[ummonk]

It seems needlessly provocative to use human neurons to do this. Presumably they could have had the same effects with neurons from another species. It’s like they want to provoke a backlash from religious people against scientific experimentation.

[drawingthesun]

It's not needlessly provocative human neurons have shown in almost every study to be superior to all other animal neurons.

Let the backlash happen and as a society let's put a stop to letting religious idiocy get in the way of science.

There is an entire field of study for ethical science and I stand behind that 100%.

Unethical science can get lost!

I'm not a progress at any costs type of person.

But is this actually unethical or just something a religious idiot doesn't like?

[lvass]

Only religious idiots would prefer a "normal" life over having human-brained gorilla chimeras do all the work and just consuming psychotropics all day, right?

[IIAOPSW]

Oh captain my captain, lead me to this promised land!

[rongopo]

Very few people are not brainwashed in one direction or another, there is no need to call them idiots.

[antiterra]

FYI, pretty sure the parent of the comment you’re responding to is the one that’s actually calling them idiots.

[rongopo]

Enough of talking about them, then :)

[TedDoesntTalk]

> human neurons have shown in almost every study to be superior

Until recently I thought a neuron is a neuron is a neuron. How are they different between species?

[drdeca]

My understanding is that they don't just differ between species, but they differ substantially between different types within the same individual.

My understanding is extremely limited.

That being said, my impression is that some of the axiis they can vary on include things like : how they respond to some other chemicals ("neurotransmitters"? not sure if that's the right word) in their environment, whethether they produce/emit those other chemicals, the types of conditions under which they fire (e.g. from how much they "leak" activation over time, counteracting the signals they get sent from others), things like uh, I think(?) whether they tend to fire at a particular rate by default which can be increased or decreased by signals they receive(?) vs whether they by default do not fire unless they receive enough other signals,

I'm unsure of basically all the things I just listed, but my impression is that there are lots of ways they can differ, and they definitely aren't all the same.

[obscur]

I would like a source for the first claim. When I read the preprint for this paper half a year ago it was actually one of their claims that to the best of their knowledge their Pong experiment was the first to show human neurons being ‘better’.

[tsol]

Are there actually any religious people against this? In general I haven't heard of groups that are against culturing human cells

[drdeca]

Well, seydor's comment that they actually used induced pluripotent cells derived from skin cells, rather than stem cells from fetuses, makes me feel better about it.

I'm of course not against, in general, "culturing human cells", but I have moral uncertainty/concern about those derived from fetuses, as well as any large quantities (in one group) of human neuron cells (or, also, but to a lesser degree, large quantities in one group of other kinds of nerve cells).

That's not to say that I would be confident that what was done would be wrong if they were using cells derived from fetuses, but, I would think it more likely that there would be a moral problem with it. (And this feeling/belief/concern is in part due to religious belief.)

(I can imagine someone saying "But seeing as induced pluripotent stem cells seem to behave in effectively the same ways as 'actual stem cells', how do you know that whatever moral problems you think would be present if using 'actual stem cells', don't also apply to the induced pluripotent cells?" And to that imaginary interlocutor, I must admit that thay have somewhat of a point, in that I suppose I can't entirely rule that out, but, my intuition, which unfortunately is most of what I have to go on because we have not been granted a book detailing precisely every last detail of the metaphysics of personhood etc. , suggests to me that it seems substantially less likely to be a problem.

Even if it might theoretically be possible to use induced pluripotent cells to form a fetus which could develop into a full child which would be a person,

(is this thought to be theoretically possible? I mean, outside of something as general purpose as arbitrarily rearranging the atoms, or using cells from an outside source, and just moving induced pluripotent cells around while treating them with various chemicals and nutrients, is it thought that in theory this could produce a viable fetus?)

it still feels reasonably unlikely that without actually starting to do that, and only converting what type of cells some skin cells are, that this would constitute creating something with any moral patienthood. One such reason being that, I would think, there wouldn't be a clear distinction of how many such entities would have been created. Would it be one moral patient per cell? That seems implausible, especially assuming that multiple such cells would need to be used together to create a viable fetus. One might point out then that identical twins can arise from one zygote by the group of cells that the zygote becomes splitting into two parts, and so if moral patienthood is incompatible with ambiguity-of-number, then this should also apply to blastocyst or whatever. And, perhaps? Though, in that case, there is still the clear differentiation of "these came from this zygote", so perhaps there could be some reason there.

Again, my position is one of uncertainty about these questions, and associated concern. My position is not that I know for certain that it is less morally problematic to use induced pluripotent stem cells than it is to use stem cells derived e.g. directly from a blastocyst, but that it seems substantially less likely to me that using induced pluripotent cells is a problem than it is that using stem cells from a blastocyst is a problem, though neither is certain.)

[seydor]

technically they used human skin cells, which they induced to be pluripotent, which then became neurons

[_mhr_]

They compared human cells to mouse cells, showing improved performance for the human cells.