‘Do We Need a Human Brain in a Monkey?’ (2019)

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Some would say we’ve already got it the other way around.

This was supposed to give researchers “a better animal” to run experiments on, searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease. Everyone in the world would like to see a cure for that… “humanizing” monkey brains?

Do We Need a Human Brain in a Monkey?

All it gave them was a monkey with some human tissue shot into its brain.

One can’t help wondering how serious some of these experiments are. Do they really expect to learn anything useful, or is it just to make a splash in Academia?

Do We Need a Human Brain in a Monkey?

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There is no one who doesn’t want scientists to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. But so far there has been no cure; because the animals whose brains they study just really aren’t similar enough to human brains to be worth that much.

So what we need, say scientists in Canada and China, and at Yale, is to inject human tissue into a monkey’s brain to make it much more like a human brain (https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/it-just-really-ethically-scares-me-caution-urged-as-scientists-look-to-create-human-monkey-chimeras)… And honk if you think this is a good idea.

See, they need a “better” animal to study, to experiment on. They are thinking of “biologically humanizing a large portion of a monkey’s brain.”

Uh-huh. And when the monkey turns around and sues you, what then? Like, just how human do you want to make the monkey’s brain? And is that really the sort of thing a righteous person does? Really?

Close observation of human patients–wouldn’t that be better?

Maybe–but not as much fun  as playing Frankenstein with monkey brains.