AI Is Dead. Organoids Are Alive

人工智能已死，类器官才是未来

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Every cell in your body has the potential to get smarter. I don’t mean this metaphorically, or in a “body keeps the score” kind of way. I mean that if lab-coated biologists took a sample of your skin and very carefully manipulated the cells inside it, they could actually make a brain. They do it all the time.

我要告诉你一个秘密。你体内的每一个细胞都有变得更聪明的潜力。我指的不是隐喻，也不是那种“身体会记录一切”的心理学说法。我的意思是，如果身穿白大褂的生物学家提取你的一份皮肤样本，并极其小心地操纵其中的细胞，他们真的可以制造出一个大脑。他们一直在这样做。

Not a brain as complex as the one behind your eyes, of course, but a glob of gray matter nonetheless, with a few-million-odd neurons that can send and receive electrical signals. Biologists call these strange creations human brain organoids. Kept at a womblike 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit for eight months, they’ll produce repetitive oscillations—brain waves—nearly indistinguishable from those made by a premature baby.

当然，这并不是像你双眼后方那个大脑一样复杂，但它确实是一团灰质，拥有几百万个可以发送和接收电信号的神经元。生物学家将这些奇怪的产物称为“人脑类器官”。在模拟子宫环境的华氏98.6度（约37摄氏度）下培养八个月，它们会产生重复的振荡——即脑电波，这与早产儿产生的脑电波几乎无法区分。

In cell culture labs around the world, human brain organoids live out their short lives as neural guinea pigs, testing the effects of diseases, toxins, and new pharmaceuticals. But they may soon be on to more glamorous pursuits. At the University of San Diego, organoids are guiding spidery robots through mazes and taking hero doses of psychedelics. At Johns Hopkins, they’re forming the basis of novel biocomputing systems. And at a startup in Melbourne, they’re playing video games like Pong and Doom.

在世界各地的细胞培养实验室里，人脑类器官作为神经科学的“小白鼠”度过它们短暂的一生，用于测试疾病、毒素和新药的影响。但它们很快就会从事更引人注目的工作。在圣地亚哥大学，类器官正在引导蜘蛛状机器人穿过迷宫，并接受大剂量的迷幻药测试。在约翰霍普金斯大学，它们正成为新型生物计算系统的基础。而在墨尔本的一家初创公司，它们甚至在玩《Pong》和《毁灭战士》（Doom）这样的电子游戏。

Biologists do the darnedest things. While the rest of us are distracted by large language models and AI agents, they’re going straight to the source of intelligence, cultivating living neurons and teaching themselves to program them with electrical signals and hits of dopamine. In the future, they wager, artificial intelligence won’t be artificial at all. It’ll be built from the stuff of life itself.

生物学家们总是做些令人惊叹的事情。当我们在被大语言模型和AI智能体分散注意力时，他们正直奔智能的源头，培养活体神经元，并学习如何通过电信号和多巴胺刺激来对其进行编程。他们打赌，未来的人工智能将不再是“人工”的，它将由生命本身的物质构建而成。

The most metal building at UC San Diego is the library. An inverted concrete ziggurat, the Geisel Library—named for the children’s author better known as Dr. Seuss—looms over an otherwise bucolic campus on spindly, two-story legs. On a recent afternoon, as a marine layer hung low in the eucalyptus groves, it looked particularly like the mothership of a brutalist alien race.

加州大学圣地亚哥分校（UCSD）最硬核的建筑是图书馆。盖泽尔图书馆（Geisel Library）是一座倒置的混凝土金字塔，以儿童文学作家苏斯博士（Dr. Seuss）的名字命名，它矗立在田园诗般的校园之上，由细长的双层支柱支撑。最近的一个下午，当海雾低垂在桉树林中时，它看起来特别像一个粗野主义外星种族的母舰。

That day, the Geisel’s sunken lobby was hung with scientific images from the university’s collection. Among CGI renderings of folded proteins and macrophotographs of benthic sea creatures, one image stuck out. It depicted a clump of human brain cells, silhouetted in black against the milky white of a petri dish. A corona of axons, the threadlike nerve endings that transmit electrical impulses across the brain, stretched outward from the clump with palpable yearning.

那天，盖泽尔图书馆下沉式大厅里悬挂着来自大学收藏的科学图像。在折叠蛋白质的CGI渲染图和底栖海洋生物的微距摄影作品中，有一张图片格外引人注目。它描绘了一团人脑细胞，在培养皿乳白色的背景下呈现出黑色的剪影。一圈轴突——那些在脑内传递电脉冲的丝状神经末梢——从细胞团中向外延伸，带着一种显而易见的渴望。

Whether in our skulls or in a dish, neurons want nothing more than to find one another—and, across the emptiness, to forge the synapses whose electrical chattering forms the basis of thought. They’re very good at it. If you put loose brain cells together, they will multiply and interlink until they’ve cohered into autonomous globs of tissue. Human brain organoids practically make themselves.

无论是在我们的颅骨内还是在培养皿中，神经元最渴望的就是找到彼此——并跨越虚空，建立起突触，而这些突触的电信号交流构成了思维的基础。它们非常擅长这一点。如果你把分散的脑细胞放在一起，它们就会增殖并相互连接，直到聚集成自主的组织团块。人脑类器官几乎是“自发”形成的。

A 20-minute walk from the Geisel, at UCSD’s Sanford Stem Cell Institute, they’re making themselves in the tens of thousands. “Whatever environment you put them in, the first thing that they do is try to connect,” said the Brazilian developmental biologist Alysson Muotri, as we gazed over the blue plane of Pacific outside his office window. “Connect with the dishes, connect with the electrodes, connect to each other. This is an intrinsic property of our brain, to connect.”

从盖泽尔图书馆步行20分钟，在UCSD的桑福德干细胞研究所，它们正以数以万计的速度自我生成。“无论你把它们放在什么环境中，它们做的第一件事就是尝试连接，”巴西发育生物学家Alysson Muotri说道，此时我们正凝视着他办公室窗外蓝色的太平洋。“与培养皿连接，与电极连接，与彼此连接。连接是我们大脑的一种内在属性。”

Muotri is dashing, with a surfer’s tan and the aquiline profile of a figure on an ancient Roman coin. Over the past decade, his lab has dramatically expanded the scope of brain organoid research. He and his colleagues have revived genetic material from the hominin fossil record to create “Neanderthalized” brain organoids. They have sent organoid payloads to the International Space Station to study what cosmic radiation does to astronaut brains. But the issue closest to Muotri’s heart is autism. His 18-year-old son is autistic and receives 24-hour care. By studying brain organoids grown from the cells of autistic donors—including his son—he hopes to pinpoint where the neural development of autistic children differs from their neurotypical counterparts.

Muotri风度翩翩，有着冲浪者般的古铜色皮肤和古罗马硬币上人物那样的鹰钩鼻轮廓。在过去十年里，他的实验室极大地扩展了脑类器官的研究范围。他和同事们复活了古人类化石记录中的遗传物质，创造了“尼安德特化”的脑类器官。他们还将类器官载荷送往国际空间站，研究宇宙辐射对宇航员大脑的影响。但Muotri最关心的问题是自闭症。他18岁的儿子患有自闭症，需要24小时护理。通过研究从自闭症捐赠者（包括他儿子）细胞中培养出的脑类器官，他希望找出自闭症儿童的神经发育与神经典型儿童之间的差异。

This is not an invasive procedure. To make a brain organoid, all you need is that sample of skin I mentioned before. (Samples of blood, hair, or teeth work too.) You take the adult cells and introduce them to some special proteins that revert them to their embryonic state. Given a second chance to mature, these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells can become anything: tear gland organoids that cry, heart organoids that beat, or brain organoids that … well, that’s the question.

这不是一种侵入性手术。要制造一个脑类器官，你只需要我之前提到的那种皮肤样本。（血液、头发或牙齿样本也可以。）你提取成年细胞，并引入一些特殊的蛋白质，使它们恢复到胚胎状态。在获得第二次成熟机会后，这些所谓的“诱导多能干细胞”可以变成任何东西：会流泪的泪腺类器官、会跳动的心脏类器官，或者会……嗯，这就是问题的关键所在。

In utero brain development is, as one bioethicist told me, “a black box” of scientific knowledge. Historically, a lot of what we know about it is inferred from studies with mice. But with an organoid, the transformation of stem cells into neurons into brain tissue happens in full view. In theory, scientists could one day study how a colony of dividing cells comes together to create a mind—to make, from 86 billion neurons, a person named Alysson Muotri, for example.

正如一位生物伦理学家告诉我的，子宫内的大脑发育是科学知识中的一个“黑匣子”。从历史上看，我们对它的了解大多是从小鼠研究中推断出来的。但有了类器官，干细胞转化为神经元再转化为脑组织的过程就在众目睽睽之下发生。理论上，科学家们有朝一日可以研究一群分裂的细胞是如何聚集在一起创造出一个思想的——例如，从860亿个神经元中创造出一个名叫Alysson Muotri的人。