London, Oct. 5: It may have its roots in science fiction, but a small number of researchers are making real progress trying to create computers out of living cells.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the weird world of biocomputing.<\/p>\n
Among those leading the way are a group of scientists in Switzerland, who I went to meet.<\/p>\n
One day, they hope we could see data centres full of “living” servers which replicate aspects of how artificial intelligence (AI) learns – and could use a fraction of the energy of current methods.<\/p>\n
That is the vision of Dr Fred Jordan, co-founder of the Final Spark lab I visited. We are all used to the ideas of hardware and software in the computers we currently use.<\/p>\n
The somewhat eyebrow-raising term Dr Jordan and others in the field use to refer to what they are creating is “wetware”.<\/p>\n
In simple terms, it involves creating neurons which are developed into clusters called organoids, which in turn can be attached to electrodes – at which point the process of trying to use them like mini-computers can begin.<\/p>\n
Dr Jordan acknowledges that, for many people, the very concept of biocomputing is probably a bit weird.<\/p>\n
“In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When you start to say, ‘I’m going to use a neuron like a little machine’, it’s a different view of our own brain and it makes you question what we are.”<\/p>\n
For FinalSpark, the process begins with stem cells derived from human skin cells, which they buy from a clinic in Japan. The actual donors are anonymous.<\/p>\n
But, perhaps surprisingly, they’re not short of offers.<\/p>\n
“We have many people who approach us,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But we select only stem cells coming from official suppliers, because the quality of the cells are essential.”<\/p>\n
Dr Jordan acknowledges that, for many people, the very concept of biocomputing is probably a bit weird.<\/p>\n
“In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When you start to say, ‘I’m going to use a neuron like a little machine’, it’s a different view of our own brain and it makes you question what we are.”<\/p>\n
For FinalSpark, the process begins with stem cells derived from human skin cells, which they buy from a clinic in Japan. The actual donors are anonymous.<\/p>\n
But, perhaps surprisingly, they’re not short of offers.<\/p>\n
“We have many people who approach us,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But we select only stem cells coming from official suppliers, because the quality of the cells are essential.”<\/p>\n
In the lab, FinalSpark’s cellular biologist Dr Flora Brozzi handed me a dish containing several small white orbs.<\/p>\n
Each little sphere is essentially a tiny, lab-grown mini-brain, made out of living stem cells which have been cultured to become clusters of neurons and supporting cells – these are the \u201corganoids\u201d.<\/p>\n
They are nowhere near the complexity of a human brain, but they have the same building blocks.<\/p>\n
After undergoing a process which can last several months, the organoids are ready to be attached to an electrode and then prompted to respond to simple keyboard commands.<\/p>\n
This is a means for electrical signals to be sent and received, with the results recorded on a normal computer hooked up to the system.<\/p>\n
It’s a simple test: you press a key which sends an electric signal through the electrodes, and if it works (it doesn’t always) you can just about see a little jump of activity on a screen in response.<\/p>\n
What’s on display is a moving graph which looks a bit like an EEG.<\/p>\n
I press the key a few times in quick succession, and the responses suddenly stop. Then there’s a short, distinctive burst of energy on the chart.<\/p>\n
When I asked what happened, Dr Jordan said there was a lot they still don’t understand about what the organoids do and why. Perhaps I annoyed them.<\/p>\n
Electrical stimulations are important first steps towards the team’s bigger goal of triggering learning in the biocomputer’s neurons so they can eventually adapt to perform tasks.<\/p>\n
“For AI, it’s always the same thing,” he said.<\/p>\n
“You give some input, you want some output that is used.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor instance, you give a picture of a cat, you want the output to say if it’s a cat”, he explained.<\/p>\n
Keeping an ordinary computer going is straightforward – it just needs a power supply – but what happens with biocomputers?<\/p>\n
It’s a question scientists don’t have an answer for yet.<\/p>\n
“Organoids don’t have blood vessels,” said Simon Schultz, professor of Neurotechnology and Director of the Center for Neurotechnology at Imperial College London.<\/p>\n
“The human brain has blood vessels that permeate throughout it at multiple scales and provide nutrients to keep it working well.<\/p>\n
“We don’t yet know how to make them properly. So this is the biggest ongoing challenge.”<\/p>\n
One thing is for sure though. When we talk about a computer dying, with “wetware” that is literally the case.<\/p>\n
FinalSpark has made some progress in the last four years: its organoids can now survive for up to four months.<\/p>\n
But there are some eerie findings associated with their eventual demise.<\/p>\n
Sometimes they observe a flurry of activity from the organoids before they die \u2013 similar to the increased heart rate and brain activity which has been observed in some humans at end-of-life.<\/p>\n
“There have been a few events when we had a very fast increase in activity just the last minutes or 10s of seconds [of life],” Dr Jordan said.<\/p>\n
“I think we have recorded about 1,000 or 2,000 of these individual deaths across the past five years.”<\/p>\n
“It’s sad because we have to stop the experiment, understand the reason why it died, and then we do it again,” he said.<\/p>\n
Prof Schultz agrees with that unsentimental approach<\/p>\n
“We shouldn’t be scared of them, they’re just computers made out of a different substrate of a different material,” he said.<\/p>\n
FinalSpark are not the only scientists working in the biocomputing space.<\/p>\n
Australian firm Cortical Labs announced in 2022 that it had managed to get artificial neurons to play the early computer game Pong.<\/p>\n
In the US, researchers at Johns Hopkins University are also building “mini-brains” to study how they process information \u2013 but in the context of drug development for neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and autism.<\/p>\n
The hope is that AI will soon be able to supercharge this kind of work.<\/p>\n
But, for now, Dr Lena Smirnova, who leads the research at Johns Hopkins University, believes wetware is scientifically exciting – but early stage.<\/p>\n
And she said there is little prospect of it taking the place of the main material currently used for computer chips.<\/p>\n
“Biocomputing should complement \u2013 not replace \u2013 silicon AI, while also advancing disease modelling and reducing animal use,” she said.<\/p>\n
Prof Schultz agrees: “I think they won’t be able to out-compete silicon on many things, but we’ll find a niche,” he suggested.<\/p>\n
Even as the tech comes ever closer to real world applications, however, Dr Jordan is still captivated by its sci-fi origins.<\/p>\n
“I’ve always been fan of science fiction,” he said.<\/p>\n
“When you have a movie of science fiction, or a book, I always felt a bit sad because my life was not like in the book. Now I feel like I’m in the book, writing the book.” (Bbc)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"London, Oct. 5: It may have its roots in science fiction, but a small number of researchers are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[191,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-203020","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-computing","9":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}