Intelligent Living Computers

By James Anthony

Humans have living brains, but without a body such a complex organ is useless, right? Not any more...

Uh oh, here's something that will send shivers of fear up the spines of technophobes - scientists may be on the verge of creating a living computer.

Straight out of the pages of science-fiction - and Hollywood (see I, Robot) - scientists in the United States have managed to grow a brain in a dish.

What's more, the said organ can control a F-22 jet fighter - albeit only in a flight simulation.

The living brain, which sits in a small Petri dish and is about the size of a 50-cent piece, is joined to a computer via a tiny network grid of electrodes that connect up its 25,000 neurons.

Neurons are nerve cells that fire messages around the brain to get the body doing what you want it to.

A human has some 100 billion neurons (not that we've counted them, but someone has) and they vary in size from 4 microns wide to 100 microns wide. Clever kids will know that a micron is the same measure as being 1000th of a millimetre.

Anyway, the University of Florida biomedical engineer doing the study on the living brain, Thomas DeMarse, is hoping his work will help unravel the workings of the brain and maybe even lead to solving conditions such as epilepsy.

The experimental brain was created by taking neurons from a rat and kept in a liquid that allowed them to stay alive and also spread to connect with each other. This neural collection was very much like a brand new PC with no information in it - not even an operating system.

The Florida scientists connected the brain up to a computer with a flight sim on it and waited to see what happened. Initially nothing did, but when information was fed into it the neurons received and understood it, analysed data and eventually learned to pilot the plane.

One example given is that when the plane was flying towards the sky at a 45-degree angle the brain worked out that things were not supposed to be doing that and sent signals to correct the matter.

While only at the very early stages there is enough promise in the experiment to have the science world looking at the long-waited for chance to fuse a silicon-based computer with a living biological system to create a hybrid thinking machine.

Scientists hope that such a fusion will bring together the superquick computation times and retention of computers with a biological entity's ability to think and solve problems that are open ended.

By working out how neurons pass information around and the code in which they communicate, scientists are sure they can create living computers that will be able to fly planes or do tasks that are too dangerous for people.

Still, the idea of a living computer will not thrill everyone. Remember The Terminator movies?