Protecting In Vitro Human Brain Organoids: Why, When, and Which?

In vitro human brain organoids offer an alternative to using brain tissue from deceased humans, animal test subjects, and 2D tissue models in neurological research. However, brain organoids also present their own technical and potential ethical challenges. The further brain organoids develop, the more useful they are likely to be as research tools, and recent progress in brain organoid research has seen the creation of brain organoids with patterns of electrical activity that resemble the brain waves of premature babies, suggesting that brain organoids might someday become conscious. However, the more a brain organoid develops, the more likely it is to develop cognitive capacity and attain moral status. With moral status, a brain organoid would be owed consideration in its own right, and not merely for what it could do to advance scientific knowledge. In this paper, eight articles representing six viewpoints on the moral status and ethical protections owed to brain organoids are considered. The arguments made by these scholars are reviewed, compared, and assessed. The dominant view of these articles is that if a brain organoid gains moral status it will be due to the brain organoid’s consciousness or potential consciousness. This paper will argue that while a brain organoid’s biological origin increases the likelihood that it will develop morally relevant consciousness, that biological origin is not itself ethically significant. The appropriate ethical standards for research with brain organoids will likely begin by drawing on principles of animal research ethics, but as a brain organoid comes to more closely resemble a human brain, additional protections, including prohibitions on certain research, may be ethically appropriate. Finally, this paper will argue that it may be necessary to extend research protections to brain organoids before they have (or are suspected to have) become conscious and that the appropriate stage for providing research protections may be when a non-conscious brain organoid reaches a point where it has the potential to eventually become conscious, if its development is not interrupted