There’s no avoiding getting older, but it beats the alternative.
People have been saying this forever, but if government scientists have their way, it might fall out of fashion.
That’s because they’re working on a way for cloned tissue to replace the stuff that’s aging, perhaps reversing age-related cognitive issues in the process.
Researcher Jean Hébert has a plan for “functional brain tissue replacement,” and his experiments – which President Biden called a “medical moonshot” – are underway.
People have been understandably squeamish about the idea of transplanting brains, since we see them as the parts of our body that most make us who we are.
Hébert, though, believes that people will be more receptive to the idea of grafted partial tissue.
He has already had some success with mice, but admits they have a long way to go before we can get to a place where human trials would be on the table.
Hébert has $110 million in funding, though, so there’s a good chance he’ll be able to take this line of research further.
His work is focused on the neocortex, the exterior part of the brain where our memories and senses are stored and operated. He has been studying the brains of aborted human fetuses between five and eight weeks gestation – so stay tuned on whether or not he’ll be able to continue that at all in the current political climate.
“While we’re engineering is a fetal-like neocortical tissue that has all the cell types and structure needed to develop into normal tissue on its own.”
He is very optimistic that we are on the precipice of something big in his line of research.
“We’re, you know, a couple of steps away from reversing brain aging. A couple of big steps away, I should say.”
Only time will tell.
That said, with all of the major leaps forward science has taken in the past several years, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?