(If you click through to the study, you will see that they used the baby “brain material” to grow brains that were full adult size. -nvp)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau warned of the horrors that might be achieved through science unmoored from morality. But we didn’t listen:
Scientists at the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology in the Netherlands aimed to grow a brain in early-mid development and so used the brain tissue from aborted fetus’ that were in the gestational period of weeks 12 through 15.
Similarly, the communists running China harvest organs from prison camp detainees killed by the government.
Anonymous donors agreed for scientists to use the tissue for research purposes only.
Oh, that’s all right then. Carry on.
The team found that by splitting the fetal brain organoid, it would reform at twice the original size within 20 to 30 days of culture.
This full process continued over eight months, with the mini brains eventually growing to 1,500 cubic centimeters in size, at which point its growth slowed down but could be maintained.
The terms “consciousness” and “soul” don’t come up in the story.
The stated purpose sounds great: to cure childhood brain cancer. However, the words “without limits” should raise the hair on the back of your neck:
‘We work together with passion and without limits every day to improve the survival rate and quality of life of children with cancer. Now, and in the long term,’ Princess Máxima Center said, adding: ‘Because children have their whole lives ahead of them.’
Unless they get aborted for being inconvenient and have their brains harvested.
On a tip from Heckrules.
https://moonbattery.com/scientists-make-brains-out-of-aborted-babies/
It would serve them right if a scenario out of the old “Lights Out” radio show happened there: the brain grows into a monster and eats the city.
Dear Lord, just send the astroid.
The world is so jack-up. But it’s to be expected with so very few valid Masses these end times.
*asteroid
Honest question Mark. How bad do you think it has to get before the Lord directly intervenes?
I can’t imagine there would be a soul in these brains any more than there would be in the brains of any other murder victims whose organs were somehow preserved and made to replicate cells? I would wonder if there could be any consciousness though — and if so what would that consciousness be without the experience of sensory organs to convey information to the brain and without language. It puts me in mind of a novel I read decades ago — Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void — in which he speculates about consciousness in highly advanced, disembodied human brains. It’s science fiction, of course, but his speculations about what they were thinking were heartbreaking. And if they have consciousness — which we presumably can’t know? — what is the right thing to do about them? Like frozen embryos — what is the right or good or holy answer?
Deborah, that is a serious consideration. Of course medical ethics have been tossed aside here. My average laynothing opinion is that the soul of the poor aborted human left his or her material body during the abortion. Brain tissue could be alive and undergoing growth, but there is no body to support development: to provide sensory input, feeling, sensations, even to receive autonomic nerve impulses. Multiplication of brain cells would not be the same as cognitive development. Human beings develop brains through the lived reality of corporeal existence, one of the reasons why Our Lord took on human flesh instead of offering some spiritual non physical redemption. Being human requires a body and a soul. Bodies are not just empty shells souls float in and out of.
They may be able to grow masses of brain tissue in this deranged heinous experiment, but I doubt whether these tissues can successfully be grafted into the brains of living human beings. One also wonders why this is “necessary” when one considers the almost miraculous ability of brain cells to adapt to new uses and roles, as in the many documented cases of people with serious brain damage whose brains shifted tasks to healthy areas of their brains.
Even if it were some miraculous cure, the end would never justify such an evil means.
I don’t want to get too deep into this, but one of the issues is that the headline is misleading. It should say, “Scientists make brains out of the brains of live infants who were then aborted.” Dead tissue is not usable.The brains must be extracted while the heart is beating, soul of the infant still united with its body. One can see the terrible questions leads.
If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
Mt 6:23.
Just think:
This is only what’s been made public here in America.
God only knows what the US military is working on in Classified, Special Access Programs…
Or what the Russians and the Chinese are working on…
Such a thing, a disembodied brain, would be terrifying. You and your thoughts, and nothing else. It would probably drive you insane.
I wouldn’t do such an experiment on a monkey, let alone a human being.
What is the right and holy answer: Don’t do it.
I think I sort of posited all that, just not as well!
Yes, but once it’s done, then what?
It’s disturbing because it’s the brain, where we think, but the brain is not the soul, only an organ, and the soul would not go with it any more than it would go with any other organ? Maybe consciousness would remain or arise in that brain, but that doesn’t mean a soul is present? An unborn child of 12-18 weeks’ gestation wouldn’t have much if any sensory experience to inform consciousness as we would understand it. I think this is a form of sin unprecedented in human experience.