Tiny ‘brains’ grown in the lab could become conscious and feel pain — and we’re not ready. Lab-grown brain tissue is too simple to experience consciousness, but as innovation progresses, neuroscientists question whether it’s time to revisit the ethics of this line of research.

“Scientists are getting closer to growing human brains in the lab, and it’s spurring an ethical debate over the welfare of these lab-reared tissues.

The debate surrounds “[brain organoids](https://www.livescience.com/minibrains-brain-organoids-explained),” which are sometimes mistaken for sci-fi-inspired “[brains in boxes](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/brain_in_a_box).” However, these small assemblies of brain tissue grown from stem cells are too simple to function like a real human brain. As such, scientists have assumed brain organoids lack consciousness, which has led to lax research regulations.

Some scientists, however, take a different view.

“We feel that in the fear of hype and science-fiction inspired exaggeration, the pendulum has swung far too far in the opposite direction,” [Christopher Wood](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5517-9496), a bioethics researcher at Zhejiang University in [China](https://www.livescience.com/tag/china), told Live Science in an email. In a perspective piece published Sept. 12 in the journal [Patterns](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389925002132), Wood and his colleagues argued that technological advances may soon lead to the creation of conscious organoids.

The authors say regulations regarding the use of organoids should be reviewed. It would be unethical for a conscious organoid to experience its own thoughts and interests, or to feel pain, said [Boyd Lomax](https://bioethics.jhu.edu/people/profile/lomax-boyd-phd/), a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.”

Honest question. Do we even know where and how consciousness works in the brain? If yes, we can avoid it and continue with the research. If not, imo we should still do this before we play god on brains.

Just sheer horror of being “awoken” from the void just to be a lab subject in a dish is sending shivers down the spine

While I agree that ethics must always come first, there seems to be a peculiar bias with regard to things that are new. We already know there are billions of brains that are capable of consciousness and of feeling pain. Their suffering, however, is routinely ignored. Factory farms are full of them, and they endure daily torment, often for utterly trivial reasons.

Yet when it comes to a few clusters of brain tissue in a lab, i.e. cells that might, perhaps, someday have the potential to feel something, we panic. The outrage seems less about genuine suffering and more about our discomfort with the unfamiliar.

The ethical concern here feels deeply out of balance.

I don’t understand where this notion comes from that consciousness is a true/false dichotomy, rather than a gradual thing. I think there’s little evidence for the former besides antiquated anthropocentric or spiritual ideas, and imo a lot of evidence for the latter – even an individual being can display various degrees of consciousness.

While we don’t understand the mechanism of consciousness, basically nobody doubts that mammals are conscious and yet mice and rats are tortured daily for the purpose of scientific discovery

We are literally being farmed for cheap labor by the corporations with government subsidies, but let’s make sure this clump of cells with no consciousness has rights.