Cortical Labs and the original DishBrain Pong paper

16:46Even if it's not financially, it's really helpful for us to get to more people so we can talk about the wonders of what the researchers and scientists all over the globe are providing us in terms of the future of humanity. And with that housekeeping note, we can jump back into Cortical Labs. All right, so now let's talk about Cortical Labs. This is the subject. This is a startup out of Melbourne, Australia. I just recently watched the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne. Um, Ferrari. No, it didn't. Mercedes is >> Was that the one where uh uhlair and Hamilton were battling each other? >> No, that was the Chinese Grand Prix very recently. Anyways, I don't want to talk about it. So, um, Cortical Labs founded

17:29in 2019 by Hongwen Chong. The company gained international attention in 2022 because of a paper that we're going to cover. It was in the journal neuron and it was describing this thing called dish brain which is a system in which in vitro neural cultures. So that's in vitro meaning in a petri dish learned how to play the game pong in a closed loop environment. Okay. So that is the paper that we are going to be talking about because that is the bedrock upon which their technology is built and it'll help us understand how exactly they did doom. Okay. And it's actually very cool the some of the some of the stuff that they've done. Okay. So, first

18:09of all, you got to get neurons for your wetwware engineering. >> Yes. >> How do you get neurons? Well, first you get primary mouse cortical neurons. Those are fine to get. You know, mice are very much a animal that we use in biological research. So, that's not that hard. Human cortical cells on the other hand are hard to come by. So instead of actually, you know, waiting for a patient who has epilepsy, let's say, to have a little part of their brain excised and get that kind of cortical neuron, you never know with those kinds of samples like, okay, it's a brain that has epilepsy. That's not a wild type type brain. It's not a neurotypical, as we should say, type brain. So instead, what what they did was they generated

18:50humaninduced pur potent stem cells. This is something that we cover a lot. It won the Nobel Prize because it's a technology where we can take somatic cells like stuff from the biopsy of a of skin. We can reprogram them to become stem cells which are blank slate cells that can be anything that they want and then we can give them a cocktail of chemicals to differentiate them into cortical tissue. So we take skin cells, we make them a blank slate and then we make them cortical neurons. I just want to make a quick note that this was uh I think this was the the Yamanaka Nobel and this was really important because prior to that embryionic stem cell

19:31research was highly controversial >> um and it was the only way to acquire stem cells >> and it really unlocked the ability to actually be able to do this type of work >> by removing the sort of moral ethical conundrum. So now the point being any human cell you can reprogram to something else. Yeah. That wasn't that's a you know that's a huge that's a huge foundational discovery. Exactly. >> Um that that now cuz I I know the sort of stem cell piece for some folks is like they that >> historical point cuz some people still think oh aren't we still getting those from embryos? >> No. Yeah. This is just your skin cell becoming a stem cell. It's pretty insane. Now, of course, with the pleoprotein stem cells, it's not a

20:13complete blank slate, right? The embryionic stem cell is like the gold standard because those things are built to be blank slates, right? So, but this