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The Implications of Playing Pac-Man With Single-Celled Organisms

h5. What the screen looks like in Riedel-Kruse's lab. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse is a researcher and Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University has turned bacteria into Pac-Men. More specifically, he connected some electrodes to a small...
What the screen looks like in Riedel-Kruse’s lab.

Ingmar Riedel-Kruse is a researcher and Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University has turned bacteria into Pac-Men. More specifically, he connected some electrodes to a small chamber containing paramecia, then gave players in his lab lab control over the electrodes, which create an electric field that changes the paramecia's movement. Which of course raises much more interesting questions than you get from a round of the new Duke Nukem, as Kill Screen finds out:

What are some of the ethical considerations in using organic life in games like these? Do paramecia have rights? There are multiple things we have to consider. Foremost, do the organisms at hand feel any pain while we play with them? In this case the answer is a clear “no” as paramecia are single celled organisms without any nerves let alone a brain. You can, of course, go to the more general question of whether it¹s okay to play with life. I don’t personally see any problem with that. What's in the future for biotic games. Are these just fun teaching tools or is there some latent scientific value still waiting to be discovered? These games provide a certain way for humans to interact with biology. You can try something and see the response in the system that's set up. That's a basic kind of an experiment. What we envision is giving people that don't come into contact with these things during everyday life a platform to explore ideas in microbiology. As to whether we could ever make research contributions, right now it's just a setup in a lab. But if you could play it over the internet and everyone could have access to it, that would change things a lot.

A video, below:

Connections:
Pac-Man Was Puckman