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Lomax Boyd’s path to the Civic Science Fellowship started with his research on brain organoids  

When Lomax Boyd published his Ph.D. research on how human brains evolved to be bigger than chimpanzee brains, news coverage landed everywhere: National Geographic, NPR, Science, and the New York Times. For a graduate student, it was the kind of result that can launch an academic career.

But the public’s questions caught him off-guard.

“People were very interested in it, but they weren’t interested in the molecular pathways that I was studying,” Boyd says. “They were interested in the moral and ethical implications of possibly growing super-intelligent, non-human animals.”

He hadn’t studied the relevant ethical and moral issues. “That was my first exposure to ethics and science, or the collision thereof.”

Most scientists in Boyd’s position would have hoped the attention could help them land a faculty job. Instead, he walked away from the bench—twice. First he went to Canada’s National Film Board on a Fulbright fellowship and traveled to the Yukon to film gold miners and paleontologists working together to unearth ice-age fossils from the permafrost. The resulting short documentary shows “what productive relationships and collaborations with the public can look like,” Boyd says.

He then returned to neuroscience at The Rockefeller University, only to find himself pulled toward the same questions about ethical issues his previous research had brought up. Through it all, he kept coming back to the same question: How could he build a bridge between the science he loved with the people it affected?

The Civic Science Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University finally gave him a way in. Funded by The Kavli Foundation, the fellowship placed Boyd at the intersection of the University’s Berman Institute of Bioethics and Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute.

“It was a bit of an unexpected discovery that that bridge could really be focused on understanding values and morals,” Boyd says. “It was a very rich space for me to bring in all these different experiences across my life.”

After his fellowship he stayed on at the Berman Institute to continue his work as an assistant research professor. “Without the fellowship, that sort of pivot into what I’m doing now, it just would not have been possible.”

A double-edged sword

Boyd became the embedded ethicist on one of neuroscience’s most provocative projects. The Organoid Intelligence team at Johns Hopkins aims to integrate lab-grown human brain tissue with computer hardware to study learning, memory, and brain function. Potential applications range from medical treatments to next-generation computing. The project recently received a $15-million-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Brain organoids are abstract enough on their own, Boyd says. But when you tell people that a biocomputer made from brain organoids learned to play the arcade game Pong more efficiently than a conventional computer program, “things just get real sci-fi, real quick,” he says. So he drew on his filmmaking background to produce a video to help explain to people what’s actually happening with this research before asking what they thought about it. What they had to say surprised him.

In March, Boyd and his colleagues published research in Scientific Reports that had been conceived during his fellowship. The results are based on a nationally representative survey of more than 1,200 people about their attitudes toward brain organoids integrated with computer hardware, also known as biocomputers.

The headline finding upends a core assumption in bioethics that if the public thinks brain organoids might be conscious, they’ll want to shut the research down. The opposite turned out to be true. The more consciousness people believed biocomputers had, the more they supported the research and saw the benefits as outweighing the ethical risks.

“Consciousness is a double-edged sword,” Boyd says. “For some people, engineering beings that could be conscious poses an existential threat. ‘They’re creating life, they’re playing God,’ they say.” Those people, he found, are significantly less likely to attribute any consciousness to organoids at all. To them, organoids are just cells in a dish, no matter how complicated they are. Other people see consciousness as a sign that the biosystem is actually modeling something close enough to the human brain to deliver real medical benefits.

Boyd’s research identified three clusters in how people think about consciousness across all beings: those who believe most things are conscious, those who believe there is a spectrum of consciousness, and those who are firmly binary—you’re either conscious or you’re not.

But the deepest dividing line is what the authors refer to as a “foundational distinction,” a gut-level belief that there is an irreducible gap between humans and everything else. For people who hold that belief, the question isn’t whether organoids are conscious, because they never could be. Even admitting that possibility would blur a boundary between human and non-human that feels sacred. Those people are the most opposed to the research. But even they can be moved: When biocomputers are framed in terms of medical benefit, their support increases.

These findings are exactly what civic science is for, says Brooke Smith, who directs science and society programs at The Kavli Foundation. Boyd’s work “shows that what scientists expect the public will think is actually different than what public concerns actually are,” she says.

Forging a new path

Because civic science is a young field, fellowship projects often involve breaking new ground. This can take time—more time than the 18-month fellowship period can accommodate in some cases. Boyd’s paper landing four years after his fellowship is one example. “The projects that Civic Science Fellows start, they’re ambitious, they’re innovative, they’re novel, and they have these long developmental times,” Boyd says.

It can also take time for Fellows to find their next position. Building a civic science culture often means creating brand new kinds of positions, sometimes at organizations and institutions that have never engaged in this type of work before. Boyd’s current position makes him one of the few scientist-fellows to remain in academia doing civic science work.

But that position is precarious. Finding funding for civic science work can also be challenging. Funders are starting to see the value and committing to directly supporting civic science efforts or including civic science aspects in the kinds of projects they already support. But even with the backing of the Civic Science Fellowship, Boyd didn’t have the resources he would have liked. “You can’t do anything empirical if you have no resources,” he says.

He did manage to cobble together enough funding, both during and after the fellowship, to do the survey that became his Scientific Reports paper. Grants from The Kavli Foundation, NSF, and Johns Hopkins’s Applied Physics Laboratory each supported a different piece of the work. The fellowship gave him the questions and the relationships; answering them took years of additional support.

Even finding support to keep his current position has been challenging. “I’m only here by the bits of my nails,” he says. He juggles half a dozen grants at a time, each covering 10 to 20 percent of his salary, scrambling every few months to fill gaps.

Boyd would like to see civic science benefit from the kind of long-term philanthropic efforts that have been established for science, such as the HHMI Investigator Program and the Kavli Institutes, or endowed positions at universities. “The most successful science philanthropic efforts are the most long-term,” he says. “These are ways of funding high-risk, long-term, sustainable research. And there’s nothing like that in civic science yet.”

Fellows based in nonprofits often have a clearer path to continuing their work after the fellowship ends, he says. For scientists in academia, there’s no equivalent landing pad. “I don’t honestly know how long I’ll be able to do it,” he says.

Despite the precariousness, Boyd sees signs that the model he’s helping to build is taking root. The network of current and former Civic Science Fellows has deepened with every cohort. He catches up with fellows monthly and has built relationships across many fields. “We’ve planted the seeds,” he says.

And the approach is starting to gain traction beyond the Civic Science Fellowship network. For example, for some funding calls, the National Science Foundation requires an ethicist as co-principal investigator on all organoid intelligence grants, with ethics plans evaluated as legitimate research aims on equal footing with scientific merit.

And in a 2023 Dana Foundation-funded survey of early-career neuroscientists, Boyd found something that gives him hope: The scientists’ interest in engaging with the public and with ethical questions is there. “People’s interest in this type of work doesn’t seem to be heavily influenced by the perturbation to the system right now,” he says. “It’s not a cherry on top—it’s an embedded, essential nature of the work.”

The scientist who was once unprepared for the public’s ethical questions is now the ethicist embedded in the science. The work takes longer than anyone budgets for, but the next generation of neuroscientists isn’t waiting for the funding structures to catch up—they already see engagement with the public as essential to what they do.

“You’ve got to see the optimism in that data,” Boyd says.