Rats can fly

My friend Guy's blog had a link to a Discovery channel news story about a rat brain that can fly a F-22 flight simulator. Wow, that's pretty amazing. I think the most amazing thing is it only takes the brain 15 minutes to learn to fly the plane straight and level in any simulated weather condition. I imagine it takes real pilots slightly less time to do the same thing, but damn, 15 minutes for 25000 rat brain cells is impressive in my book.

Guy asks the question of when do future brain-in-a-box machines get to be considered alive? I imagine that they will be purposely kept "dumb" so that this disposable society won't feel to remorseful tossing out a living brain just because the thing it's in is no longer "cool" or was built to wear out in only a year. But it certainly brings up very interesting questions. Much harder questions for me than any human embryo cloning for stem cells ever would.

I can see this raising many interesting questions in the coming years. I hope that the work continues because at a minimum it will tell us important things about our own brains, even if it will lead to very tricky questions that I'm sure people will look to religion to answer (which I'm hoping won't respond with with "Burn them at the stake!").