Inside a lab in Vevey, Switzerland, a scientist gives tiny clumps of human brain cells the nutrient-rich fluid they need to stay alive.
It is vital these “mini brains” remain healthy, because they are serving as rudimentary computer processors — and once they die, they cannot be rebooted.
This new field of research, called biocomputing or “wetware,” aims to harness the evolutionarily honed yet still mysterious computing power of the human brain.
Photo: AFP
During a tour of Swiss start-up FinalSpark’s lab, cofounder Fred Jordan said he believes that processors using brain cells will one day replace the chips powering the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
The supercomputers behind AI tools such as ChatGPT use silicon semiconductors to simulate the neurons and networks of the human brain.
“Instead of trying to mimic, let’s use the real thing,” Jordan said.
Photo: AFP
Among other potential advantages, biocomputing could help address the skyrocketing energy demands of AI, which have already threatened climate emissions targets and led some tech giants to resort to nuclear power.
“Biological neurons are one million times more energy efficient than artificial neurons,” Jordan said. They can also be endlessly reproduced in the lab.
For now, wetware’s computing power is a very long way from competing with the hardware that runs the world.
Another question lingers: Could these tiny brains become conscious?
To make its “bioprocessors,” FinalSpark first purchases stem cells. These cells, which were originally human skin cells from anonymous human donors, could become any cell in the body. FinalSpark’s scientists then turn them into neurons, which are collected into millimeter-wide clumps called brain organoids.
Electrodes are attached to the organoids, which allow the scientists to “spy on their internal discussion,” he said.
Scientists could also stimulate the organoids with a small electric current. Whether they respond with a spike in activity or not is roughly the equivalent of the ones or zeros in traditional computing.
Ten universities around the world are conducting experiments using FinalSpark’s organoids.
University of Bristol researcher Benjamin Ward-Cherrier used one of the organoids as the brain of a robot that managed to distinguish between different braille letters.
There are many challenges, including encoding the data in a way the organoid might understand — then trying to interpret what the brain cells “spit out,” he said.
“Working with robots is very easy by comparison,” Ward-Cherrier said. “There’s also the fact that they are living cells — and that means that they do die.”
Ward-Cherrier was halfway through an experiment when the organoid died and his team had to start over.
FinalSpark said the organoids live for up to six months.
At Johns Hopkins University, researcher Lena Smirnova is using similar organoids to study brain conditions such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease in the hopes of finding new treatments.
Biocomputing is more “pie in the sky,” unlike the “low-hanging fruit” use of the technology for biomedical research — but that could change dramatically over the next 20 years, she said.
Some scientists dismissed the idea that the tiny balls of cells in petri dishes were at risk of developing anything resembling consciousness.
Jordan said that “this is at the edge of philosophy,” so FinalSpark collaborates with ethicists.
The organoids — which lack pain receptors — have about 10,000 neurons, compared with a human brain’s 100 billion, he added.
However much about our brains, including how they create consciousness, remains a mystery.
That is why Ward-Cherrier said he hoped that beyond computer processing, biocomputing would ultimately reveal more about how our brains work.
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