If science had any kind of barrier to overcome, it has broken it down completely. The biotechnological company Cortical Labs has achieved create a brain lab based on human and mouse stem cells so that its main purpose is that it can play Pong, as revealed by the BBC.
Yes, the unforgettable Atari title from 1972 has been the video game chosen to test the capabilities of this experiment. Of course, all of this has a cause as noble as “helping further research into Alzheimer’s treatment,” explains Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs.
The Union of between 800,000 and one million cells of rodent cerebral cortex, together with human stem cells, has resulted in this brain that is on a kind of Petri dish, they point out from elDiario.es. That is, the classic round container used in laboratories.
Thanks to a microelectrode system, they have managed to record their activity, achieving that in just five minutes they learned to play Pong. “We have shown that we can interact with living biological neurons in such a way that we force them to modify their activity, which leads to something that resembles intelligence,” says Kagan. Here you have one of the games that threw the brain.
The next step? Study the effect of alcohol on the brain, or what is the same, get him drunk. “We tried to create a response curve to different doses of ethyl alcohol: basically getting the cells drunk and seeing if they play worse, the same thing that happens when people drink,” explains Kagan.
In this way, the viability of certain drugs or gene therapies can be verified. In any case, the Cortical Labs team is committed to working with bioethicists to ensure that their experiments do not accidentally develop consciousness. We don’t want there to be an unexpected rebellion.