Stanford Law School.
Am J Bioeth. 2021 Jan;21(1):34-45. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2020.1845853.
Human brain research is moving into a dilemma. The best way to understand how the human brain works is to study living human brains in living human beings, but ethical and legal standards make it difficult to do powerful research with actual human beings. So neuroscientists have developed four types of surrogates for living human brains in human bodies: genetically edited non-human animals, human/non-human brain chimeras, human neural organoids, and living human brain tissues. These new and rapidly improving models offer the hope of understanding human brain function better. If we make our models "too good," they may themselves deserve some of the kinds of ethical and legal respect that have limited brain research in human beings. This article is an initial effort to outline that dilemma.
人脑研究正陷入困境。了解人脑如何运作的最佳方法是在活体人类中研究活体人脑，但伦理和法律标准使得难以对实际人类进行强有力的研究。因此，神经科学家开发了四种替代活体人脑的方法：基因编辑的非人类动物、人/非人脑嵌合体、人类神经类器官和活体人脑组织。这些新的和迅速改进的模型为更好地理解人类大脑功能提供了希望。如果我们使我们的模型“太好”，它们本身可能就值得得到一些已经限制了人类大脑研究的伦理和法律尊重。本文旨在初步概述这一两难困境。
