Basically, in laboratories that study neural networks in cultures, nerve cells live on chips for an average of 2-3 months. But these are not problems of the brain, but of its nutrition.
– How long can neurons live if the necessary nutrition is provided?
– In theory, Human brain cells can live for a thousand years with the right supportive technologies for nutrition and oxygen supply. but this does not happen in nature. We are working with mouse cells, which have a lifespan of about 2 years. Everything is faster here. Some laboratories have shown that mouse neurons in culture can live for up to two years.
– And why did “Alexander Gennadievich” die?
“We generated a tissue containing not only neurons, but also gliocytes (helper cells of brain tissue) as in the native brain. Glyocytes are constantly dividing, it is very difficult to control them. As a result of the growth of cells that isolate the current conduction, we were not able to record the neuron signals with the electrodes, and therefore we could not conclude that the tissue works, lives, responds. In addition, as a result of glia growth, our “Alexander Gennadievich” broke off from the substrate and, gliding like a pancake, ceased to stand on the electrodes. The experiment was stopped.
– And what do you record when the conditional “Alexander Gennadievich” gives you an electric signal? Is this a thought?
– I’ve had a few graduate students defending themselves on the technology to understand what we’re recording. Thus, we record a signal from tens of thousands of neurons in this tiny tissue onto a chip. They can produce a very complex electrical signal unique to a particular culture, we’ve proven.
When we examine the brain’s perception of the environment with microelectrodes placed in the brain of a human or mouse, we also record a complex electrical signal that occurs spontaneously or under the influence of environmental factors in our own culture. So, from the outside, this complex pattern of electrical activity may be an afterthought.
Not only does the tissue “in vitro” have the opportunity to tell us or write it down, which means the activity pattern created.
– How exactly did you prove that your tissues process information and emit something “meaningful”?
“We took two brain tissues and made connections between them. Then they built the knowledge movement in only one direction. We saw that the second cell culture took the most complex information (not just a set of data) and produced its own signal after processing that information.
“But you can’t exactly say you’re processing that information, right?”
– To be. Information is a set of sign phenomena that may or may not change. There are many ways to prove that the signal was processed by chance and not by chance, the math can count that. The idea of scientists is to understand exactly how the brain processes information, identify algorithms, and then put them into neuromorphic intelligence. In this way, it will be possible to obtain a much faster computer.
“Will it be possible to find out exactly what neurons are thinking in a test tube?”
It doesn’t sound so fantastic.
How else can you use such a brain grown in a test tube?
– Can be used as a joystick. Such an experiment was carried out in our laboratory. We took a culture that worked for us, signaling, issuing specific commands, and programmed one signal pattern to turn left and another to turn right.
We had a radio controlled car that turned the wheels left and right. The programmers gave him a command: when a certain pattern appears, you need to go left or right from the leg of the table or any other obstacle. So our machine worked great like a robot. The control brain was in the incubator, the signal from it went to Wi-Fi, then transmitted to the machine. When it encountered an obstacle, it was signaled “back” to the culture. Outwardly, it looked funny.
— You mentioned the machine that scientists control with a brain joystick. Are there experiments in the world where the adult brain itself will direct the movement of the car?
– There is no such study. Science or fiction.
– So we have a common language with the brain – you could call it electrical – but can we say so little in it so far?
– Yes. Otherwise we would learn to read minds and that is impossible. In addition, the thoughts of the brain are not formulated in words, but in a binary code of action potentials – electrical signals. He does not know the language, he has no sense organs – the eyes, the ears to learn it. All human and animal sense organs convert environmental signals into action potential signals that the brain understands.
We give a cell culture a warm environment, a cold environment, we can offer a lot of oxygen, we can give it little oxygen, we can shine a light on it, we can add a substance to it that affects synaptic transmission, and it changes the cell structure. electrical model. Thus, we can calculate the frequency of the response potentials of the action, the rate of their occurrence, the place of their occurrence, etc. By examining it, we can determine how cells perceive this information, and then calculate it in the form of formulas. Well, the formulas – to embed artificial intelligence.
— What experiments have been or are being conducted in your laboratory, and which ones do you plan to do in the future?
— We went two ways in our lab. The first group deals with pure biology. Researchers are trying to study signals in neuronal tissue under various pathological conditions. That is, scientists model various metabolic changes at the whole brain level in vitro. This is a common method, it is used as one of the ways to study the mechanism of treatment or the occurrence of a disease. It’s a broad layer of work, we have a lot of scientists working here.
– Do these studies have an applied biomedical purpose?
– Definitely. And we feed the second group in our laboratory, we realize that so far it is the only group in Russia. These are workers engaged in bioengineering – neuromorphic intelligence, the possibility of combining an electronic component with living tissue, creating bionic prostheses for medical purposes. Now it is important to understand how to continuously transmit signals between the prosthesis and the nerve. Do it safely, effectively and for a long time.
“Can you connect axons with electrodes?”
– You can now connect 20-40 axons, but much more cells are involved in information processing. The more axons we can connect to the electrodes, the more accurate the bionic prosthesis will be. The task here is to find materials with a certain conductivity so that they attract and transmit a signal of a very small area – microns, not centimeters, as is currently the case.
– Do you need an adapter?
– Yes. But now materials scientists are working on it, so we’ll finally have bionic prostheses that will transmit signals from one million axons, not the 40 axons that should be in the human body.