Disembodied Brains

Society has long been fascinated with mixes of humans and animals, and scientists have recently developed human-animal neuro-chimeras, animals with some component of a human brain. Society has also been fascinated by the “brain in the vat,” and now scientists have developed human brain organoids, small parts of a human brain in a dish grown from cells from a person’s body. The typical reaction to these technologies is shock or disgust, responses which this book closely examines. The public tends to believe in a foundational distinction between humans and animals, and the neuro-chimera violates this distinction, resulting in public opposition. Similarly, the public tends to believe that disembodied human parts are not totally separate from the human from whom they were taken, and therefore that a brain organoid in a dish retains the “essence” of its human source. This too results in greater concern about such organoids. The book also examines more general attitudes toward biotechnology that affect the public’s views of neuro-chimeras and organoids. It concludes with a discussion of how to set a public policy so that limits on these technologies are possible—allowing the development of the technologies for medical research but preventing them from achieving the public’s dystopian vision of the very human animal or the organoid that is perceived as actually a part of another human.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.