Scientists are on the Edge of Figuring out Mind Control… Sort of | Optogenetic Capabilities
In the ’50s, the CIA held a confidential scientific research investigation called MKUltra, which involved the conduction of human experiments in order to attempt to understand mind control as one of the objectives. Due to ethical reasons, the program was shut down a few decades later, and the quest for mind control took a brief pause. You can read more about this on history.com.
Fast forward to the modern age of technology in 2020, and our knowledge on these subjects is quickly becoming exponential due to the limitless uses of technological advancements since that time. Scientists have formed disruptive fields from humans mimicking artificial intelligence to gene therapy to cure diseases before they occur. In these new fields, one called optogenetics has quickly become popular as global scientists are on the edge of solving this mystery behind mind control… well, sort of.
If you really want to understand what optogenetics is, let’s break down the actual word first.
“Opto” derives from Greek optós, meaning “visible,” and “genetics” derives from Greek genetikos meaning “origin.”
If you ask in a scientific sense, what are your origins, your “code-like” instructions that makeup who you are, the answer would be genes which are a segment of your DNA. Optogenetics is based around the study of using visible light to alter and trigger your genes in the brain. It’s quite simple at the basis. It’s not rocket science. It’s neuroscience!
Let me take on you on a quick history trip down the optogenetics road.
According to STAT News, a neuroscientist in the early 2000s named Zhuo-Hua Pan would begin a chain of revolutionary studies to use a light-sensitive protein in the eye to restore vision in the visually impaired! The European Space Agency has written, “Each wavelength can also be associated to a frequency; there is a simple relationship between the two…there also is a simple relationship of energy and wavelength.” This energy can generate electricity in the brain because guess what? Just like your phone and lights use electricity, so does your brain, but more on that later.
STAT News also writes that around 2003, there was an article was written about a subset of a family of a protein that is found in algae called Channelrhodopsin (ChR2). The word is a handful, I know.
Natural green life needs certain proteins such as this algae to convert light into electricity and basically their “food.” ChR2 was found to be stimulated by light due to a protein on the cellular membrane, which responded by opening an ion channel, which controls the electrical excitability in the algae, causing it to move towards the light; this was the light-sensor that he’d use for optogenetics. Think of this like how a plant in your house will slowly turn its leaves in the direction of the sun.
Now, why don't we tie this back into the brain, shall we.
- the connection of the brain and the eyes is through certain neurons called ganglion cell (neurons are responsible for receiving sensory input for the brain)
- the same way that virus is killed off by inserting strands of it into a vaccine, the same was done by inserting ChR2 as a virus into a rat
- The virus spread into the membranes of these ganglion cells in the rat and started to grow on them
- Pan attaches an electrode to the Rat’s retina and turns on a lamp which led to immense electrical activity until the lamp was turned off
This was the basis for optogenetics and curing eye diseases through the brain.
A year or so later, Edward Boyden and Karl Deisseroth entered the optogenetics game and stormed ahead of the competition. Instead of focusing on just optics, they decided to use optogenetics for neuroscience as a whole.
Ok, so that’s the history… but how does it work?
Your brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons. For reference in seconds, that's almost 3200 years! These neurons are like the postal-delivery man of the brain. Through electrical impulses, they send messages and instructions to your nervous system, such as telling yourself to bite down on an apple. Now, if you have a deficit of certain neurons, you lack these “instructions” and “deliveries,” which lead to certain underlying brain disorders. Imagine trying to build a bed but are missing steps 4, 6, and 13 out of 22. Now that’s a big issue if you skip the fourth leg, eh?
Each neuron has its own specific job. They’re like wires of the brain that will eventually send an electrical impulse, an instruction, a connection to the different parts of the body. It’s crazy to see how the advancements in genetic engineering have greatly helped with optogenetics. Because still quite new, scientists such as Boyden and Pan are testing live animals such as mice and rats.
Their application of the past two decades of optogenetics can lead to breakthroughs in the health industry. Edward. Boyden, a groundbreaking neuroscientist at MIT, did a video with MIT’s YouTube channel to help us understand what he does.
- Modern genetic engineers use recombinant DNA technology to isolate certain DNA and genes (DNA in neurons in this case), where they then remove fragments and replace them with new recombinant human-made DNA.
- The DNA that would be used in a human brain would be replaced with one that has been injected with ChR2 which means that it now can be stimulated by light along with other specific neurons that contain ChR2.
- Boyden says in his interview, “Now, these molecules can convert light to electricity [through energy as explained earlier], and they do it just in neurons that we want to control.”
- When light is shined on these neurons, they become stimulated and essentially turn on like an on-off switch to target certain neurons' functions in the brain. “We can hunt down the exact set of cells that are contributing to a specific disease state. Or, which, when activated or shut down, will remedy that disease state,” says Boyden. This is done by only have targeted cells activate impulses when the light is on.
- In doing so, Boyden talks about how “optogenetics directly controls brain circuits in patients with brain disorders” and therefore organizing a subset of brain cells with a certain disease, it can be possible to cure the disease by knowing the individual characters of purposes of specific cells.
Like I said in the title, this “on and off switch” Boyden talks about is essentially controlling minds through optogenetics by stimulating certain parts of the brain at a press of a button. Maybe not to the extent of MKUltra’s goal, but still amazing to think about.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not too difficult to understand the major processes, but the nuances between the different studies that, when brought together, really take leaps into understanding the controls of our brains.
There have been so many experiments done, and quite an amazing one was seen by Ada Poon, an engineer at Stanford University, where she wrote her findings in an article on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Poon placed an optogenetic wireless device on a mouse were genetically engineered brain cells in the premotor cortex, the area of the brain that controls muscle movements. When she turned on a light switch stimulating the cells, the mouse started running in circles until turned off. Now that's cool!
Why did this happen?
Poon actually stimulated muscles that mimicked the mouse's motion where at a certain time, for whatever reason, the brain told the mouse to move in a circle. The same way that at any time, your brain tells your arm to pick up a cup of water or pace back and forth when you’re worried. If you can believe it, optogenetics is also being studied for emotions in neuroscience.
Poon’s study is pivotal to the future of medicine. Being able to truly understand how each individual cell and neuron affect any everyday activities that may seem normal to the mouse is actually being stimulated by light in its brain. I guess science fiction is becoming less and less fiction by the day.
What’s more is that the approach and application to neuroscience are endless, and scientists have taken so many different routes to find resolutions to neurological and neurodegenerative diseases.
Now let’s get down to the good stuff, the nitty-gritty of optogenetic applications.
According to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), by use of light, there are 4 main uses for optogenetics:
- Motility — regulating cells to move in a certain targeted directions
- Signalling pathways — controlling the electrical impulses that are sent through neurons by light; the on and off switch
- Apoptosis — controlling the life and death expectancy of certain cells by triggering a reaction with light rays or keeping them dormant
- Cell differentiation — being able to track cell differentiation; how a cell can change its properties and transform into another type with another role.
EMBL also says that there are certain advantages that optogenetic capabilities allow us to achieve that is either extremely challenging or not possible by other genetic testing means:
- Spatial Precision: Among the sea of cells and neurons in your brain, optogenetics allows us to target a specific number of chosen cells and sub cells to interact with and stimulate
- Temporal precision: With the flexibility to activate certain cells at certain times based on the intensity, wavelength etc. of light rays, it is easier for scientists to understand the dynamic changes of cells over time because they are able to once again focus on a chosen subset of cells
- The ability for light-induced dimerization: the ability to induce photosensitive, genetically engineered cells and proteins to dimerize (getting two molecules to come together and form one molecule called a dimer). Dimers are important because it makes it possible to restrict the “instructions” in a DNA sequence to help repair it of deficits. Imagine if this was applied to figuring out how to cure neurodegenerative diseases in the human brain!
-> Essentially, optogenetics lets us focus on certain cells and neurons
-> Cells and neurons that have a deficit in necessary DNA or have components that degenerate your neuro functions can be identified
-> If they are identified, we no longer need to wait for the neurodegenerative disease to worsen over time
-> We can then target and “fix” through gene engineering and therapy these certain neurons or parts of the cell that are harming your quality of life
Let’s take a look at Parkinson’s Disease — a neurodegenerative disease example.
According to the National Health Service, Parkinson’s Disease is caused by “loss of nerve cells in the part of the brain called the substantia nigra. Nerve cells in this part of the brain are responsible for producing a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine acts as a messenger between the parts of the brain and nervous system that help control and co-ordinate body movements.”
An article published on Science Daily says a group of scientists used optogenetics strategies for Parkinson’s on a mouse model (a laboratory mouse, usually genetically engineered). These were their results.
- They focused on specified cell types of a mouse with induced parkinsonism (Parkinson’s)
- PV-GPe neurons and Lhx6-GPe neurons were the focus.
- They found that by stimulating light on the PV-GPe neurons more than the Lhx6-GPe neurons, they were able to stop the abnormal Parkinson’s behaviour in the basal ganglia (responsible for motor control) for four hours!
- As written, this was “significantly longer than current treatments.”
Although prevalent in animal testing, it is still a challenge to utilize optogenetics with maximum efficiency in humans. But there are few organizations out there doing it.
MIT Technology Review is keeping a tab on these organizations and has listed a few.
- Zhuo-Hua Pan is still at it! With his company RetroSense, he feels that because the eye is light sensitive, it is easier to treat with gene therapy. The eye has two photoreceptor cells: cones for colour vision and rods for the light at night. By injecting his special virus as mentioned earlier into the center of the eye, the top layer of the retina will begin to produce around 100 000 of the light-sensing protein, ChR2. With post-genetic engineering and alterations, he hopes for the protein to fire in response to light and restore limited sight to the blind.
- Jens Duebel who runs an optogenetic vision restoration study in Paris, said that post-optogenetic treatment, blind mice were able to follow a moving image and turn away from bright lights in the dark. Duebel is now only a few years away from human testing
- Antonello Bonci, a neuroscientist and Scientific Director of the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Baltimore, says, “before optogenetics can be used therapeutically in the brain, researchers will need more information about which cells to target. ‘But that’s five years away, not 20 years away,” THAT’S CRAZY!
If you take a step back and look holistically, you will be able to see the INCREDIBLE advancements that optogenetics is leading us to in only a few years' time.
Edward Boyden, the award-winning neuroscientist at MIT talks about the struggles of applying optogenetics and its technology to humans in a video.
- There are extremely few numbers of FDA approved gene therapies globally, and this is required to deliver the gene that encodes light-activated molecules in the body to reproduce
- The light-reacting molecules originate from algae and bacteria. When sent into the human body, your immune system may detect them as foreign agents and start attacking them.
“What we need is a paradigm shift,” says Boyden…
“to develop new modalities, new forms of energy, new strategies for treating brain disorders by correcting the computations within the brain.”
If we come together as a scientific and technological community, and start to look at the uses and components of optogenetics holistically, the potential for exponential learnings, and new treatments for treating neurodegenerative disorders, or even sight impairments can become a reality for the average person.
Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center says, “If left unchecked 30 years from now, more than 12 million Americans will suffer from neurodegenerative diseases.” Optogenetics will be able to improve the quality of life of tens of millions of people.
Maybe the main goal of optogenetics isn’t really for mind control, but the benefits of the future of human medicine and neurodegenerative disease remedying will look completely different than it is now. We’ll be able to stop the degeneration before it begins.
Don’t you think we can do this as a global community if we strive to keep on learning, and searching for what we don’t know, and see if technological feats can take us places we only dreamed about in the realms of science-fiction?
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