Does a human need a body? Scientists are finding ever more sophisticated ways of generating what look and behave like tiny human brains. Are they accidentally torturing people?
Debate over mini-brains grown in labs
Disembodied: A brain grown in a lab would not have eyes to see with or skin to feel with. Glossary
Organoids - Artificially grown groups of cells that resemble small organs.
Neuroscience - Science looking at the nervous system and the brain.
Rodents - A rodent is a small animal with sharp front teeth that never stop growing, so it needs to gnaw or chew things to keep its teeth short.
Schizophrenia - A mental illness often accompanied by delusions and hallucinations. The term derives from two Greek words meaning "divided" and "mind".
Foetus - An unborn human or animal in the later stages of its development, but before birth.
Conscious - Consciousness is the name given to our own internal experience of the world and of ourselves.
David Hume - The Scottish philosopher argued that all human knowledge is acquired through experience and therefore embracing the unknown is a fundamental part of being human.
Immanuel Kant - A German Enlightenment philosopher who is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the modern era. He fundamentally changed the way we think about a variety of subjects, from aesthetics to cognition to morality.
Nervous system - The brain, spinal cord and network of nerves sending messages between the brain and the body.