In her own small corner of this research utopia at the human brain laboratory at the University of Cambridge, Madeleine Lancaster’s team is at work on a task so absurd it seems more wizardly than scientific: they’re transforming human skin into brains.
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Lancaster is using [the brains] to answer a decades-old mystery: for all our intellectual superiority, the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is around 1.2%. That’s only 12 times higher than the differences between individual humans (0.1%). Why?
To find out, the team has been taking individual genes involved in brain development and replacing them with the chimpanzee version – then using these cells to make hybrid chimp-human brains. As they develop, the role of the gene often becomes clear….
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Related on the SLP
Elsewhere, the organoids are being used to study uniquely human diseases, from autism to schizophrenia…By comparing brains grown from the skin of normal adults and autistic patients,…scientists [in 2015] were able to show that the disease may be caused by an imbalance of the two main types of neuron….
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“You can watch them over time and find out at what point during their development they start to look different…” [Lancaster] says.
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