Lab-Grown Human Brains Power ‘Wetware’

Scientists are building experimental computers from tiny lab-grown clusters of human neurons with the aim of creating ultra-efficient “wetware” that can learn, adapt and run AI-type tasks using a fraction of today’s energy.

What Are These “Mini Brains”?

In this case, “mini brains” are brain organoids, which are small three-dimensional clusters of living human neurons and support cells grown from stem cells. They are not conscious or comparable to a human brain, but they share the same biological building blocks and can produce electrical activity that researchers can stimulate and record. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (in Baltimore, Maryland, United States) refer to this emerging field as “organoid intelligence”, a term that captures both the scientific ambition and the ethical caution surrounding biocomputing.