Brett Kagan features in The Age on the future of human computing
Honorary in the Department of Biochemistry & Pharmacology, Brett Kagan discusses the world’s first biological computer, CL-1, launched earlier this year.
Chief Scientific Officer of the biotech startup, Cortical Labs, Brett Kagan, unveiled the CL-1, the world’s first commercially available biological computer earlier this year. The CL-1 holds living human neurons - cultured from stem cells donated by volunteers - inside a petri dish, connected to digital hardware. The neurons respond to electrical signals and can be trained to perform tasks like recognising handwriting or playing video games.
The Cortical Labs team first gained attention in 2022 when they taught a neural network to play Pong, a 1970s arcade video game that simulates table tennis. And today, the Lab is pushing boundaries further - training neurons to recognise handwritten digits and exploring the potential for synthetic biological intelligence.
“This is the next step towards engineering intelligent biological devices,” says Kagan. “We’re not just building computers - we’re building a new kind of intelligence.”
This article was originally published in The Age & SMH on 30 September.