The Biology of Brain Organoids (or, Don't Call it a Brain in a Dish!)
b'Our understanding of the human brain and its disorders has always been limited by our lack of access to living, human, developing brain tissue. For the first time, that\\u2019s changing. In this episode (first aired on the a16z Podcast), Sergiu Pasca, Professor of Behavioral Science at Stanford, talks with a16\\u2019z General Partner Vijay Pande and Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky about the wild new tech that\\u2019s pioneering a whole new approach to understanding the brain: brain organoids.\\n\\nSo what are brain organoids, what are the scientific breakthroughs that lead to their creation, and how can we use them best? The conversation starts with the existing models we have used to learn about the living brain, from genetic studies to autopsies to primates\\u2014and what this new model now brings us: the ability to study the human brain, both how it develops and what goes wrong in certain disorders, with human brain tissue \\u201calive\\u201d in a dish. We talk about what these organoids can and can\\u2019t do; what they\\u2019re good for understanding and where that understanding becomes limited; why calling these \\u201cbrains in a dish\\u201d or \\u201cmini-brains\\u201d isn\\u2019t the right terminology at all; and finally, how far can this new tool and model be taken now and in the future, maybe even leading us closer towards understanding psychology itself on a molecular level.'