[hithre]

Surely it can only be fake. How can it be legal?

But seeing so many people from the hacker news community reacting to it as normal or exiting is troubling. This is obviously breaching the limits of ethics.

[0xTJ]

It's a group of cells on a plate? What is there here that would be illegal? This isn't any different than growing some rat intestinal lining cells in a petri dish.

[Zambyte]

How do you source living human brain cells? (Not necessarily trying to make a point, I'm genuinely interested)

[volkercraig]

You buy them from a supplier.

but to answer your question honestly the supplier keeps stock of them by growing them and storing them. The original cells came from donations.

You could always extract some cells from a biopsy as well, but these guys likely just bought them from sigma or whatever the Australian lab-supply monopoly is.

[undeveloper]

there are many "immortal" strains of cells that are mass produced and sold to labs, most notably "HeLa" cells. in this case in particular, "iPSCs" cells are used, sourcing skin cells or blood cells (with informed consent of the patient), and using those differentiated (or "specialized") cells to create pluripotent (or "less specialized") cells that can then be transformed into neurons

[NackerHughes]

Where did they get the brain cells from?

[jeffybefffy519]

Cortical labs have done this before, its their whole thing…