In 2022, President Joe Biden established the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H for short. This initiative aims to generate transformative innovations in health research and medicine through massive government funding.
ARPA-H recently hired Jean Hébert to research how to rejuvenate a human brain by infusing it with youthful lab-grown brain tissue, as recently detailed in MIT’s Technology Review. The potential benefits of replacing your brain with fresh brain tissue include extending life, replacing damaged tissue after a stroke, and combating neurodegenerative diseases.
Hébert is a former professor of genetics and neuroscience from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which we assure you is a very real private medical school in New York City even though it sounds like the name of a scam organization that you would only learn about after the scammer running it was indicted.
Essentially, he wants to combat the aging process by replacing parts of the human body with better, newer, younger parts, including the brain. In his book Replacing Aging, published in 2020, he suggested that humans could take a cue from car maintenance by completely replacing their aging organs and tissues every once in a while.
Hébert is mostly focused on the neocortex, the portion of our brains that controls our senses, reasoning, and memory. The big challenge, he says, is to replace the brain tissue without screwing with parts that manage your personal identity and basic cognitive functions. It sure sounds like we’re dealing with a Ship of Theseus situation. The guy wants to replace your brain while making sure you are still you.
Hébert’s plans to tackle the issue of slowly swapping out a person’s brain with a whole new one fresh from the factory involve the incremental integration of lab-grown brain tissue. He has already conducted some initial experiments with mice that have shown some promising results. Apparently, small sections of mice brains were successfully replaced with “embryonic cell slurries.”
MIT reports that some members of the scientific community have been critical of Hébert’s theories and experiments. Many are uncertain whether the transplanted brain tissue will fully mesh with an aging brain—not to mention any potential ethical implications.
Hébert wants $110 million to upscale his testing to larger animals.
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The post The Wild, Government-Funded Idea to Rejuvenate Human Brains with Lab-Grown Tissue appeared first on VICE.
