TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT

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World’s First CRISPR-Edited Spider Produces Glowing Red Silk From Its Spinneret



he common house spider – you may look at it and think “Oh, what a beauty, my lovely house companion!” Or if you are not like me and you have arachnophobia, you may run away screaming. For one group of scientists, they looked at this spider and thought of innovation and the future – and to create the first-ever CRISPR-Cas9 modified spider.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a remarkable gene-editing tool that has revolutionized biology, and the inventors behind it won the Nobel Prize. This gene editing can help snip out precise pieces of genomes and insert other genes of interest. Currently, it is being used as a tool to help cure different diseases and find out more about biological processes. It is not the first time it has been used for a creepy crawly. In the past, scientists have successfully created red-eyed wasps and malaria-resistant mosquitoes. Now it is the spider's turn.

One of the reasons why this has never happened before is that spiders themselves are difficult organisms to work with within the laboratory. They are a diverse group, have a complex genome structure, and their cannibalistic nature means that they have to be reared individually, otherwise their cage neighbors would be gobbled up. Despite this, new developments in Parasteatoda tepidariorum have allowed this species to become a research model.

The research team looked into spider silk as the target. Spider silk is an incredibly strong and scientifically interesting substance, as it is five times stronger than a steel cable of the same weight, tear-resistant, while also being biodegradable, lightweight, and elastic.

To genetically modify this arachnophobe’s nightmare, the scientists developed an injection solution. This had a gene-editing system that also included a red fluorescent protein gene sequence. This solution was then injected into oocytes inside unfertilized female spiders, when these spiders mated with males, it resulted in the genetically modified offspring.

Fluorescent gene inserts like the red fluorescent protein are often inserted into the experimental organism, as it is an easy indication of whether it worked or not. If the silk glows under a certain light, then this was a success.

“We have demonstrated, for the first time worldwide, that CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to incorporate a desired sequence into spider silk proteins, thereby enabling the functionalisation of these silk fibres,” Professor Dr. Thomas Scheibel, Chair of Biomaterials at the University of Bayreuth and senior author of the study, said in a statement.

“The ability to apply CRISPR gene-editing to spider silk is very promising for materials science research – for example, it could be used to further increase the already high tensile strength of spider silk.” Said Scheibal.

So, while most of us are busy trying to escort spiders gently out of the bathtub, scientists are successfully busy giving them a glow-up…literally.

The study is published in Angewandte Chemie.

https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-first ... eret-79154

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Scientific societies call for a moratorium on using CRISPR to create genetically modified children

Safety concerns and lack of clear need cited as reasons for a 10-year ban on germline editing


An embryologist who was part of the team working with scientist He Jiankui adjusts a microplate containing embryos at a lab in Shenzhen in southern China in 2018.Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Leading trade organizations representing the makers of cell and gene therapies are calling for a 10-year international moratorium on the use of CRISPR and other DNA-editing tools to create genetically modified children, according to a draft of the declaration provided to STAT.

The move — coming nearly seven years after Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced the birth of the world’s first CRISPR babies — is intended to send a clear signal to the global scientific community that attempts to alter the genomes of eggs, sperm, or embryos — known as the germline — destined for live births remain unacceptable at this time.

The statement has no legal or regulatory force, but should offer guidance as countries decide whether or how to regulate germline and other genome editing.

https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/13/sci ... ng-crispr/

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Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment

The technique used on a 9½-month-old boy with a rare condition has the potential to help people with thousands of other uncommon genetic diseases.


KJ Muldoon was born with a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies.Credit...Muldoon Family

Something was very wrong with Kyle and Nicole Muldoon’s baby.

The doctors speculated. Maybe it was meningitis? Maybe sepsis?

They got an answer when KJ was only a week old. He had a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies. If he survived, he would have severe mental and developmental delays and would eventually need a liver transplant. But half of all babies with the disorder die in the first week of life.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered the Muldoons comfort care for their baby, a chance to forgo aggressive treatments in the face of a grim prognosis.

“We loved him, and we didn’t want him to be suffering,” Ms. Muldoon said. But she and her husband decided to give KJ a chance.

Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.

The investigators who led the effort to save KJ are presenting their work on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cell & Gene Therapy, and are also publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ, said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration official overseeing gene-therapy regulation until he recently resigned over disagreements with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. More than 30 million people in the United States have one of more than 7,000 rare genetic diseases. Most are so rare that no company is willing to spend years developing a gene therapy that so few people would need.

But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research — offers a new path for companies to develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive development and testing.

Illnesses like KJ’s are the result of a single mutation — an incorrect DNA letter among the three billion in the human genome. Correcting it requires pinpoint targeting in an approach called base editing.

To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed.

ImageA close-up view of a plastic syringe in a plastic bag with a clear liquid in the syringe.

One of the syringes of KJ’s treatment.Credit...Kiran Musunuru

While KJ’s treatment was customized so CRISPR found just his mutation, the same sort of method could be adapted and used over and over again to fix mutations in other places on a person’s DNA. Only the CRISPR instructions leading the editor to the spot on the DNA with the mutation would need to be changed. Treatments would be cheaper, “by an order of magnitude at least,” Dr. Marks said.

The method, said Dr. Marks, who wrote an editorial accompanying the research paper, “is, to me, one of the most potentially transformational technologies out there.”

It eventually could also be used for more common genetic disorders like sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and muscular dystrophy.

And, he said, it “could really transform health care.”

The story of KJ’s bespoke gene-editing treatment began on the evening of Aug. 8, when Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a gene-editing researcher at the University of Pennsylvania got an email from Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A baby had been born, and genetic testing showed he had CPS1 deficiency.

Could he save the baby?

Dr. Musunuru had begun investigating the use of gene editing for fairly common gene mutations.

Developing a gene editor to treat patients is a deliberate process that can take years. But KJ did not have years to wait — perhaps as few as six months before a mounting risk of severe brain damage or death.

“At this point, the clock starts in my mind,” Dr. Musunuru said. “This is real life. This is not hypothetical.”

KJ’s disease is caused by an inability to rid the body of ammonia, a byproduct of protein metabolism. Ammonia builds up in the blood and crosses into the brain. His doctors put him on a diet that severely restricted protein — just enough for him to grow. He also had a medicine, glycerol phenylbutyrate, that helped remove the ammonia in his blood. But he still was at high risk for brain injury or death. Any illness or infection could make his ammonia levels soar and cause irreversible damage to his brain.

KJ lived at the hospital under 24-hour care.

Building a gene-editing system for the Muldoons’ baby and testing it was not easy.

“There was a lot of shooting from the hip,” Dr. Musunuru said.

Image
Dr. Kiran Musunuru, who wears a gray fleece and a stethoscope around his neck, poses with Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, who wears a light sweater and also has a stethoscope.

Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a gene-editing researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, left, and Dr. Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.Credit...Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

He began working with Fyodor Urnov at the University of California, Berkeley, who made sure there were no unexpected and deleterious gene edits elsewhere in the DNA. Dr. Urnov is a part of an academic collaboration with Danaher Corporation, a company capable of producing the gene editor for KJ at a standard that would allow it to be used in a patient.

Danaher in turn collaborated with two other companies it owned, two additional biotechnology firms and another research institute, said Sadik Kassim, its chief technology officer for genomic medicines.

“At every step of the process, we were always expecting someone to say, ‘No, sorry,’” Dr. Kassim said. “And that would be the end of the story.” But his fears were unfounded. Danaher and the other companies charged only for the raw materials to make the drug, he added.

The F.D.A. also smoothed regulatory approval of the treatment, Dr. Ahrens-Nicklas said.

Dozens of researchers put all else aside for months.

In Berkeley, Dr. Urnov said, “scientists burned a vat of midnight oil on this the size of San Francisco Bay.” He added that “such speed to producing a clinic-grade CRISPR for a genetic disease has no precedent in our field. Not even close.”

David Liu of Harvard, whose lab invented the gene-editing method used to fix KJ’s mutation, said the speed was “astounding.”

“These steps traditionally take the better part of a decade, if not longer,” he said.

Only when the gene-editing solution was in hand and the F.D.A. approved the researchers’ work did Dr. Ahrens-Nicklas approach KJ’s parents.

“One of the most terrifying moments was when I walked into the room and said, ‘I don’t know if it will work but I promise I will do everything I can to make sure it is safe,’” she said.

On the morning of Feb. 25, KJ received the first infusion, a very low dose because no one knew how the baby would respond. He was in his room, in the crib where he had lived his entire life. He was 6 months old and in the seventh percentile for his weight.

Dr. Musunuru monitored the two-hour infusion, feeling, he said, “both excited and terrified.”

KJ slept through it.

Within two weeks, KJ was able to eat as much protein as a healthy baby. But he still needed the medication to remove the ammonia from his blood — a sign that the gene editor had not yet corrected the DNA in every affected cell.

The doctors gave him a second dose 22 days later.

Image
KJ stands on a soft surface in a hospital exam room with Dr. Musunuru and Dr. Ahrens-Nicklas, who both wear light yellow smocks and blue gloves and orange masks.

KJ is now well enough for the team to start planning to discharge him from the hospital and live at home, and he is meeting developmental milestones.Credit...Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

They were able to halve the medication dose. He got a few viral illnesses in that time, which normally would have triggered terrifying surges in his ammonia levels. But, Dr. Ahrens-Nicklas said, “he sailed through them.”

A week and a half ago, the team gave KJ a third dose.

It is too soon to know if he can stop taking the medication completely, but the dosage is greatly reduced. And he is well enough for the team to start planning to discharge him home from the hospital. He is meeting developmental milestones and his weight is now in the 40th percentile for his age, but it is not yet known if he’ll be spared a liver transplant.

The result “is a triumph for the American peoples’ investment in biomedical research,” Dr. Urnov said.

The researchers emphasized the role government funding played in the development.

The work, they said, began decades ago with federal funding for basic research on bacterial immune systems. That led eventually, with more federal support, to the discovery of CRISPR. Federal investment in sequencing the human genome made it possible to identify KJ’s mutation. U.S. funding supported Dr. Liu’s lab and its editing discovery. A federal program to study gene editing supported Dr. Musunuru’s research. Going along in parallel was federally funded work that led to an understanding of KJ’s disease.

“I don’t think this could have happened in any country other than the U.S.,” Dr. Urnov said.

Those who worked on saving KJ were proud, Dr. Urnov said.

“We all said to each other, ‘This is the most significant thing we have ever done.’”

Gina Kolata reports on diseases and treatments, how treatments are discovered and tested, and how they affect people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/heal ... roid-share

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New CRISPR alternative can 'install' whole genes, paving the way to treatment for many genetic disorders

A new gene editor takes advantage of CRISPR-associated proteins to insert whole genes into the genome, scientists report.


Scientists used directed evolution to give rise to a new gene-editing system for use in human cells. (Image credit: ktsimage via Getty Images)

Scientists have developed a new gene-editing system that can weave whole genes into human DNA. It could one day lead to a better method of treating genetic diseases triggered by a diverse range of mutations.

So far, the approach has been tested only in human cells in the laboratory. But if it's shown to be safe and effective for patients, it could provide an alternative to gene-editing tools that target only specific typos in DNA. Rather than correcting a single gene mutation, the new technique would instead introduce a working copy of the gene into a person's cells.

"A single genetic disease can be caused by many different mutations in that gene," said Isaac Witte, a doctoral student at Harvard University and co-lead author of the new research. For example, cystic fibrosis can be triggered by more than 2,000 different mutations in a specific gene. "Treating it [these types of conditions] with genome editing often requires many, mutation-specific approaches. That's labor-intensive, and also intensive from a regulatory standpoint" to get all those approaches approved, Witte told Live Science.

An alternative strategy is to introduce a whole new gene to make up for the broken one. The gene editor, described in a report published Thursday (May 15) in the journal Science, enables these types of edits and can insert the new gene directly "upstream" of where the broken one is found in human DNA. More work is needed to get the new gene editor out of the lab and into medical practice, but "we are quite excited by this," Witte said.

Related: CRISPR 'will provide cures for genetic diseases that were incurable before,' says renowned biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys https://www.livescience.com/health/gene ... us-siksnys

Directing evolution in the lab

Classical CRISPR systems are often nicknamed "molecular scissors" because they use proteins to cut DNA. These systems are found naturally in bacteria, which use CRISPR to defend themselves against invaders, such as viruses.

The core of the new gene editor is also borrowed from bacteria, but it does not cut DNA. Rather, it moves large sections of a host's DNA from one location to another in a highly targeted manner. These systems — called CRISPR-associated transposases (CASTs) — have been known about since 2017 and act as a way for "jumping genes" to leap around, either within the same cell's DNA or possibly into other cells' genomes.

https://www.livescience.com/health/gene ... -disorders

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Surgeons Perform First Human Bladder Transplant

The procedure could be life-changing for some people with debilitating conditions.



Oscar Larrainzar, the recipient of the first-ever bladder transplant, waited to be discharged from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center on Tuesday.Credit...Kyle Grillot for The New York Times

Surgeons in Southern California have performed the first human bladder transplant, introducing a new, potentially life-changing procedure for people with debilitating bladder conditions.

The operation was performed earlier this month by a pair of surgeons from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California on a 41-year-old man who had lost much of his bladder capacity from treatments for a rare form of bladder cancer.

“I was a ticking time bomb,” the patient, Oscar Larrainzar, said on Thursday during a follow-up appointment with his doctors. “But now I have hope.”

The doctors plan to perform bladder transplants in four more patients as part of a clinical trial to get a sense of outcomes like bladder capacity and graft complications before pursuing a larger trial to expand its use.

Dr. Inderbir Gill, who performed the surgery along with Dr. Nima Nassiri, called it “the realization of a dream” for treating thousands of patients with crippling pelvic pain, inflammation and recurrent infections.

“There is no question: A potential door has been opened for these people that did not exist earlier,” said Dr. Gill, the chairman of the urology department at U.S.C.

Pushing the Envelope

Until now, most patients who undergo a bladder removal have a portion of their intestine repurposed to help them pass urine. Some receive an ileal conduit, which empties urine into a bag outside the abdomen, while others are given a so-called neobladder, or a pouch tucked inside the body that attaches to the urethra and allows patients to urinate more traditionally.

But bowel tissue, riddled with bacteria, is “inherently contaminated,” Dr. Gill said, and introducing it to the “inherently sterile” urinary tract leads to complications in up to 80 percent of patients, ranging from electrolyte imbalances to a slow reduction in kidney function. The loss of the intestinal segment can also cause new digestive issues.

Dr. Despoina Daskalaki, a transplant surgeon at Tufts Medical Center who was not involved in the new procedure, said advances in transplant medicine (from critical life-sustaining organs, like hearts and livers, to other body parts, like faces, hands, uteri and penises) had led doctors to start “pushing the envelope.”

“They’re asking: ‘Why do we have to put up with all the complications? Why don’t we try and give this person a new bladder?’” Dr. Daskalaki said.

Image
A portrait of Dr. Nima Nassiri, who wears a blue cap, white lab coat and light blue scrubs, posing in front of a bright off-white wall.

Dr. Nima Nassiri, assistant clinical professor of urology at the U.C.L.A. David Geffen School of Medicine.Credit...Kyle Grillot for The New York Times

Image
Surgeons hunch over their work during Mr. Larrainzar's surgery.

Mr. Larrainzar’s surgery earlier this month, performed by Dr. Nassiri and Dr. Inderbir Gill.Credit...Nick Carranza/UCLA Health

In late 2020, Dr. Nassiri was in his fourth year of residency at the University of Southern California when he and Dr. Gill sat down in the hospital cafeteria to begin brainstorming approaches. After Dr. Nassiri began a fellowship on kidney transplantation at U.C.L.A., the two surgeons continued working together across institutions to test both robotic and manual techniques, practicing first on pigs, then human cadavers, and finally, human research donors who no longer had brain activity but maintained a heartbeat.

One of the challenges of transplanting a bladder was the complex vascular infrastructure. The surgeons needed to operate deep inside the pelvis of the donor to capture and preserve a rich supply of blood vessels so the organ could thrive inside the recipient.

//More on Organ Transplants
//Skipped Over in Line: The sickest patients are supposed to get priority for lifesaving transplants. But more and more, they are being skipped. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ients.html

//Pig Organ Transplants: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to two biotechnology companies for clinical trials that will transplant organs from genetically modified pigs into people with kidney failure. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/heal ... rials.html

//Organ in a Box: Perfusion keeps a donated organ alive outside the body, giving surgeons extra time and increasing the number of transplants possible. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/heal ... usion.html

//Harvesting Organs: A new method for retrieving hearts from organ donors has ignited a debate over the surprisingly blurry line between life and death in a hospital. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/nyre ... -dead.html

“When we’re removing a bladder because of cancer, we basically just cut them. We do it in less than an hour on a near-daily basis,” Dr. Gill said. “For a bladder donation, that is a significantly higher order of technical intensity.”

The surgeons also chose to conjoin the right and left arteries — as well as the right and left veins — while the organ was on ice, so that only two connections were needed in the recipient, rather than four.

When their strategy was perfected in 2023, the two drew up plans for a clinical trial, which eventually would bring the world’s first recipient: Oscar.

An Ideal First Candidate

ImageMr. Larrainzar peers from his hospital room through an opening in its doors.

Mr. Larrainzar had survived a rare type of bladder cancer, but a surgery to resect the bladder tumor had left him “without much of a bladder at all,” one of his doctors said.Credit...Kyle Grillot for The New York Times

When Mr. Larrainzar walked into Dr. Nassiri’s clinic in April 2024, Dr. Nassiri recognized him. Almost four years earlier, Mr. Larrainzar, a husband and father of four, had been navigating end-stage kidney disease and renal cancer, and Dr. Nassiri helped remove both of his kidneys.

But Mr. Larrainzar had also survived urachal adenocarcinoma, a rare type of bladder cancer, and a surgery to resect the bladder tumor had left him “without much of a bladder at all,” Dr. Nassiri said. A normal bladder can hold more than 300 cubic centimeters of fluid; Mr. Larrainzar’s could hold 30.

Now, years of dialysis had begun to fail; fluid was building up inside his body. And with so much scarring in the abdominal region, it would have been difficult to find enough usable length of bowel to pursue another option.

“He showed up serendipitously,” Dr. Nassiri said, “but he was kind of an ideal first candidate for this.”

On a Saturday night earlier this month, Dr. Nassiri received a call about a potential bladder match for Mr. Larrainzar. He and Dr. Gill drove straight to the headquarters of OneLegacy, an organ procurement organization, in Azusa, Calif., and joined a team of seven surgeons working overnight to recover an array of organs from a donor.

The two brought the kidney and bladder to U.C.L.A., then stopped home for a shower, breakfast and a short nap. They completed the eight-hour surgery to give Mr. Larrainzar a new bladder and kidney later that day.

Image
Two surgeons hunch over an organ in a bowl with ice in a darkened operating room.

Preparing the bladder for transplantation during the surgery. Dr. Nassiri said that kidney transplants can sometimes take up to a week to process urine, but when the kidney and bladder were connected inside Mr. Larrainzar, there was “immediate output.”Credit...Nick Carranza/UCLA Health

Image
Dr. Gill and Dr. Nassiri, both in blue caps and scrubs, with Dr. Nassiri also wearing a white lab coat, chatting in a hallway of the hospital.

Dr. Gill, left, and Dr. Nassiri. The former called the surgery “the realization of a dream” for treating thousands of patients with crippling pelvic pain, inflammation and recurrent infections.Credit...Nick Carranza/UCLA Health

Dr. Nassiri said that kidney transplants can sometimes take up to a week to process urine, but when the kidney and bladder were connected inside Mr. Larrainzar, there was a great connection — “immediate output” — and his creatinine level, which measures kidney function, started to improve immediately. Mr. Larrainzar has already lost 20 pounds of fluid weight since the surgery.

The biggest risks of organ transplantation are the body’s potential rejection of the organ and the side effects caused by the mandatory immune-suppressing drugs given to prevent organ rejection. That is why, for Dr. Rachel Forbes, a transplant surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was not involved in the procedure, the excitement is more tempered.

“It’s obviously a technical advance,” she said, but “we already have existing options for people without bladders, and without the downside of requiring immunosuppression.” Unless a patient is — like Mr. Larrainzar — going to be on those medications anyway, “I would be a little bit nervous that you would be exchanging some complications for others,” she said.

‘A Miracle’

Image
A close-up view of holding hands in a hospital room.

Mr. Larrainzar held hands with Sandy Romero, his wife, as they waited for him to be discharged.Credit...Kyle Grillot for The New York Times

A new bladder transplant also does not have nerve connections in the recipient, so while it works well as a storage organ, doctors did not know whether Mr. Larrainzar would ever be able to sense a full bladder, let alone hold and empty it naturally. They spoke about catheters, abdomen maneuvers and eventually developing an on-demand bladder stimulator to help with the release.

But at a follow-up appointment on Thursday morning — just two days after Mr. Larrainzar was discharged from the hospital — Dr. Nassiri removed the catheter and gave him fluids, and Mr. Larrainzar immediately felt that he could urinate.

Dr. Nassiri called it a miracle, then phoned Dr. Gill, who was in a U.S.C. operating room, and exclaimed two words: “He peed!”

“No way! What the hell?” Dr. Gill said. “My jaw is on the floor.”

After finishing the surgery, Dr. Gill drove straight to U.C.L.A. and watched Mr. Larrainzar do it again.

“Of course, this is very, very early. Let’s see how everything goes,” Dr. Gill cautioned. “But it’s the first time he has been able to pee in seven years. For all of us, this is huge.”

Mr. Larrainzar, exhausted, smiled, and Dr. Nassiri brought him a bottle of mineral water to celebrate.

Emily Baumgaertner Nunn is a national health reporter for The Times, focusing on public health issues that primarily affect vulnerable communities

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/heal ... e9677ea768

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This $35,000 Computer Runs on Human Brain Cells. Scientists Say It’s Not Conscious—Yet.

The path toward our mind-machine merger never has never seemed clearer


Yuichiro Chino//Getty Images

Here’s what you’ll learn about when you read this story:

- The blending of biological and artificial “computing” is a topic that stretches back to the 1940s and 50s.
- Now, Cortical Labs has successfully developed a brain-on-a-chip computer primarily designed to aid scientists and researchers studying diseases, therapies, and treatments.
- The new computer—called CL-1—will be widely available in late 2025 for around $35,000.

Two very different types of “computers” dominate the world today. The first is the type you’re likely reading this article on—machines powered by transistors and silicon that make our modern society possible. Then, there’s the biological type of computer that’s been a couple billion years in the making—the human brain, which has neurons and a cerebral cortex instead of transistors and a motherboard.

These are two wildly different architectures with totally different capabilities—the human brain somehow achieves a level of consciousness unseen elsewhere in nature (or the observable universe, for that matter), but computers can do calculating tasks many times faster than our minds could ever fathom. So, it should come as no surprise that since the very origins of computing, scientists and engineers have pondered whether these two disparate “computers” could one day merge together.

RELATED STORY

This Brain Structure Could Create Consciousness https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... ciousness/

Well, apparently, that time is now. Cortical Labs, an Australia-based company, announced earlier this year that it had successfully developed the world’s first “biological computer,” which it calls the CL-1. Fusing human brain cells with silicon hardware, Cortical Labs says the CL-1 is an ideal tool for science and medical research, meaning that this thing isn’t going to be siding onto your desktop and delivering a 120 frames-per-second gaming experience. Instead, this $35,000 computer—which will be widely available later this year—could make medical testing and other scientific trials easier, as scientists can essentially test would-be drugs on this ‘body in a box’ biological computer.

“The large majority of drugs for neurological and psychiatric diseases that enter clinical trial testing fail, because there’s so much more nuance when it comes to the brain—but you can actually see that nuance when you test with these tools,” Brett Kagan, Cortical Labs’ Chief Scientific Officer, told New Atlas back in March. “Our hope is that we’re able to replace significant areas of animal testing with this. Animal testing is unfortunately still necessary, but I think there are a lot of cases where it can be replaced and that’s an ethically good thing.”

Kagan was directly involved in the development of CL-1’s predecessor, DishBrain, which grabbed headlines back in 2022 for successfully playing a game of Pong (the results of which were published in the journal Neuron). As Kagan explained at the time, DishBrain played Pong quite unlike a human brain, and instead described the neurons as sort of experiencing its surroundings as if it was the Pong paddle itself.

However, this dawning era of neurons-on-a-chip computing brings up a sticky question: Could we be possibly subjecting a type of sentience to a “life” of abject misery or, at the very least, boredom? Back in 2022, Kagan said that his team was working closely with bioethicists to answer this question, and clearly came to the conclusion that this wasn’t a concern—at least, not yet.

RELATED STORY

This Experience Could Teach Us About Consciousness https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... xperience/

Speaking with Live Science, a stem cell research unaffiliated with Cortical Labs came to a similar conclusion, and Suhas Kumar from Sandia National Laboratories also told Popular Mechanics back in 2022 that the simplicity of this setup means the neurons are simply responding to a stimulus. However, seeing as this is just a first step into the broader world of neuromorphic computing, the relative simplicity of CL-1 could get dizzyingly complex pretty quick.

The Cortical Labs team argues that Synthetic Biological Intelligence, or SBI, is “inherently more natural than AI” because it uses materials more akin to the human brain. As the technology progresses, this could produce results similar to that of a human mind, blurring the lines between the world’s two greatest computers even further.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/scienc ... -computer/

[kmaherali]

Technology is breaking our concept of the self. It could help us heal the mind

Virtual reality is digging up age-old questions about who we are. That has profound implications for neuroscience


Young woman next to lighttrace face, wearing VR glasses, looking closely at the lightrace rendering. (Getty Images / Henrik Sorensen)

When Arthur Tres put on the virtual reality headset, he became another person. The device was connected to a woman across the room, who inhabited his body in the swap. Their movements were synchronized with motion sensor technology, so that each time he moved an arm, it lifted her arm. Each time he turned his head, it turned her head. Not only did he experience the sensation of inhabiting the other person’s body, but he also saw himself from her eyes.

Tres knew he was tall, but from the point of view of the woman he shared the experience with, he saw his size in a different way.

“I saw myself as this extraneous body that was a bit threatening,” Tres told Salon in a phone interview. “I could really feel like I was looking up to myself, and that felt super odd.”

Related

These brain scans of dying patients may reveal what happens when you die https://www.salon.com/2023/05/03/these- ... -when-you/

Tres is part of a collective called the Be Another Lab, which uses immersive technology to help people better understand what it is like to be someone else through virtual embodiment. It’s one of several projects that have emerged in recent years to examine how this technology can impact our psyche and our sense of self.

Whether we have a “self,” has been debated between philosophers for centuries. In Ancient Greece, Plato thought the self, or the soul, was immortal, while Aristotle saw it as something that was connected to the body. In the 17th century, René Descartes connected the idea of the self to consciousness when he famously stated, “I think, therefore I am.”

People tend to experience the world through the perception of a “self,” as if it were some sort of director steering the ship of our lives, making decisions and helping us carry out the everyday functions we need to survive.

Yet in philosophies like Buddhism, there is no fixed self. Rather, many believe that the innermost parts of being human are interconnected with all things and ever changing — that the self is an illusion, and overattachment to it is the source of suffering.

"The self is a very complex system of mechanisms that serve as a way to bridge our physical, individual body to our social, cultural and physical world."

Finding out whether the self is real is likely to remain elusive, and it may be something that can never be proven one way or the other. Yet science can offer some clues about whether there is or is not a self in each of us.

“The self is a very complex system of mechanisms that serve as a way to bridge our physical, individual body to our social, cultural and physical world,” said Şerife Tekin, a mental health ethics researcher at SUNY Upstate Medical University and author of "Reclaiming the Self in Psychiatry." “I think it can be elusive because it is an extremely complex phenomenon.”

There are various elements of our sense of self. Part of the way we understand ourselves is by recognizing our physical body and how it moves through space in a process called proprioception. Virtual embodiment experiences like those used in the Be Another Lab work by sending the brain confusing signals about where it is, disrupting this process.

In the brain’s attempt to reconcile a coherent story of seeing, smelling and touching the environment around it from a new perspective, it draws the conclusion that it is experiencing the world from the body of another.

“It really triggers this override of perception,” Tres said. “The system kind of reroutes your perception to make you feel like you are somewhere else.”

These experiences build off of older studies that played similar tricks on the brain to alter perception. In 1998, scientists set up an experiment called the rubber hand illusion, in which they simultaneously stroked a rubber hand and one of the participants’ real hands to trick the brain into thinking that both of their hands were being stroked.

When the brain is locating the physical self in its environment, the sensory cortex is activated. Research has shown that the premotor and posterior parietal cortices, along with the temporoparietal junction, are active in the brain when we are locating or thinking about ourselves. When these regions of the brain are disturbed through experiments like the rubber hand illusion, people report feeling out-of-body experiences. The anterior precuneus, situated between the brain’s two hemispheres, has also been linked to out-of-body experiences.

Bigna Lenggenhager, a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich, said these same regions of the brain were active when people had out-of-body experiences stimulated from virtual embodiment exercises. These same areas have also been shown to be triggered with meditation or psychedelic experiences, she added. This could be why many people who have taken psychedelics report things like “ego death,” in which their sense of self temporarily dissolves.

“The idea with the current knowledge we have would be that the brain is no longer able to integrate these inputs in a coherent way as it does generally,” Lenggenhager told Salon in a video call. “Using these technologies, it’s really something that the brain has not been prepared for.”

There are other aspects of the sense of self, too. We also have a self-concept of who we are, shaped by our beliefs, feelings and perceptions about ourselves. Some researchers are conducting experiments to see if virtual embodiment can change some of the characteristics we identify with.

"These aspects of ourselves are more like habits and with intentionality, we can actually experience a surprising amount of change."

Some ethical concerns have been raised about using this technology to conduct experiments due in part to the possibility that they could increase depersonalization, a feeling of detachment from oneself that has been described as “observing the world from behind glass.” However, studies have shown that these experiments can positively impact body image for people with eating disorders, reduce racial bias and increase empathy. Lenggenhager is currently working on experiments in which participants interact with a child version of themselves to see if this tool could be used in psychotherapy to work with the “inner child.”

“Much like they do in classical psychotherapy sessions, you would call the child or tell them whatever the child would have needed at that point,” Lenggenhager said. “Then you switch perspective and be this little child … and you see a big adult who tells you all of these things.”

Other studies have shown that aspects of our sense of self can be changed through other means. Personality traits like openness, mindfulness and empathy have been shown to increase after psychedelic experiences. In a review of several studies exploring the impact of feeling “awe,” participants reported feeling less entitled, were more generous and acted more ethically in experiments where they had the opportunity to cheat.

The authors concluded that these changes largely occurred because participants felt a diminished sense of self: “Our investigation indicates that awe, although often fleeting and hard to describe, serves a vital social function,” they wrote. “By diminishing the emphasis on the individual self, awe may encourage people to forego strict self-interest to improve the welfare of others.”

In another study conducted by Madeleine Gross, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara Memory Emotion Thought Awareness lab, participants were able to change aspects of their personality, like curiosity, by using a mindfulness-based app.

“These aspects of ourselves are more like habits and with intentionality, we can actually experience a surprising amount of change,” Gross told Salon in a phone interview. “Self-awareness is a big part of people being able to change the self, which kind of makes intuitive sense.”

While there is evidence we can change some elements of our self-concept, other aspects of our sense of self are harder to access. The “self” many people identify with is not just our physical body or our psychological chatter, but a narrator to our life story, tying together all of our sensory experiences and memories together in a throughline. The origins of this personal subjective consciousness have been eluding researchers for decades.


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“The self is the story we tell ourselves about who we are,” said Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There's this thing that we all have called personal subjective consciousness, and that becomes hard to disentangle from the concept of self.”

Compared to our physical concept of self, this element of our sense of self is more difficult — or some would argue, impossible — to shake. In the 1960s, Gazzaniga began conducting experiments in split-brain patients whose corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres, was absent.

What he found through his experiments was that the left hemisphere was largely the “interpreter” making sense of sensory information that entered the brain. However, in patients with a split brain, the left-brain interpreter could still create a narrative based on information the right brain had received independently. In the experiments, patients did not report feeling like they had two narrators interpreting their experience — they felt like they had a unified sense of self.

“Consciousness is what the brain does, and the brain may do it very locally, but it only appears as this massive, unified system,” Gazzaniga told Salon in a phone interview. “That’s because over time, any expression of any one local action gets stitched together and gives us our sense of conscious wholeness that we all experience.”

The fact that our sense of self is inseparable from our subjective personal experience is enough evidence to convince some that the self does not exist. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher and professor emeritus at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, argues that we are instead operating under something called a transparent phenomenal self model, which is essentially a computational entity in our brains.

“It is a conscious whole organism model, which is so good that you, the organism, cannot recognize it as a model,” Metzinger told Salon in a video call. “That is why you, the organism, are kind of glued to it, fully attached to it or identify with it.”

Even psychedelic experiences or other out-of-body experiences ultimately boil down to signals in the brain that can be jarring when they disrupt the thought patterns or narrative that our “self” has been telling us, Metzinger explained. However, that doesn’t mean these cannot be powerful and therapeutic experiences.

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Our sense of self helps us identify with others and form relationships. It helps us plan ahead. It can help navigate us through challenging thoughts or emotions. Many psychotherapy models rely on the sense of self to function, said Mark Leary, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University. This also supports the idea that the sense of self is created in the brain.

Still, associating too much with the self has been linked to psychiatric disorders like depression, where the mind ruminates on the self and the body can become oppressive. Conversely, too little identification with the self is linked to things like schizophrenia, in which people feel detached from themselves.

“So many of the things that people go to see counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists about are things that may be a real problem in their life, but they are making it worse by how they're thinking about it,” Leary told Salon in a phone interview. “When you dig down into what a lot of psychological therapies are doing, they are often trying to change either how much people are thinking about themselves or the content of what they are thinking about themselves.”

Metzinger is a life-long meditator himself and thinks processes like these have the power to bring deep insights and knowledge that help us understand internal models of our “selves.” To him, the process of uncovering the answer to the question of whether the self exists does not take away from that experience. He cited Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist that talks about this phenomenon in his book, “Unweaving the Rainbow.”

“Dawkins always said that if you see a rainbow and then they tell you something about wavelength and electromagnetic variation, the rainbow isn't destroyed,” Metzinger said. “It's just as beautiful as it was before.”

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By ELIZABETH HLAVINKA
Elizabeth Hlavinka is a staff writer at Salon covering health and drugs. She specializes in exploring taboo topics and complex questions that help humans understand their place in the world.

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/26/techno ... -the-mind/