A transplant of brain cells can give a person a second life, says the Kiev scientist.
While we are thinking about prices, salaries and other everyday little things, some are seriously concerned about the problem of personal immortality. What? Science has already reached such levels when practically everything is possible, if there would be money - something like this can now often be heard from scientists, including Ukrainian ones. So why is eternal life also impossible - naturally, not for everyone?
MOMENT "H" The
problem, as you understand, must be solved radically - where are the gerontologists, with all due respect to them! Today, almost 300 theories of anti-aging are known. And everyone, to one degree or another, works - only something immortals are not visible next to us. Well, okay, gerontologists will add ten or two years to our life path. What next? Sooner or later, the moment "H" will come, as it happened in due time with the famous tokamaks, from which they were expecting solutions to all energy problems from day to day, but the amounts required by each next step became simply unaffordable. “If some billionaire wants to extend his life more and more, it will be possible,” says my today's interlocutor. - Only costs will increase not even exponentially, but exponentially.
And if you go from the other side? Well, let the man die, since it cannot be otherwise. But if his memory is transplanted into a baby, or in general, an embryo, the deceased owner will receive a kind of second life! Oddly enough, this formulation of the question is being worked out by scientists quite seriously.
Back in the middle of the last century, American James McConnell became interested in planarians - these are flat worms that live on the shores of lakes and rivers.
It turns out that they are quite trainable - thanks to the ganglia (special clusters of nerve cells), they can briefly acquire the simplest defensive reflexes. McConnell was able to "explain" to several especially talented individuals that you need to crawl away from the bright light as quickly as possible, otherwise you will get an electric shock. When they learned this, he cut them in half. A month later, a new planarian grew out of each half, reacting to light several times faster. Moreover, from both halves - the tail remembered the same as the head with the ganglion, and transferred this knowledge to the new head!
Then there were experiments at the Institute of Biophysics near Moscow, then the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Pushchino. A group of young scientists led by Inna Sheiman acted similarly: pieces of "trained" worms were planted in the tissue of "untrained" ones. And it turned out that even such tiny particles not only successfully take root, but also transfer their knowledge to new owners. “And if we go further and try not on worms, but on rats or even dogs? - asks my current interlocutor Emir ASHURSKY. - We tried it. We started with mice. Then we moved on to rats, hamsters and ended up with one dog "…
In general, you understand: I wanted to know the details.
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ALGORITHM OF OPERATION
- And how did you do it, Emir Emmanuilovich?
- At first we thought to try to transplant memory simply from an adult to a young one. We turned to neurosurgeons. Evgeny Yarmolyuk from the Kiev National Medical University. A. Bogomolets even compiled an algorithm for such an operation.
- Transplant what? Part of the brain?
- Yes, individual cells. However, then I thought: after all, the immune system will reject them. Of course, there are appropriate drugs for this, but this, in principle, is not the case, as you understand. In experiments on animals, this can be done, but what will it be like for a person to suppress immunity all his life so that any flu could be fatal? So we gave up on that project.
We decided to turn to embryologists. I found a young candidate of medical sciences Vladimir Petrenko - golden hands, one of those masters who shod a flea. Began to teach adult mice to run in mazes. Then Volodya took cells from the brain stem from a trained mouse (not to be confused with stem cells!) And implanted into the embryo - it was important to do this at a stage before it turned into a fetus, when all organs were formed. Here, precisely, the whole subtlety lies in knowing which cells to take in which week of embryo development and where to transplant - this is our know-how. I confess: a lot of mice were killed - someday we will erect a monument to them.
That is, you know exactly where the memory is located in the brain - am I talking about a person, not about mice?
- And here I have some thoughts that many scientists will consider heretical - the same physiologists, for example. I am sure: a person - yes, any living creature - has more than one memory. Not in the sense that psychologists say: sound, olfactory, tactile, that's not what I mean. And the real one, which, as they say, is also memory in Africa. I am firmly convinced that memory is duplicated. And when we perceive information, it settles in several different places at once.
- Why are you so sure of this?
- Yes, because the evolution of nature was carried out completely differently from the evolution of technology. There was Charles Lyell, an English geologist. He imagined it this way: something lives, develops - then bang, nature did not like it, everything is destroyed and starts anew. If so, the memory in us would be exactly in one place, as we do in robots or computers. But this theory is now completely disproved. The path of evolution was strewn with thorns and thorns, and she made her new "design" moves on top of the old ones. Since a person stands, so to speak, on the powerful shoulders of the same protozoa, etc., etc., some relics of their memory at each stage were deposited in us.
Specifically: where is the memory? First, in the brain stem, the so-called thalamus. Even in the paleocortex (the so-called old crust) - it was still in the first primitive mammals. And the third level is the large hemispheres. I counted at least three - if the top one is destroyed, the bottom layer will work. But not everything is so simple: after all, even in the upper layer, figurative memory is the right hemisphere, logical memory is the left.
TRAINABLE AMEBA
- It is known that sometimes a sound or smell can bring up something from memory that you never thought you could remember.
- But this, in my opinion, is another proof that it is not the upper hemispheres that are working, but some more ancient layers. But that's not all. In addition to these three completely material layers, I clearly and categorically assert: there is one more, some kind of "immaterial", mental memory. At the Institute of Zoology, Igor Vasilievich Dovgal experimented with conditioned reflexes in unicellular organisms. It turns out that even amoebas remember something, they can be trained. Ciliates shoes - remember even better. But how, after all, they have not only nerve cells, not even receptors, only a nucleus and a clot of cytoplasm? Obviously, this "subtle" memory is the very ancient relic.
But that's not all. The curse of our experiment is that every mammal has two thalamus, two hemispheres, even a mouse. And it was necessary to determine what dominates: what if we take memory from a thalamus that is not dominant? Then the young mouse will not feel old, that is, there will be no identification of its personality.
- By the way: you know exactly where which memory is. Why such confidence, after all, from many physiologists you can hear that our brain is, in general, a continuous mystery?
- This is my personal point of view - and the experiments I am telling you about prove it. If a person is transplanted, emotions must be included in her personal memory. When a rat, raised in isolated conditions and never had anything to do with a human, crawls up your arm on your shoulder, settles down and starts licking you on the cheek? This means that the previous personality of the domestic rat has awakened in her. She was transplanted exactly that, existential, as I call it memory - if it is different, the rat will simply learn faster. When applied to a person, they would say from the outside: "This is what a prodigy is growing!" But the child prodigy will not have this element of "deja vu" - which means there will be no immortality! The problem is that it is almost impossible to understand what memory you transplanted on mice - is it pleasant for her, or is it just learning faster? It's easier on ratsdogs all the more - they must recognize their own face, wag their tail.
- And if a person is transplanted several such "personalities" at once? Do you get bifurcation and frustration?
- The brain is an extremely plastic structure, in terms of the degree of adaptability it has no equal. Let's say a child grows up, absorbs information - everything is as usual. And only personal memory is transplanted into it - well, let's say, from a dog (after all, anything is possible!). For some time he will feel some awkwardness, memories from the former dog's life will begin to emerge, layered on the newly appeared human faces, toys, computers. But this will not be long - then everything will depend on the environment where it grows. Perhaps, if in a booth or a pack, the dog will prevail. But no - "animal" memories will heal, as it were, there will be no split …