People who gave cells for medical research are turning up inside computers - without their consent. == It's the Organoids == Brain-based biocomputing grows human cortical neurons into organoids, small three-dimensional clusters that mimic the structure of a brain region, then wires them to microelectrode arrays. IN: Stimulation OUT: Neural activity Already, the organoids can demonstrably recognise simple patterns. Brain tissue holds memory and computation in the same substrate, so it needs far fewer components than silicon, and it runs on a tiny fraction of the energy with no cooling plant attached. Writing in Nature, Nada Salem, Insoo Hyun and five colleagues point at the #Bioethics angle that's otherwise been conveniently overlooked. Instead people are mostly arguing about whether organoid might be conscious (itself an extremely cool notion, by the way). So the problem is: Donors sign up for biomedical research. The forms ask whether leftover material may be stored for future biomedical use, and give assurance that reviewers will check that later studies have scientific merit. I mean that IS rather open-ended, but still - incorporating the donors' cells, their DNA, into a Matrix-like computing application, doomed to be an organic slave running tasks in some engineering department with an oversight committee not exactly set up to examine this type of work? It sounds like a stretch or two beyond what they might've thought they were giving consent for. There IS a precedent, along similar "scope creep" or "consent creep" lines: Around 100 members of the Havasupai tribe in Arizona gave blood in the 1990s for a diabetes study under broad consent. Two decades later, 41 donors and their families sued, having found the samples had gone into research on mental illness and ancestry. The authors want three things in order of preference: * establish new cell lines, or * go back to existing donors for fresh consent, or * submit to independent review where neither is possible A stem-cell line can be cultured indefinitely, but the donor can't be asked again once they've died and the science carries on regardless. #Neuroscience #Biocomputing