Scientists grow rat brain to fly F-22 Simulators.

It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of “living” computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.

The “brain”, grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

They hope their research into neural computation will help them develop sophisticated hybrid computers, with a thinking biological component.

Uh, did no one read those science fiction books? Nothing good comes of giving a computer a brain. Even when it’s a good computer. Like in Weber’s series. The brain is good, but because of its programming perameters it has to let the bad guys get away and the good guys suffer for 10,000 years.

Or how about Alien when the brain/computer guy tries to put the alien in the people because that’s his job for the company?

Or, as Blogotional suggested, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. (Not exactly. She had Dr. F put dead people’s brains in body parts stuck together to make an oversized colored disaster and then had Dr. F freak out about his creation and run off and leave it to grow up on its own. Much more an alien species thing than a computer.- Lecture over. Dr. D)