Robot Brings Patch-Clamping To the Masses 59
scibri writes about robots helping neuroscientists dig into the brains of (animal) test subjects. From the article: "Robots designed to perform whole-cell patch-clamping, a difficult but powerful method that allows neuroscientists to access neurons' internal electrical workings, could make the tricky technique commonplace. Scientists from MIT have designed a robot that can record electrical currents in up to 4 neurons in the brains of anesthetized mice (abstract) at once, and they hope to extend it to up to 100 at a time. The robot finds its target on the basis of characteristic changes in the electrical environment near neurons. Then, the device nicks the cell's membrane and seals itself around the tiny hole to access the neuron's contents."
one step closer (Score:5, Funny)
Die and leave a copy, or die and don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, there are two of me, briefly -- but one of me never wakes up after the transfer, and the other wakes up healthy.
I'm actually completely OK with this. Maybe it has something to do with a lifetime of going to sleep every night, and never failing to wake up the next day. Discontinuity of experience is nothing new.
Re:Die and leave a copy, or die and don't. (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't have to be that way. You would slowly replace parts of your brain with wetware until it was all artificial.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/135207-harvard-creates-cyborg-flesh-thats-half-man-half-machine [extremetech.com]
You would then still be "you", and not two of you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus [wikipedia.org]
"Plutarch thus questions whether the ship would remain the same if it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. Centuries later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced a further puzzle, wondering: what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and used to build a second ship.[3] Which ship, if either, is the original Ship of Theseus?"
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I have an axe like that. Its been in the family for three generations.
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It doesn't have to be that way. You would slowly replace parts of your brain with wetware until it was all artificial.
Well, yeah, given the choice, I would prefer that. But once you're "all artificial", I'm betting it'll still be relatively easy to make copies of yourself, and we'll still have to deal with all the existential paradoxes that result.
"On the charge of murder, first-degree, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to six months subjective of isolation. On the charge of attempted extermination of backups, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to corrective editing (removal of aggressive proclivitie
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"On the charge of murder, first-degree, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to six months subjective of isolation. On the charge of attempted extermination of backups, we find the defendant guilty, and sentence it to corrective editing (removal of aggressive proclivities, augmentation of inhibitions against irrevocable harm), concurrent with the previous sentence."
Its shit like this that scares me, even as a very progressive futurist. Stay the hell away from my brain with a hex editor sort of thing.
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Which happens anyway. I doubt you have any of your cells you had when you were a child.
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Completely agree. My original post suggests using artificial methods to integrate and slowly replace human tissue with an alternative that can last longer.
I.E. I have no intention of going through the messy process called death.
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Absolutely nonsense. Asking which one is the real "you" is presumptive since there is no "real you." there is no soul, no vital essence, no metaphysical, ontological chain of identity that exists as any discrete, singular being separable from the functional state and operations of your physical makeup. The outcome is two yous, both perceiving themselves as the real McCoy.
You guys are operating on naive philosophical assumptions best left in the bronze age with its cosmology. Your intuitions rely on extra ma
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I'm not sure I want to know how your TV has ravaged you...I hope for your personal safety it's unplugged when it ravages you in the future.
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Don't they have fat-free diet cheetos now?
Yeah, but the addiction (Score:2)
to neuropyzine is going to suck.
Seriously (Score:2)
Who thinks this shit up? We'll just design this little nanobot that seeks out a neuron, cuts a hole in it and welds itself into place and then it will start injecting shit into your thought patterns. Like it's no problem.
Just amazing.
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In all honesty, my first thought was of William Gibson's Neuromancer [wikipedia.org] and Razorgirl.
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My first thought was Peter Hamilton's "Commonwealth Saga", or Richard Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" series. My second thought was "hurry the hell up".
So you support fascism? Do you really want to be a drone?
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'Clamps', from 'Futurama' ...? (Score:2)
My first thoughts were of the robot 'Clamps', from 'Futurama':
http://ochemonline.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/clamps.jpg [wordpress.com]
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"That's really not what I do, Peter."
Actually... (Score:2)
It's a good thing that I renewed my Old Glory Robot Insurance.
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You're getting your brain clamped. Deal with it.
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Just like on TV
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Francis_X._Clampazzo
Brings patch-clamp to nobody new. (Score:1, Informative)
Generally the most difficult parts of these experiments are 1) surgery / dissection, 2) keeping your animal / slice alive, 3) _keeping_ the electrode attached to the cell, and 4) managing racks full of comp
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The only things to add are
- Fighting with your pipette puller to deliver constant results, because either you have your own crappy little puller that is hideously unreliable or you have a fancy one which is shared, meaning there is a high risk of someone messing with the filament and/or settings. And if your pipettes are crap, neither you nor
Patch-Clamping To the Masses (Score:4, Interesting)
Patch-Clamping To the Masses
1) Almost nobody on /. knows about or will ever see this technique practiced
2) BTW, it is done in vitro or in instrumented animal models, not in your head. At least not with any reasonable expectation of safety in the hands of "the masses."
3) At the moment there are essentially no practical applications of patch clamping "for the masses"
If I am mistaken, then boy are we in deep shit now.
Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Almost nobody on /. knows about or will ever see this technique practiced
Almost nobody who knows about patch clamping practices it. It's that hard. "The masses" in this case refers to the 90% of neuroscience labs who don't have a patch clamp apparatus because it's an incredibly difficult technique. Putting an automatic patch clamp machine on every lab bench would be a huge boon to neuroscience.
Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses (Score:4, Informative)
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Patch clamping isolated cells is not all that hard. It has become the standard method of single-cell recording, and automated devices to do it have been available for years. This device automatically patch clamps neurons in brain slices, which is trickier because it's harder to see what you are doing.
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1) Almost nobody on /. knows about or will ever see this technique practiced
Almost nobody who knows about patch clamping practices it. It's that hard. "The masses" in this case refers to the 90% of neuroscience labs who don't have a patch clamp apparatus because it's an incredibly difficult technique. Putting an automatic patch clamp machine on every lab bench would be a huge boon to neuroscience.
Neurophysiologist here: patching isn't nearly as hard as it looks and is quite fun. Now-a-days investigators don't even need to build their own amplifiers like in the old days. However, that said, it does take practice and as I like to say, "I've never met anyone who learned how to patch-clamp after getting a Ph.D." Only undergraduates and graduate students have the time and dedication to learn it.
I should also point out there have been automatic patching machines that cater to high-throughput drug discove
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However, that said, it does take practice and as I like to say, "I've never met anyone who learned how to patch-clamp after getting a Ph.D."
I know quite a few (including me) but most of them got their PhDs in physics, EE, or something non-biological before learning to poke at wet things. It didn't take long-- I was doing sharp electrode in about 2 hours, and getting gigaohm seals and action potentials within a few sessions.
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I got pretty good at it as a hobby trying to work on multi-electrode array stuff with neurons. It's not that hard if you're patient and have a light touch on the controls and can read an oscilloscope. I could do two mouse hippocampal neurons (in a dish) at once pretty reliably, and I tried did 3 a couple of times just to show off. The limiting factor on how many you can do at once is generally the size of the manipulators and amplifiers. Getting 4 in is possible but tricky, more than that starts to get
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It was homemade amplifiers that Jerry Pine had made (probably published somewhere). I don't think we had enough manipulators to get 4, but there was room-- to do 3 it was 2 on one side of the scope, and one on the other. 4 would have been the same, but two on each side. There wouldn't have been room for 5. The manipulators were just micrometer style-- no piezo, but they were very smooth and could sit on a cell for a couple hours without slipping. Data storage for a while was with an analog storage scop
Re:Patch-Clamping To the Masses (Score:4, Insightful)
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3) At the moment there are essentially no practical applications of patch clamping "for the masses"
Maybe because other types garage research into cell biology are still not happening. At home PCR machines are feasible, at this point you can build one for around $500. I heard of a relatively cheap desktop electron microscope not too long ago. The price of DNA sequencing is falling fast. Microscopes are getting cheaper and more powerful. All the tools seem to be headed in the direction of home experimentation.
Maybe someone in their garage will harvest some of their own fibroblasts, make their own
What I immediately thought of (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf8_tn7lBIc [youtube.com]
Thank you to Unknown Lamer (Score:2, Insightful)
Certainly this robotic manipulation system (Score:1)
When I first learned about neural "voltage clamp" in college, it was a way to maintain a constant voltage across a neural membrane, which is otherwise normally altered by a trans-membrane conduction event. That is, a current is passed in/out of the cell during a conduction event to compensate for it, thus maintaining or
Call me... (Score:1)