Human Brain Surrogates Research: The Onrushing Ethical Dilemma

Abstract

Human brain research is moving into a dilemma. The best way to understand how the human brain works is to study living human brains in living human beings, but ethical and legal standards make it difficult to do powerful research with actual human beings. So neuroscientists have developed four types of surrogates for living human brains in human bodies: genetically edited non-human animals, human/non-human brain chimeras, human neural organoids, and living ex vivo human brain tissues. These new and rapidly improving models offer the hope of understanding human brain function better. If we make our models “too good,” they may themselves deserve some of the kinds of ethical and legal respect that have limited brain research in human beings. This article is an initial effort to outline that dilemma.

Keywords:

• Brain
• human subjects research
• neuroethics
• neuroscience
• regulatory issues
• animal experimentation/research

This article is referred to by:

Scientific and Ethical Uncertainties in Brain Organoid Research

Human Brain Surrogates: Models or Distortions?

Philosophy is Still Missing from the Human-Mouse Chimera Debate

Responding to Human Brain Surrogates Research: The Value of Empirical Ethics

The Moral Relevance of Humanization

Brain Surrogates—Empty or Full Makes the Difference

Against the Precautionary Approach to Moral Status: The Case of Surrogates for Living Human Brains

Neural Organoids and the Precautionary Principle

Testing the Correlates of Consciousness in Brain Organoids: How Do We Know and What Do We Do?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank his research assistants, Brittany Cazakoff, Christie Corn, and Cassidy Amber Carter-Pomeroy for their exceptional support on this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

Author Henry T. Greely works for Stanford, which conducts some of the research this article discusses. His center has received internal Stanford funding in part to provide ethics advice on organoid research. He is part of two grant working groups, one on organoids and one on chimeras, for which he receives modest payment for attending meetings.