Assembloids: Recreating the Brain with Sergiu Paşca

About This Episode

How do you recreate a brain circuit in a dish, and what can it unlock about our minds? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the frontier of neuroscience with Stanford neuroscientist Sergiu Pașca, to break down stem cells, how the brain forms itself, and assembloids: self-organizing brain circuits.

What exactly is an organoid? We break down how these new, useful tools for research are made. How do you turn back time on a cell in order to create stem cells? Do cells have their own clock? Learn how brain cells organize themselves according to a blueprint and how cells in a dish know the human gestational period. How do these cells know where to go, how to organize, and when to evolve? Are we simply unlocking instructions already written inside them?

We explore how assembloids are helping scientists model disorders like forms of severe autism and schizophrenia, complex diseases that don’t have a non-human proxy. Can these models let us test medications? Can we observe pain, coordination, and even emotional processing in these neural mini-systems? Learn how Sergiu’s newest work studies a proxy for the sensory circuit and the nuances of how we feel pain. Is pain a feeling or an emotion?

Could we one day use a patient’s own cells to build a personalized avatar brain for drug testing? What happens when assembloids grow old—do they age like real brains? Do they feel pain? Could they eventually learn? As we probe deeper into the biology of the mind, bigger questions arise: What are the ethics? Learn how this technology could revolutionize how neuroscience is studied and what we have already uncovered.

Thanks to our Patrons Andy Fleishman, Khal Khumalo, Mauritz Cronje, Kyle Stone, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Ridge Glenn, Josh Gumina, Mike Evans, Eddie Trapp, Aaron Turetsky, Kenneth TRan, Deeks, Patrick Weglinski, João Bruno Agria Russo, Lester Fernandez, Shani, Jorge Zok Yepiz, Devin Waldron, Eric D, Luke Landry, Chase Snow, Micheal Wall (Bean), Stefan, Tori Kishman, James Sellers, Alex Hayman, Kyle Gosser, Maria Balog, Vytautas Jasas, Cainã Kubiaki, Ryan Berube, James Randall, QuirkyCollisions, Bryan Staley, Jake, James Fuller, Will Behave, Gordon Pluemer, Bob Dietrich, Pizza Pockets, Nip34, Sh40l1nmunk Munken, Nick Hanna, Lyman Jordan, Robert Brashear, Lemon Life, Azeem Ahmed, John Barry, Tomas Gomez, and Joss in Cambodia for supporting us this week.

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