Crypto Millionaire Fuels Push to Transform Brain Research
In early April, James Fickel boarded a train from Boston to New Haven, Connecticut, to check on some brains. The brains in question had once been inside pig skulls but now were located in a series of vats inside a building at the edge of Yale University’s campus, connected to an intertwining mass of tubes and a handful of machines feeding them a nutrient-rich fluid. Researchers have long dreamed of studying brains that remain largely functional outside their bodies, and this setup made those visions real.
This avenue of brain research began years ago with work by the Croatian scientists Nenad Sestan and Zvonimir Vrselja, who inspired spectacular headlines in 2019 by announcing they’d restored cellular activity in a pig’s brain for…
