 All right. Good evening and thank you for that very kind introduction. I will talk about brain organoids and the law. When a new area of science comes up, then researchers around the world start working on that immediately. And they do this even though there's no regulation or rules in place that tells them what they can or cannot do. But normally, this is really not a problem because scientists, well, you know, they kind of know what they are doing. And this works very well until suddenly and sometimes unprepared public debate comes up and political reactions to this public debate or this public debate itself is then able to burn the turf in certain areas of science for years and decades to come. And this can be prevented if there is a set of rules in place that the scientists can follow because then this public debate can be met by saying, hey, there's a set of rules and we follow these rules. And on the other hand, you can clearly identify someone who has broken the rules and maybe then that way an area of science does not need to be shut down completely. If you remember the CRISPR babies, this has happened to the field of genetic manipulation or modification but there's many other examples around there that exist. So in the following, now approximately 14 minutes, I would like to give you an idea on what we as lawyers and for-inter-do and among other things, one of those is that we try to make or to give an idea of how this regulation that could regulate brain organoids could look like. So how do we go about this? First, we need to define an area of interest and our area of interest is brain organoids. Brain organoids, we heard this already today, they are grown from stem cells and it is very important to understand and this will stay important throughout my talk that they are not grown from embryonal stem cells but rather induced pluripotent stem cells. And we learned about these today as well. What is important about induced pluripotent stem cells is that they are grown, for example, from skin cells and they are taken and then they are reprogrammed into brain cells and then these are grown into three-dimensional structures. But what's really important is that they, these induced pluripotent stem cells, they will never be able to grow into a full human being. So today, these brain organoids, they are not able to grow much larger than a sugar cube. That's also important. Now, these brain organoids, they promise a lot of exciting discoveries, especially in the field of medical science. They can be used to replace brain tissue after severe illness or after an accident. They can be used to study the development of the human brain or to study neurodegenerative disease. They can be used for therapeutic testing or for personalized medicine and they can probably also be used to replace animal testing because let's be honest, something that looks like a human brain is probably much better suited to study the effects of medical drugs on humans than any animal could ever be. Now, when I first came into contact with brain organoids, I kind of imagined them to be little brain-shaped animals with hundreds of little feet that made sounds like crickets. So essentially, I imagined them to be something like a mix of the luggage from Terry Pratchett and brains. That's Carl. Carl is going to accompany us throughout today's presentation. Okay, so now that we have established that, let's look at problems. Lawyers always look at problems. And as a lawyer, I've been trained to denote problems with a P in a circle. That's how that looks like. We have a number of problems that we need to address. One, do organoids need legal protection? Two, who do they actually belong to? Three, if we implant brain tissue into someone's brain, do we then kind of make a better person out of them? And can we do that? Three, by that, do we possibly create chimeras? Like, not these lion, eagle-shaped things, but brain chimeras. Doesn't matter. So, if we have someone's cells, that's a question that has already been raised today, can we just grow brain organoids from them? Or do we need to ask someone, like maybe the owner of the cells, for permission? And lastly, do we possibly run into issues with data protection? Now, I said this earlier, but I would like to stress it again. Brain organoids, like at this point, are really small, and they probably don't do anything except lying around. They don't exhibit any traits that are worth protecting. At least that's what we think. So, to answer these questions that I've just named, we hypothesize that they will one day be able to grow much larger, and show much more sophisticated features, and that is what we work with. So, the issue I would like to pick out today, because sadly we don't have time to go into all of them, is do brain organoids need legal protection? And that is the problem that I'm going to try to explain the process that we as lawyers in this project go through. So, if we look for an answer to the question whether brain organoids need to be legally protected, what we do first is we check whether there is regulation that already exists and that we can simply apply directly. And that's a number of different regulations that exist. And just take it from me that if we want to protect something that might possibly be alive, we first look into constitutional law. That's what the German constitutional law looks like. So, the German constitutional law protects human beings. So, do you think Karl is a human being? I think we can be fairly certain that he's not, sadly. But maybe he's human-like, and then we could possibly also protect him. And to be human-like, he would need to be showing some features that make him human, or that we see as decisive in humans. And one of those features may be consciousness. Now, again, consciousness, what's consciousness? We would need to answer this question and I'll try to keep this brief. What consciousness is has been debated by philosophers and ethicists for the past millennia. And there's different theories and the two most extreme are one, that to be conscious, someone needs to have a kind of two-fold conscious awareness. One, he needs to be, or it needs to be, this entity needs to be aware of its existence. And aware of the fact that it is aware of its existence. And the other extreme say, well, if we shine and light it or touch it and it reacts, it must be conscious. So, for our case, because there are some organoids that have developed retina cells, so like IA cells, more or less, you shine a light at them, they react, let's assume they are conscious. Now, we would need to quantify this consciousness, right? And we would need to draw a line from where protection for organoids start. And this might seem very unlikely, but two researchers in the US, they have actually found out that consciousness or brain activity can be quantified. And consciousness and unconsciousness in humans can be clearly distinguished. This diagram, which I've simplified a lot, shows the gray line, which shows the maximum complexity of brain activity in unconscious subjects. And this red line shows the minimum complexity in conscious subjects. So, you see that there is a clear divide between the two. They can be clearly divided. And this, that is theorized by some others, can also be applied to organoids. Now, if we say, Carl, again, is located above the line and needs to be protected, we really need to watch out for one thing. And that is, in order to stay consistent, we would only be able to protect those entities that are above the line that we have just established. But there may be states of consciousness in humans take, and I say this without wanting to be completely correct, like minimally conscious patients who might fall below the line that we have drawn. And in order to stay consistent, because we only protect the entities above this line, they would then no longer be protected. And of course, this would be fatal. We couldn't do this. And therefore, if this happened, then we would need to re-valuate the whole concept. But let's go back to where we were. So, we established that Carl may be human-like. Now we need to see what other human-like entities there are, and whether we might be able to draw some conclusions from them in answering the question whether Carl needs to be protected. And one very good example to look at is embryos. Because embryos, if you probably know that, develop into humans. They should. Now, it is very, very important to understand that embryos themselves, under German constitutional law, they do not enjoy their own protection from being attacked. They only enjoy a kind of derivational protection as a pre-effect from one day developing into a human being. So then this shield of protection comes up that is beautifully animated. And in order to determine whether this embryo and the human being are the same, lawyers employ something that's called the skip arguments. That's for, that is, S, C, I, N, P, and they stand for species, continuity, identity and potentiality. So, species. Is the embryo or the embryo and the human being are of the same species? That's fairly obvious. The embryo developing into the human being is a continuous process. And at no point can we say there's a clear divide here from where human dignity should start, or before this divide there should be no human dignity. Because there is this continuous line, in embryos we also say that the aspect of continuity is given. Embryos and human beings also deserve the identical amount of human dignity, and this is also important when we look at organoids later. Embryos are able to develop into human beings, so they have the potential to do that. And therefore, the protection that is given to human beings radiates outwards in time and also grants a kind of protection to the embryo. So, while the theoretical basis for our organoids may be the same, the results are not. And this is what we will see now when we look at the fact where the car will also be protected as a human-like entity. Look at the skip arguments again. Of course, the human brain and the human brain organoid or the human brain organoid and the human are of the same species. Let's assume that. Let's also say the brain and the human deserve kind of the same amount of human dignity. Take that as given. But we said it's induced pluripotent stem cells, they cannot develop into humans, and a simple brain can also not develop into a full human. So we have no potentiality, and due to the fact that there's no potentiality, we also don't have a continuous line of development, and therefore, two of these four prerequisites are not fulfilled. So if we now employ this to what we have, we see that the skip arguments do not apply, and that our organoid, therefore, is not protected. The shield just fell away and arrows came animated in. And, yeah. Well, this means that Carl is crying now, because we cannot protect him. But because we have established that he has some, possibly has some kind of conscious presence, that is not a state that we want to deal with. And therefore, even though we cannot find a protection for Carl under constitutional law, and now you also have to believe me again, I know this is something that my physics teacher always said in school, believe me, it is like that. There's also no, like, sub-constitutional regulation in German law, or really in any other law that would apply to organoids directly. That is true for Germany, and that is also, to my knowledge, true for the rest of the world. So in a fourth step, we look at existing regulation in other fields, say the field of biotechnology law, and we see whether there is regulation or rules that we can borrow from in order to find ways or ideas on how new regulation could be developed in this field. And we do this because new regulation or new policy should never be drafted from thin air, again, to keep some kind of consistency in the process. A good way or a good place to start looking is the German Stem Cell Act. It regulates the import and use of embryonal stem cells. Keep in mind, we don't use embryonal stem cells for organoids, we use induced pluripotent stem cells. And the German Stem Cell Act says that embryonal stem cells, not the ones we use, can be used in order or can be researched on in order to achieve high-level research objectives. And those are, for example, the diagnosis, prevention and therapy of severe and at least so far untreatable diseases, among those multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease, because we've already heard that today. What would not be among them would be the loss of hair or an erectile dysfunction. Luckily, Carl doesn't have a problem with hair. So we do not run into a problem here. Another thing that we may want to look at is the Embryo Protection Act. The Embryo Protection Act in Germany, since 1991, has been prohibiting generating embryos for any other purpose than causing impregnation. But it doesn't really work in our case because it doesn't allow any specific conduct, it just penalizes conduct that it declares illegal. And therefore, other than maybe for finding a nice layout for our new law, it doesn't really give us any clue on what we should do. So, while all the questions I've answered and I'm sorry about that can really not be answered at this point, I think that one thing is clear. The public debate that might endanger science, it will come. And in times of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, it will come crashing down. And when it does, we should be prepared for this debate. And we can be prepared if lawyers and lawmakers get to work and look at what's there and develop some new policy. And like I said in the beginning, that is one of the things that we, in our part of For Inter, are doing. Because we really cannot risk to lose a field of science as exciting to this one, to political deliberations and public debate. So, to conclude, there is a lot of ethical and legal questions that need to be answered. And many of these questions have not been answered yet. But when they have been answered, we should take these answers and we should form them into regulations and rules that scientists can employ in order to guide these scientists to show us what's possible and what's not and to mitigate the public debate that, like I said, will come in this area as well. When this debate comes, we should all be prepared. Attending today's event is the first step in this direction. In the next years, just keep interested in this field, get all the facts, know what you're talking about. So I say, stay curious and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Hannes. That was very interesting. Let's see what kind of questions people have to you and show me your hand. There is a question in the middle. Thanks for the talk. So my question is actually, do you think these rules or laws should be dictated on a national level or on a higher level, say, European? Because, you know, researchers move a lot and so having different national laws, I think, may create countries that are more attractive than others and so maybe we don't want that, at least in the EU. So the question is whether I think that this rule should be made on a national or rather European or international level and I think that we cannot make these laws on a national level and if we look at other rules or other regulations that are already in place in genetic modification, gene technology, if you look at biotechnology law, they all come from a European level and I suppose that this will be the same for any law that would regulate brain organoids. National initiatives may be what kickstarts this but the rules that will be in place in the end will at least be reflected on a European level as well. Thank you. Is there, there is one more question here. Hey, thanks for the lecture. I had a question right here. Oh, yeah. If there was a breakthrough or a discovery through illegal research, would it still be possible to use it or would people be allowed to use it even though it was discovered through illegal means? So, the question is whether any scientific breakthrough, I suppose, that has been made by illegal method would still be able to be used. I think, and this we have seen in the CRISPR babies debate, the public debate that there will be a public uproar in this case and politics will likely react and try to shut science down but I wouldn't see why scientists that have these results would then practically not use them although, you know, something that has been achieved by illegal means once may well be kept using and no one will ever know. This is not my official opinion. Alright, thanks. Thank you. More, more curious people right now. There is a question here from one of our team members, apparently. Let's see. Great talk, by the way. I liked it a lot. Thank you. He helped to prepare it. I'm sorry. A question just came to my mind. They're saying that no law exists for this purpose yet. What does a scientist risk if he or she experiments with brain organelles right now? So, the question is, what do scientists risk by experimenting with brain organelles right now? I don't think I'm able to give you a full answer on this, unfortunately. No, I cannot really give you a full answer on this. Okay, thanks. Never do this. Thank you. There is one more question on that side, Iki. Could you please come a bit front? Thank you for the talk. My question is, how well versed are the... Do the people who have to make the law be in the field? I mean, obviously not the scientists are making the law, but people who are versed in, well, law, basically. But they obviously have to know what they make the law about. So, is there a minimum requirement of, basically, literacy in the field? The question is, how well versed do the people that make the law have to be? And I think this is more a question that goes into, like, how laws are made. And I learned at some point that there's two things in the world that you do not want to know how they're made, that's sausages and laws. But... Laws are made in parliament. Laws are made in parliament. And they do not just write down something and then put it out into the world, but they will hear experts and commissions. And they will be drafts from different professors of law faculties. They will be drafts probably from a consortium like ours. And we are one law project among eight projects of biologists, neurobiologists. So, these drafts or these ideas, these come not from pure politicians, but from academics and scientists all around the country, all around Europe and all around the world. So, I think they would be kind of educated in what they do. Thank you. I think now we need to move on. Any more questions can be addressed to Hannes after the talks. Thank you very much, Hannes, once more. Thank you.