Letter: Growing brains in a dish does raise many issues

From Eric Kvaalen, Les Essarts-le-Roi, France

Michael Le Page says that brain organoids grown in labs are nothing like real brains, that they are “bunches of brain cells just a few millimetres across that are nowhere near even a simple animal brain” (10 June, p 21).

Even so, that is a lot bigger than many animal brains. The whole nervous system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans only contains about 300 neurons.

If consciousness arises out of brains, then we should stop these experiments. If it doesn’t, then we should reject materialistic theories of consciousness.