This scientist wants to gradually replace your brain
The US government has just hired a scientist who believes we can defeat aging with cloned bodies and brain upgrades.
An American agency dedicated to revolutionary developments in the field of health care has hired a scientist who proposes an extremely radical plan to defeat death.
His idea? Replace body parts. All. Including the brain.
Jean Hebert, a new employee of the US Health Advanced Projects Agency, is expected toARPA-H), will lead a major new initiative on “functional brain tissue replacement” – the idea of adding new tissue to people's brains.
President Joe Biden created ARPA-H in 2022 as an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services to pursue what he called “bold, urgent innovation” with transformative potential.
The concept of brain renewal could have applications, for example, in treating stroke victims who lose some brain function. But Hébert, a biologist at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, proposes complete brain replacement, along with replacement of other parts of our bodies, as the only possible way to avoid death from aging.
As he described in his book “Replacing AgingIn 2020, Hebert believes that in order to live forever, people must find a way to replace all parts of their bodies with younger ones, just as a high-mileage car keeps running by installing new struts and spark plugs.
The idea has an aura of plausibility since liver transplants and titanium hip joints, artificial corneas and heart valve replacements already exist. The hardest part is your brain. It also ages, sharply decreasing in size in old age. But you don't want to change it to something else because he is you.
This is where Ebert's research comes into play. He is studying ways to “progressively” replace the brain by adding new tissue created in the laboratory. The process would have to happen gradually, in stages, to allow your brain to adapt, shifting memories and your personality.
During a visit this spring to his laboratory at the medical school, Hébert showed MIT Technology Reviewhow he spent first experiments with mice, removing small sections of their brains and injecting them with suspensions of embryonic cells. This is a step toward proving whether such young tissue can survive and take on important functions.
Of course, this strategy is not widely accepted, even among aging scientists. “At first glance it sounds completely crazy, but I was surprised how convincingly he was able to make the case,” says Matthew Scholz, CEO of a gene therapy company. Oisin Biotechnologieswho dated Hebert this year.
Scholz is still skeptical. “The new brain will not be popular,” he says. “The surgical element is going to be very serious no matter how you slice it.”
However, Ebert's ideas now seem to have received enormous support from the US government. Eber told MIT Technology Reviewthat he proposed a $110 million project for ARPA-H to prove his ideas on monkeys and other animals, and that the government “didn't blink” at that figure.
ARPA-H confirmed this week that it has hired Ebert as program manager.
The agency, modeled after DARPA, the Defense Department organization that develops stealth fighter jets, gives managers unprecedented freedom to award contracts to develop new technologies. Among its first programs are efforts to develop personal cancer tests and treatment of blindness with eye transplants.
It may be several months before details of the new project are announced, and it is possible that ARPA-H will set itself more conservative goals, such as treating stroke victims and Alzheimer's patients whose brains are damaged, rather than the more radical idea of extreme life extension.
“If it works, forget about aging; it will help with all types of neurodegenerative diseases,” says Justin Rebo, a scientist and businessman who studies longevity.
But victory over death is Ebert's stated goal. “I was a weird kid, and when I learned that we all get old and die, I thought, 'Why does everyone agree with this?' And that has guided a lot of everything I do,” he says. “I simply prefer life to the gradual decline into oblivion that biology has planned for us all.”
Hébert, now 58, also recalls when he began to think that the human form might not be set in stone. This happened after watching the movie 1973 “Westworld”in which the gun-toting villain played by Yul Brynner is revealed to be an android. “It really touched me,” Eber said.
Lately, Ebert has become something of a star among the immortalists, an unusual community whose members want to never die. This is because he is a recognized scientist who is willing to propose extreme measures to avoid death. “Many people want radical life extension without a radical approach. People want to take a pill, and that's not going to happen,” says Kai Micah Mills, who runs Cryopets, a company that is developing ways to cryopreserve cats and dogs for future resuscitation.
The reason pharmaceutical drugs will never stop aging, says Hebert, is that time affects all of our organs and cells and breaks down substances like elastin, one of the proteins that holds our bodies together. So even if, say, gene therapy could rejuvenate the DNA inside cells, a concept that some companies are exploringEbert believes that we are doomed anyway, since the tissues around them are destroyed.
One organization promoting Ebert's ideas is the Longevity Biotech Fellowship (LBF), a group of life extension enthusiasts that this year published technical roadmap complete victory over aging. In it, they used data from Hebert's ARPA-H proposal to argue for extending life by gradually replacing the brains of older people, and transplanting their heads onto the bodies of human clones grown without a functioning brain of their own, a procedure they called “grafting.” bodies.”
Such an astonishing breakthrough would require several technologies that do not yet exist, including a way to attach a transplanted head to the spinal cord. However, the group rates “replacement” as the most likely way to defeat death, arguing that it would take just 10 years and $3.6 billion to demonstrate.
“This doesn't require understanding aging,” says Mark Hamalainen, co-founder of the research and education group. “That’s why Jean’s work is interesting.”
Ebert's connections to such concepts (he serves as a mentor at LBF training sessions) could make him an interesting choice for ARPA-H, a fledgling agency with a budget of $1.5 billion a year.
For example, Eber recently said on a podcast with Hamalainenthat human embryos could be used as a potential source of parts for older people. This would be ethical, Hébert said during the program, as long as the embryo is young enough that it has “no neurons, no feelings, no personality.” And according to the meeting agenda reviewed MIT Technology ReviewHebert was also a guest speaker at an online session on total body replacement that took place last year and included biohackers and a primate cloning expert.
Ebert declined to describe the meeting, which he said was not recorded “out of respect for those who prefer privacy.” But he advocates the cultivation of insensitive human bodies. “I'm talking to all these groups because, you know, it's not just my brain that's deteriorating, but the rest of my body as well,” Heber says. “I will need other body parts.”
The focus of Eber's research is on the neocortex, the outer part of the brain that looks like a pile of very thick noodles and is where most of our feelings, reasoning and memory reside. The neocortex is “perhaps the most important part of who we are as individuals,” says Hebert, and “perhaps the most complex structure in the world.”
There are two reasons why he believes the neocortex can be replaced, albeit gradually. The first is evidence of rare cases of benign brain tumors, such as the man who developed a tumor the size of an orange. However, because it grew so slowly, the man's brain was able to adjust by moving the memories elsewhere, and his behavior and speech never seemed to change – even when the tumor was removed.
According to Ebert, this is proof that gradual replacement of the neocortex can be achieved “without losing the information encoded in it,” such as a person's personality.
The second source of hope, he says, comes from experiments showing that embryonic-stage cells can survive and even function when transplanted into adult brains. For example, clinical trials show that young neurons may integrate into the brains of people with epilepsyand stop their seizures.
“It was those two things—the plastic nature of the brain and the ability to add new tissue—that for me became like, 'Aha, there must be a way now,'” Hebert says.
“I simply prefer life to the slow decay into oblivion that biology has planned for us all.”
One upcoming goal is how to make replacement brain parts, or what Hebert called “facsimiles,” of neocortical tissue. During a visit to his laboratory at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, Ebert described plans to hand-assemble pieces of young brain tissue using stem cells. These parts, he says, will not be fully developed, but instead will be similar to what is found in the developing brain of an embryo. This way, once transplanted, they can complete maturation, integrate into your brain, and be “ready to absorb and learn new information.”
“We are creating embryonic-like neocortical tissue that has all the cell types and structure needed to independently develop into normal brain tissue,” says Heber.
Part of the work was carried out by BE Therapeutics (which stands for Brain Engineering), a startup based on the Albert Einstein School of Medicine campus and funded by Apollo Health Ventures, VitaDAO and contributions New York State Development Fund. The company had only two employees when MIT Technology Review visited her this spring, and her future is uncertain, Eber says, now that he is joining ARPA-H and closing his laboratory at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine.
Because it is often difficult to make even one type of cell from stem cells, creating a facsimile of the neocortex using a dozen cell types is no easy project. In fact, it's just one of several scientific problems standing between you and a rejuvenated brain, some of which may have no practical solutions. “There’s a saying in engineering. You are allowed one miracle, but if you need more than one, look for a different plan,” says Scholz.
Perhaps the biggest unresolved issue is whether the young parts of the neocortex will even function properly in an older brain, such as making connections or storing and sending electrochemical information. Despite evidence that the brain can include individual transplanted cells, this has never been reliably shown for larger pieces of tissue, says Rusty Gage, a biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and considered a pioneer of neural transplantation. He says scientists have tried for years to transplant larger parts of the brain into adult animals, but with limited results. “If it worked, we'd all do it more often,” he says.
The problem, Gage says, is not whether the tissue can survive, but whether it can contribute to the existing brain. “I'm not criticizing his hypothesis. But that’s all he has,” Gage says. “Yes, fetal or embryonic tissue can mature into the adult brain. But whether it replaces the function of a non-functional area is an experiment he needs to conduct if he wants to convince the world that he has indeed replaced the old part with a new one.”
ARPA-H expects Ebert to have a large budget to fund scientists who will try to show that his ideas can work. He agrees it won't be easy. “We're just steps away from reversing brain aging,” says Hebert. “In a couple of big steps, I mean.”
