- 16 October, 2022

- 14 October, 2022

16 October, 2022

- WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their accounts back after talking about a Beijing protest

Humans and technology

WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their accounts back after talking about a Beijing protest

Zeyi Yang   5:00AM, 16 Oct, 2022

On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week.

“I have been in a terrible mental state due to the massive pressure from recent pandemic prevention measures. I lost my control, and sent sensitive statements in a group chat with six people,” one user wrote. “I have profoundly realized my mistake. I hope Tencent can give me a chance to start with a clean slate. I won’t let down the party and the country.” The message was posted with a special hashtag for “Tencent Customer Service.”

Messages like this, which surged on Thursday, vary in substance but share urgent pleas from users who have been banned from the Tencent-owned super app WeChat—begging company representatives to restore their social accounts on a service that has become an almost indispensable part of life in China. While the hashtags themselves aren’t new, they were flooded late in the week after WeChat reportedly banned a large number of users. Those affected believe it was because they had discussed a rare political protest in Beijing.

It all started on the afternoon of October 13, two days before the high-profile 20th Communist Party Congress, when a protester hung banners on an overpass in the capital city that called for removing pandemic control measures and instating democratic reforms. “Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom,” part of one banner reads. “Go on strike, remove the dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping,” reads another.

The timing right before the party congress—as well as the highly sensitive act of mentioning the name of the Chinese president, who is expected to clinch an unprecedented third term at the meeting—has made discussion of the event tightly censored on Chinese social media.

On Weibo, any user content that includes words like “Beijing,” “bridge,” and “brave” is restricted from being searched. Apple Music’s Chinese version removed a song named “Sitong Bridge,” presumably only because the name refers to the place where the protest happened.

This censorship extends to WeChat, the dominant messaging app with over 1.2 billion global users, the majority of whom live in China. Users soon realized that just posting a picture of the event, even in a private group chat, could cause their accounts to be permanently banned.

Chen, a Beijing resident who asked to be identified only by his last name, says he sent a photo of the protest to a group chat at 1:11 p.m Beijing time on Thursday, and his account was permanently banned at 5:35 p.m. The decision was made “according to the relevant Internet policies as well as laws and regulations,” the boilerplate notification from WeChat reads.

Another member of the group chat also tried to send the photo; his account was also banned, Chen later learned. “We knew it would cause a suspension, but we didn’t expect it to be permanent. I thought at the time I would only be banned for a few days,” he says.

Though there’s no official number on how many accounts were banned that day, there are numerous reports across Weibo and other social media platforms of WeChat users’ losing their accounts since the protest, some not knowing what they did wrong. Tencent didn’t respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.

Being banned from WeChat isn’t exactly a trivial matter. It has a significant practical impact on individuals, as they are now blocked from using the many digital services tied to their accounts, from health QR codes to online subscriptions. It takes days, if not weeks, to reestablish their digital connections with a new account.

The mass suspension also has an effect on society as a whole: the latest example of how swiftly China’s censorship machine works to silence dissent will only further chill these voices in the future. Protests like the latest one are already rare in China today, and many people won’t ever learn it happened.

Real-time censorship on WeChat

In China, the government holds social media platforms responsible for closely screening user-generated content. A 2017 regulation from China’s Cyberspace Administration targets online group chats and prohibits both platforms and users from “spreading content forbidden by laws and relevant regulations.” In 2021, popular social media platforms Douban and Weibo were publicly fined millions of yuan for allowing “illegal” content to be seen on their platforms.

WeChat’s terms and conditions has a lengthy section on what content is banned, but it’s only specific when illustrating examples involving scams, spam, rumors, gambling, or pornography. It doesn’t give any examples of the politically sensitive content it censors.

Still, it’s well known that sending politically sensitive content on WeChat, even in private exchanges, can result in account suspension. Similar waves of mass suspension also happened during other online protests, such as when people were criticizing the inept government response to omicron flare-ups in Shanghai in April.

In 2019, the Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab found that WeChat imposes real-time automatic censorship of chat images through a mix of text recognition, visual recognition, and tools for detecting duplicate files. One of the results is that once the system identifies an image as subject to restriction, it can immediately block all users from sending that image. This has sometimes driven users to get creative, using puns, distorted images, or hard-to-understand languages to mask what they want to share.

The real-time censorship system seems to have been applied to images from Sitong Bridge. Tina, a 38-year-old Beijing resident, sent a photo of the protest to a small group chat on Thursday, though she suspects the image didn’t even reach the other members. She later checked with her boyfriend, who is also in the group, and confirmed that he couldn’t see any photo of the protest. Nevertheless, Tina’s WeChat account was permanently banned hours later. (Tina asked to be identified by her English name to protect her identity.)

“The cyber confessional”

Once a WeChat account is permanently banned, there aren’t many ways to appeal the decision. Calling the designated customer service hotline usually just gets you hours of wait time; the in-app appeals process returns a generic response concluding that “the restrictions cannot be removed.”

So over the past few years, users who are desperate to get their accounts back have turned to other social media platforms where Tencent has corporate accounts.

On Weibo, there were two “super topics,” a Weibo community feature that builds on a specific hashtag: “腾讯客服 (Tencent customer service)” and “腾讯人工客服 (Tencent human customer service).” Together, the two topics had over 130,000 posts where users asked, begged, or condemned Tencent in hopes it would give their accounts back.

These posts dated back to 2017, the year after Weibo introduced the super topic feature, but more than half were published in 2022. There was one account that had persistently written to Tencent almost every day since July 26.

Use of the super topics spiked before Weibo removed both topics on the morning of October 14, just a day after the protest. MIT Technology Review examined and archived some of the posts before they were taken down. Weibo didn’t respond to a request for comment. After Weibo removed the two super topics, some users moved to a different super topic, “Tencent,” or resorted to simply tagging Tencent’s corporate accounts.

The surge of posts on Thursday attracted attention from other Weibo users, who named the missives “cyber confessionals,” since users often lay out what they think they did wrong in order to ask Tencent for a second chance; WeChat users are usually not given a detailed explanation for their ban.

But some of the users knew, or suspected, that their account ban was triggered by posting politically sensitive content. “I called the customer service phone number but they didn’t tell me what violated the rules. After self-examination, I found it was because I reposted improper photos,” reads one of the posts on Weibo.

Others were less clear about what happened, yet ready to admit mistakes anyway. “I personally don’t think I’ve sent any harmful information, but if it really was because I did, I’m very sorry and will be cautious with my words and actions in the future,” reads another.

Not all people who posted under these hashtags were banned for political censorship. Some say they spammed too many people or promoted counterfeit products; others had no clue about what happened.

What most of the posts share is a sense of desperation. Since WeChat has come to be used in almost all aspects of life, having your primary account banned can be devastating. The Weibo posts describe how having their WeChat accounts banned made it difficult for people to get messages from colleagues, potential employers, or family members. Some write they are now on the brink of depression.

Meanwhile, Tencent’s customer service Weibo accounts only posted robotic responses under these posts asking them to provide more information. Two Weibo users told MIT Technology Review that posting under the hashtag didn’t help their appeals process at all.

Life after WeChat

Being banned from WeChat turns you into a ghost on the ubiquitous platform. “After losing WeChat, it feels like you lost connection to the world,” says Chen. “Even though you can still log into your WeChat account, read the messages others sent you and the group messages, and make digital payments, you can’t interact with them or reply to them.”

WeChat started allowing banned users to export their contacts in 2020, so if they choose to register a new account and start over, they can add their friends back one by one. But for most WeChat users who have had the app for over a decade, this means adding thousands of contacts manually and explaining to them what they did to trigger the ban.

Chen used his old account for 11 years and had over 1,400 contacts. It took him several hours to add back 500 contacts from his back-up account. “When I was adding contacts back, I was questioned if I was a scammer and the person called me to confirm. If I don’t have this person’s number or other confirmation methods, maybe they will straightaway refuse to befriend me,” Chen says. Then there are the subscriptions, the bookmarked content, the public accounts he follows, and all other information tied to his WeChat account. He needs to migrate all that too.

On Friday, after the discussion of the protest had ebbed, many WeChat users were discovering who among their friends were banned or helping their friends spread their new WeChat handles. A 2020 article that offered a helpful checklist on what to do after being banned by WeChat gained at least 70,000 views overnight.

News of the suspensions obviously had a chilling effect too, as people weighed whether to talk about the protest when it was now clear it could get their accounts banned. By holding people’s access to digital services hostage, the government was able to obstruct the spread of information and increase its control.

Not everyone is willing to become a hostage. While Tina has heard about the posts on Weibo begging Tencent for help, that’s not what she wants to do. She understands the severity of political censorship and doesn’t believe posting will help.

So far, she has only told her close contacts about what happened and plans to try living her life without a WeChat account, at least for a little while. She has always felt she spent too much time on social media apps anyway; maybe this forced leave could be a detox experience.

“Many people were registering their second accounts yesterday. But I told them I won’t. I want to give it a try. If, let’s say, I can still live my life normally without WeChat, I think I can choose not to register another account,” she says. “I don’t think an individual should be bound so close with [WeChat] together.”

14 October, 2022

- Innovation talk with Goldman Sachs TxB

- Brown-Forman CISO Sailaja Kotra-Turner talks about the cybersecurity war

- An architecture for mature enterprise AI

- The Finnish Post reinvents itself with new technologies, including robotic process automation and gamification

- AI-led businesses will rule the future

- Bankers and experts discuss transforming the banking experience through cloud-driven modernization

- The Download: the dream of cryonics, and enhanced rats

- Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died

- Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?

Innovation talk with Goldman Sachs TxB

Jenn Webb   1:03PM, 14 Oct, 2022

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Luc Teboul, managing director and head of engineering—transaction banking at Goldman Sachs, talks to Kapol Tandon, business head—Americas at Infosys Finacle, about what differentiates their first ever cloud-native transaction banking platform, TxB, from that offered by incumbents.

Click here to continue.

Brown-Forman CISO Sailaja Kotra-Turner talks about the cybersecurity war

Jenn Webb   12:56PM, 14 Oct, 2022

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Brown-Forman’s global information security leader and CISO Sailaja Kotra-Turner shares her cybersecurity insights with Jeff Kavanaugh, chief learner at Infosys Knowledge Institute.

Click here to continue.

An architecture for mature enterprise AI

Jenn Webb   12:46PM, 14 Oct, 2022

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Enterprise AI has generally not scaled well or worked across business functions. It also struggles to react quickly enough to fast-changing markets. A reference architecture can help businesses scale AI that is more agile, holistic, and future-proof.

Click here to continue.

Uncategorized

The Finnish Post reinvents itself with new technologies, including robotic process automation and gamification

Jenn Webb   11:20AM, 14 Oct, 2022

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Turrka Kuusisto, CEO of Posti, talks about how the group reinvented and transformed from a traditional postal company to a next-generation and efficient delivery and fulfillment company using the cloud.

Click here to continue.

Uncategorized

AI-led businesses will rule the future

Jenn Webb   11:08AM, 14 Oct, 2022

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Avrohom Gottheil, the founder of AskTheCEO Media, recaps the fascinating conversation he had with Gary Bhattacharjee, AI practice leader at Infosys, about the evolution of AI and how it will transform businesses in the future.

Click here to continue.

Uncategorized

Bankers and experts discuss transforming the banking experience through cloud-driven modernization

Jenn Webb   10:41AM, 14 Oct, 2022

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.”

Senior leaders from BNY Mellon, HSBC, and Citizens Bank share their perspectives with experts from Infosys Financial Services and Google Cloud on building a hyper-personalized digital banking journey for customers through the cloud.

Click here to continue.

The Download

The Download: the dream of cryonics, and enhanced rats

Rhiannon Williams   8:10AM, 14 Oct, 2022

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died

When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China in 2016, he was traveling there to guide China’s first forays into cryonics, or freezing corpses for reanimation.

Drake had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a small nonprofit that had managed to become the longtime leader in cryonics, freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. But it’s the recent involvement of Yinfeng that signals something of a new era for cryonics.

With impressive financial resources, government support, and scientific staff, it’s one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation. Still, the field remains rooted in faith rather than any real evidence that it works. Read the full story.

—Laurie Clarke

This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed issue, available from 26 October. If you want to read it when it comes out, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $80 a year.

Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?

This week, my colleague Jessica Hamzelou wrote about a fascinating experiment that involved implanting human brain cells into rats’ brains. The brain cells from both species were able to form connections and work together. The human cells became part of the rats’ brains.

A few months after they’d been implanted, the human cells made up around a sixth of the rats’ brains and appeared to have a role in controlling the animals’ behavior. Which invites the tricky question: Are these animals still 100% rat? Read the full story.

Jessica’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly newsletter exploring all things biotech and health. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

ClimateTech 2022

This week MIT Technology Review held its inaugural ClimateTech conference on technology solutions for climate change—a big thank you to everyone who attended in-person or online!

If you missed it, you can catch up with all the biggest news and announcements via our live blog covering day one and day two of the conference.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 China is preparing for its historic Communist party congress

A third term for president Xi Jinping is a near-certainty. (Economist $)

+ The congress is an opportunity for Xi to reassert his control. (FT $)

+ All 2,3000 senior party members will attend the meeting. (The Guardian)

+ Douying, Tiktok’s Chinese sister app, is silencing Cantonese speakers. (Rest of World)

2 Not everyone in California can afford electric vehicles

They’re expensive, and the state’s push towards EVs risks overlooking lower earners. (The Guardian)

+ Even the US secretary of transportation acknowledges the obstacles. (Recode)

+ The US only has 6,000 fast charging stations for EVs. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Turkey has passed a flawed “disinformation bill” ahead of its elections

Which, handily enough, restricts criticisms of its President Erdoğan. (FT $)

+ The European Parliament has accused Big Tech of secretive lobbying. (Bloomberg $)

4 Food is getting more expensive 🥪

Supply issues and higher gas prices are just some of the reasons why. (Vox)

+ The rising cost of food has contributed to those sky-high inflation figures. (New Yorker $)

5 An AI is planning to run for election in Denmark

The Synthetic Party, which is led by an AI, claims to represent the values of “non-voting Danes.” (Motherboard)

6 Gamers are the perfect target for cybercriminals

Younger players are particularly vulnerable to fraudsters’ advances. (NYT $)

7 Ads on Netflix are arriving next month

The company desperately wants to attract new customers, following months of users canceling their subscriptions. (WSJ $)

8 Intense heat therapy isn’t just for elite athletes ☀️

Carefully controlled exposure to heat could prevent cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, too. (Neo.Life)

9 Your restaurant server hates your menu hacks

And apps are making it easier than ever to order elaborate concoctions anonymously. (Eater)

10 There aren’t legs in the metaverse after all 🦵

Hard to believe, I know, but Meta misled us. (Kotaku)

+ Meta is desperately trying to make the metaverse happen. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“There will often be one or two people running around like crazy, or doing something like creating a massive cartoon of a cat.”

—Antti Innanen, chief executive of Dot, a Finnish legal design consultancy, explains the pitfalls of trying to hold people’s attention while giving seminars in the metaverse to the Financial Times.

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Hey, that’s not how the next line of the song goes!

+ The one and only Patti Smith is releasing a book next month—and it’s inspired by, err, Instagram.

+ This sunlit waterfall is straight out of House of the Dragon.

+ If you ever find yourself in London, it’s only right you indulge in a bit of pub grub.

+ We tend to gravitate towards the familiar when something’s coming to an end, and that’s okay.

Biotechnology

Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died

5:00AM, 14 Oct, 2022

The entrance to the Moscow storage facility of KrioRus, which was until recently the only cryonics company in Eurasia.

When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China’s eastern Jinan province in 2016, he was whisked into a state-of-the-art biotech hub. More than 1,000 staffers—including an army of PhDs and MDs—were working on things like studies of the stem cells in umbilical cord blood. The center specialized in research on human cells, from gene testing to tailored cancer treatments.

But it also had other plans: cylindrical stainless-steel tanks would eventually contain corpses suspended in liquid nitrogen. The tanks weren’t installed yet, but Yinfeng hoped Drake would help with that while it invested some $7 million to get the new project off the ground. As its high-profile new hire, he was there to guide China’s first forays into cryonics, or freezing corpses for reanimation.

The environment was something of a shift for Drake, who had spent the previous seven years as the medical response director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Though it was the longtime leader in cryonics, Alcor was still a small nonprofit. It had been freezing the bodies and brains of its members, with the idea of one day bringing them back to life, since 1976.

The foundation, and cryonics in general, had long survived outside of mainstream acceptance. Typically shunned by the scientific community, cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But its adherents have held on to a dream that at some point in the future, advances in medicine will allow for resuscitation and additional years on Earth. Over decades, small, tantalizing developments in related technology, as well as high-profile frozen test subjects like Ted Williams, have kept the hope alive. Today, nearly 200 dead patients are frozen in Alcor’s cryogenic chambers at temperatures of −196 °C, including a handful of celebrities, who have paid tens of thousands of dollars for the goal of “possible revival” and ultimately “reintegration into society.”

But it’s the recent involvement of Yinfeng that signals something of a new era for cryonics. With impressive financial resources, government support, and scientific staff, it’s one of a handful of new labs focused on expanding the consumer appeal of cryonics and trying anew to bring credibility to the long-disputed theory of human reanimation. Just a year after Drake came on board as research director of the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute, the subsidiary of the Yinfeng Biological Group overseeing the cryonics program, the institute performed its first cryopreservation. Its storage vats now hold about a dozen clients who are paying upwards of $200,000 to preserve the whole body.

Still, the field remains rooted in faith rather than any real evidence that it works. “It’s a hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology,” says Clive Coen, a neuroscientist and professor at King’s College London.

Even if one day you could perfectly thaw a frozen human body, you would still just have a warm dead body on your hands.

The cryonics process typically goes something like this: Upon a person’s death, a response team begins the process of cooling the corpse to a low temperature and performs cardiopulmonary support to sustain blood flow to the brain and organs. Then the body is moved to a cryonics facility, where an organ preservation solution is pumped through the veins before the body is submerged in liquid nitrogen. This process should commence within one hour of death—the longer the wait, the greater the damage to the body’s cells. Then, once the frozen cadaver is ensconced in the cryogenic chamber, the hope of the dead begins.

Since its beginnings in the late 1960s, the field has attracted opprobrium from the scientific community, particularly its more respectable cousin cryobiology—the study of how freezing and low temperatures affect living organisms and biological materials. The Society for Cryobiology even banned its members from involvement in cryonics in the 1980s, with a former society president lambasting the field as closer to “fraud than either faith or science.”

In recent years, though, it has grabbed the attention of the libertarian techno-optimist crowd, mostly tech moguls dreaming of their own immortality. And a number of new startups are expanding the playing field. Tomorrow Biostasis in Berlin became the first cryonics company in Western Europe in 2019, for example, and in early 2022, Southern Cryonics opened a facility in Australia.

“More researchers are open to longer-term, futuristic topics than there might have been 20 years ago or so,” says Tomorrow Biostasis founder Emil Kendziorra.

The Society for Cryobiology has even dropped its past cryonics-related restrictions. And now its president, cryobiologist and biogerontologist Greg Fahy, is behind a company called 21st Century Medicine, which develops techniques to cryogenically preserve human organs and tissues. (Still, the society said in a statement to MIT Technology Review that cryonics “is an act of speculation or hope, not science.”)

Today, around 500 people are preserved in liquid nitrogen globally, the vast majority in the United States. Around 4,000 people are on waiting lists of cryonics facilities around the world, says Kendziorra. Alcor has around 1,500 members, and Tomorrow Biostasis already has 300 clients paying a relatively accessible monthly membership fee of €25 (with €200,000 payable at the time of death).

Despite a lack of evidence that dead people could one day be brought back to life, cryonicists perhaps unsurprisingly remain optimistic, noting that tissues like sperm, embryo, and stem cells can be successfully cryopreserved and thawed right now, and that researchers claim to have cryogenically frozen and thawed small worms and rabbit kidneys. Researchers at 21st Century Medicine, for instance, cryopreserved and thawed a rabbit brain in 2016 and a pig brain in 2018.

But Dayong Gaom, a cryobiologist and professor at the University of Washington, points out preserving the brain’s structure does not mean preserving its functions. KCL’s Coen says it’s “disingenuous” to say these studies support the aims of cryonics and maintains that brain structures are far too complex to be adequately preserved and revived in the way cryonicists claim.

There’s also been some progress, though, in finding a way to rewarm frozen tissues. A research group at the University of Minnesota showed that nanowarming techniques, using radio-frequency-excited nanoparticles of iron oxide, could work on larger samples of 50 millimeters. The team has now successfully thawed whole rat organs in a way that preserves cell structure and is nontoxic to cells, with a view to restoring the organ’s functions. It is now experimenting with pig organs.

Yinfeng is devoted to solving the same problem—it’s currently experimenting with cryogenic methods to preserve individual human organs and amputated extremities to boost China’s national transplant program.

But none of these developments lead to a possible way to eventually revive a living person. Even if one day you could perfectly thaw a frozen human body, you would still just have a warm dead body on your hands. The hardest part to reverse—death itself—remains an enigma.

This is not lost on Drake. But the clients seeking cryonics services are often “either agnostic or atheist,” he says. “Instead of a faith in a supreme being, they have faith in science—that science, more specifically medical science, will eventually figure this out.”

Laurie Clarke is a technology journalist based in the UK.

Biotechnology

Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?

Jessica Hamzelou   2:17AM, 14 Oct, 2022

Brain organoids, illustration. Organoids are miniature, simplified versions of organs grown in the laboratory to allow testing of targeted therapies.

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.

This week I wrote about a fascinating experiment that involved implanting human brain cells into rats’ brains. The brain cells from both species were able to form connections and work together. The human cells became part of the rats’ brains.

The idea is to get a better sense of what happens in the brains of living people—something that is notoriously difficult to do. For the last decade or so, scientists have been studying lab-grown clumps of brain cells called organoids. The new study shows that these organoids start to look much more like functional human brain cells when they are implanted into the brain of a baby rat.

A few months after they’d been implanted, the human cells made up around a sixth of the rats’ brains and appeared to have a role in controlling the animals’ behavior. Which invites the question: Are these animals still 100% rat?

It’s a tricky one. The scientists behind the work argue that there’s nothing really human about these rats. Throughout the study, the team examined the rats to see if those with human cells were any smarter, or experienced more suffering, than rats that didn’t receive organoid transplants. They found no sign of human traits or behaviors.

But the whole point of implanting human cells is to get some insight into what happens in the human brain. So there’s a trade-off here. Essentially, the animals need to represent what happens in humans without becoming too human themselves. And if the rats don’t show any human behaviors, can they really tell us that much about human disease?

“The question is: What percentage of animal cells would be needed in the brain to reduce animal behavior and see a different type of behavior?” asks Jeantine Lunshof, a philosopher and ethicist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

This raises another question. What would it take for us to accept that an animal is no longer a typical member of its own species? Many of the discussions on this topic focus on moral status. Most people would agree that humans have a greater moral status than other animals—and that it is not acceptable to treat people the same way we treat animals, whether for research or in other contexts.

It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about us that makes us special, but the consensus is that it has something to do with our brains, which are larger and more complex than those of other animals. It is our brains that allow us to think, feel, dream, rationalize, form social bonds, plan our futures, and, more generally, experience consciousness and self-awareness. Could rodents with human brain cells have these same experiences?

It’s an important question for bioethicists like Julian Koplin at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. “If we’re talking about humanizing the brains of non-human animals … by introducing human brain organoids and allowing them to integrate into the animal brain,” he says, “I think we do need to start thinking about whether this could have any follow-on effect for the moral status of the research animal.”

In the current study, the answer appears to be no. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see “humanized” or “enhanced” rats in future, according to Koplin and other bioethicists who specialize in this field.

We need to tread carefully.

In this study, scientists put human brain organoids into a region of the rats’ brains that helps them sense their environment. But there’s no reason they couldn’t put the same organoids into regions that play a role in cognition or consciousness—which might make cognitive enhancement more likely.

Then there’s the question of how much of the rat’s brain is made up of human cells. Transplanting bigger organoids might mean that the rat is technically “more human” at the cellular level—but that’s not what’s important. What matters is how, if at all, its mental state changes.

The mental changes aren’t just about how “human” the rats’ mental states become, either. “You might have an animal that thinks in a very different way to we do, but is acutely susceptible to suffering, or is really intelligent in ways that are not familiar to us as humans,” says Koplin.

So far, we’ve focused on rats. But what would happen if the organoids were put into baby monkeys instead? Non-human primates have brains that look and work much more like ours, so they’d be better models for studying human disease. But “it does raise the possibility that you will create a humanized primate,” says Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist at the National University of Singapore.

Savulescu is also concerned about cloning. The cells that make up organoids contain a person’s DNA. What would happen if a large chunk of a monkey’s brain were made up of cells with an individual’s genetic code?

“If you were to introduce an advanced organoid into a developing primate, you may well essentially create a clone of an existing person,” he says. “Not only would it be humanized—it would be a clone of somebody that’s already in existence.” This would be the very bottom of an ethical slippery slope, says Savulescu.

There are a lot of questions here, and few definitive answers. No one really knows how to measure moral status, or the point at which animals with human cells become special—or even some kind of new animal.

But it provides plenty of food for thought. To read more, check out these articles from Tech Review’s archive:

In this piece from 2016, Antonio Regalado describes researchers’ attempts to grow human organs in pigs and sheep. The aim here is to create new organs for people who need transplants.

A Spanish stem-cell biologist told a reporter that the pope had given his blessing to this kind of research. But the Vatican later disputed the claim and called it “absolutely unfounded.”

A few years later, that same biologist went on to create embryos that are part human and part monkey, as reported by El País. Antonio explained why the research was so controversial.

In this recent piece, Hannah Thomasy explores eight technologies that are helping us understand the mysteries of the human brain and how we form memories.

And you can read more about how our brains make our minds in this piece from Lisa Feldman Barrett, which was featured in last year’s Mind issue.

From around the web

Could an algorithm help people who choose to end their own lives? The founder of this nonprofit thinks so. (MIT Technology Review)

Monkeypox cases have been declining for a couple of months now. But there are several ways things could play out from here. (Nature)

Covid boosters have been approved for children as young as five in the US. (Reuters)

Long covid is an enduring problem. Almost half of those who get sick with covid still haven’t fully recovered months later. (New York Times)

Watch this game of Pong. And then realize that it is being played by brain cells in a dish. (Neuron)

Table of Contents

MIT Technology Review: 16 Oct, 2022

16 October, 2022

WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their accounts back after talking about a Beijing protest

14 October, 2022

Innovation talk with Goldman Sachs TxB

Brown-Forman CISO Sailaja Kotra-Turner talks about the cybersecurity war

An architecture for mature enterprise AI

The Finnish Post reinvents itself with new technologies, including robotic process automation and gamification

AI-led businesses will rule the future

Bankers and experts discuss transforming the banking experience through cloud-driven modernization

The Download: the dream of cryonics, and enhanced rats

Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died

Are rats with human brain cells still just rats?