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Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
(science.org)
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by Timofeibu
by Timofeibu
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1. As it turned out, I was so frightened in the lead-up to the surgery that they had to do general anesthesia on me because I was shaking too much for them to operate so I was unconscious for the whole thing.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
"Attention to the risks of off-label use of propofol increased in August 2009, after the release of the Los Angeles County coroner's report that musician Michael Jackson was killed by a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam, and diazepam on 25 June 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propofol
Used properly, however:
"To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental."
IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
Every other part of the human body is understandable but the brain.
Reading the article and imagining its you, sheeeeesh. I really wonder how this passed ethical review. Yes the brain is an organ, and yes there’s probably consent and the body is officially proclaimed dead and this is near the best way to really extrapolate the empirical data prior to alive human trials.
But damn this article is a combination of words I did not want to read today nor imagine.
see e.g. Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Same for memory, which is "needed" as well for your question to make sense. The more current theories assume memories are stored not only in the brain, but throughout the body.
see e.g. Repetto, C., & Riva, G. (2023). The neuroscience of body memory: Recent findings and conceptual advances. EXCLI journal, 22, 191–206. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2023-5877
There is also the practice of not using anesthesia on infants when undergoing medical surgery.
Anesthesia is hard to do even on adults, harder on children, and very difficult on infants. Not accidentally killing one is quite hard.
So, for a long time we just didn't. I think some countries still don't, but can't remember.
The idea really gets back all the way to philosophy. If you can't remember if you were in pain, did you get hurt? And then you add in the medical problem itself, the duty to do no harm, the difficulties, etc. The conclusion was to just not use pain meds.
Can’t be worse than my organs being harvested for donation.
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
> Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
Once you go much more granular, there's no particular spot to make a distinction between "alive" and "not alive", until you stop seeing any electrical, biochemical and mechanical activity of any kind, at which point you're basically saying "inert".
I do wonder if AI advancements will allow me to see these horrors play out. Hopefully not to myself.
https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-hello-cru...
Reminds me of the Three Body Problem and sending a live brain to the cosmos because the tyranny of the rocket equation made a whole human impossible.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052646/mediaviewer/rm713036545...
Just please don't remove my brain before I'm 1000% certainly dead.
There's some fraction of people who would prefer to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, depending on the alternatives, but getting to that point is going to require a bunch of people to volunteer to undergo excruciating torture as we learn how to keep the brain alive, how to keep them comfortable, how to keep them conscious, sane and let them interact with the world.
Does this mean the donor was (1) or can the "revive" after (2)?
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
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Dramatized retelling of the story at 21m04s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ny_s07D-LT8&t=1264s
I remember there was a lawsuit when a guy left his phone recording when they wheeled him in for a conscious sedation procedure and the doctors and nurses were making fun of him audibly how fat he was. Seems like they're confident enough in people not remembering for them to do that - or being able to dismiss it.
People will downvote anything, SMH.
When I wake up from dreams, even with no memory of them, I sometimes have "a memory of a memory"; the tip-of-tge-tongue feeling that there's something interesting I'd experienced, but which I now can't remember what it was. But with the anaesthetic, there wasn't anything like that at all.
I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.
General anaesthetic scares me way more.
Or so they claim - the patient would have no memory of that anyway.
The short story "Transition Dreams" by Greg Egan touches on this concept
It's not that it's bad. The problem's the opposite: He poses an existentially dreadful question which I can't definitively answer with 'no'.
Does a full day of torture, completely forgotten, really matter? How long before it does matter? We forget vast amounts of our lives constantly. And after death, forgetting everything, how much mattered then? It's a mindfuck.
The last question is strange, it implies that the goal of life is to fill up a trophy cabinet with golden memories and then, I guess, relish them for eternity, rather than to do things.
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The first time it happened, I was fascinated watching the process. I thought I asked them a question about what I was seeing. I probably was just mumbling. The second time, I had a bright white ball of nuclear fire in my chest, and in my mind's eye, my ribs were slumping under the heat. I tried to tell them about the burning sensation, and I apologized for complaining (one should always be polite to the doctor running a wire through one's arteries and into one's heart).
In both cases, after I tried to speak, the room went black again.
As I relate the story, I can see how, for some people, it would be nightmare fuel. But for me it was this abstract "hey, that's cool."
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Happy to’ve learn a URL trick on HN so I’ll reshare:
The media and the people who bought into their shameless attention-grabbing lies are the reason he had sleep problems. He was unanimously acquitted of all counts, but the media made his life into a living hell by consistently portraying him as a pedophile because it drove incredible engagement numbers. A justice system should be "innocent until proven guilty", and yet MJ was deemed guilty even after proven innocent. Longform read from an actually good journalist, if you care to learn for yourself: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
Here's hoping the idea is that the slices will be really small, or something, because frankly the whole thing is utterly horrifying enough as-is.
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How could you possibly say that? You are positing that the brains are both conscious and happy. Both of those are leaps.
> It just invokes a strong emotional response because it's so "abnormal"
You are making an assumption about why people find this horrifying, and the assumption you made was uncharitable.
> OTOH, this is HN, I guess. Having empathy for real people would be harmful to the business model of most people's employers.
I do not see how people on HN being horrified by human brain experiments means they do not have empathy.
Until you hook it up to a lightening rod in the top of a castle!
We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.
Keep that in mind when they make arguments about propofol... Which is one of the drugs mentioned in https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/surgical-... and https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/neuroscience/pain/anesthesi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120411063647/http://squid314.l...
"What did the doctor say? He told me that they couldn’t up the anesthetic because an overdose could cause respiratory arrest, and that it wouldn’t matter because the anaesthetic on any dose caused severe short term memory loss and whatever happened the patient would forget all about it. The second point, at least, was right on. One patient spent the entire procedure writhing in agony and screaming something incoherent to God. The doctor finished the procedure, took out the endoscope, and cut off the anesthetic, and the patient turned his head, looked the doctor right in the eye, smiled, and said, laughing “Wow, that wasn’t bad at all! Guess I slept right through it!”"
[1]: e.g. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.27886
Is that incorrect?
Under "general anesthesia", the patient is completely unconscious. They don't respond to any stimuli. In rare cases, some patients may have an adverse reaction and still retain some sensation, but that's very uncommon. My understanding is that we are certain that patients are actually unconscious (and not just unable to respond) because none of the other involuntary responses to trauma occur during surgery: elevated heart rate, etc. In short, you are simply not there for a while. This is what you get for most kinds of significant surgeries unless the surgery requires you to be awake (like brain surgery where they may need to ask you questions).
"Sedation" or "twilight sedation" is a lower level of anesthesia. You are somewhat conscious and can respond to commands from the doctor. But you are unable to form memories of what's happening and you're usually on something like fentanyl that makes you entirely OK with whatever it is they are doing to you. This is common for procedures like colonoscopies and endoscopies where the procedure is somewhat uncomfortable but where you aren't being cut open.
In general, anesthesiologists are trying to balance the goal of patient comfort against the risks of deeper levels of sedation.
I still think this experimentation is absolutely insane and I strongly object because there is no way to get feedback from the "patient" after the fact. Since we have no real idea of what is happening, I believe we should err on the side of caution. "But they could consent beforehand" is not morally acceptable for intrinsically inhumane actions that take away fundamental human rights and dignity. So if you think this is possibly inhumane / potentially torture, it is an irrelevant point since true consent would be impossible.
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I only gave one example and Wikipedia to start with. There's a lot of material out there if you're (rightfully) skeptical of that one paper. I don't even know what you're refering to as "their theory", as the way I read it, they're basically documenting various co-existing theories, and the authors don't disclose which one they find the most likely. I also don't see it as necessary for science to pick one; it's all about theories. I prefer documentation of all possible theories, and see no reason to dismiss one over the other unless they're disproven. I pointed to that paper, because any paper that talks about alternative theories shows the point I was making: We don't know yet. The point was not to claim that they've managed to put together good or bad arguments.
> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.
I don't see how this relates to the "seat of consciousness" (with)in a human body, or how the biological system works together to "form it". Or where thinking or memory storage or retrieval takes place. At least that was what I was talking about. You're talking about something else.
It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The modern term for "soul" is "psyche".
Remember that the OP was asking: "How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream?" -- clearly refering to something... conscious?
I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.
No it's not, not by anyone serious.
We know the brain is the seat of consciousness because damage to the brain damages consciousness. There is no other organ in the body where that's true. You can completely replace all other organs without changing consciousness.
You can always find a paper by a quack that posits the earth is flat, that doesn't mean there's serious debate.
I am familiar with the works of Oliver Sacks, Paul Broks, and others, who have spent their lives researching damage to brains and the potential consequences for the psyche. I agree that it sounds like damage to the brain can have big impact, but none of that research, as far as I am aware, proves or even tries to argue that the brain is the only component necessary for consciousness to exist.
I am not interested in beliefs in one theory over another. I am not even asking for probabilities. I am asking for a scientific approach, which is to detail all possible (potentially fringe) theories until they're proven wrong. Anything else is the business of religion.
Singer, J., & Damasio, A. (2025). The physiology of interoception and its adaptive role in consciousness. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 380(1939), 20240305. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0305
Aderinto, N., Olatunji, G., Kokori, E., Ogieuhi, I. J., Moradeyo, A., Woldehana, N. A., Lawal, Z. D., Adetunji, B., Assi, G., Nazar, M. W., & Adebayo, Y. A. (2025). A narrative review on the psychosocial domains of the impact of organ transplantation. Discover mental health, 5(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-025-00148-y
Boem F, Greslehner GP, Konsman JP and Chiu L (2024) Minding the gut: extending embodied cognition and perception to the gut complex. Front. Neurosci. 17:1172783. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1172783Article 1. is about how the brain interprets incoming signals from the body
Article 2. is about dealing with psychiatric needs, such as medication compliance and stress, which result from organ transplants.
And, as I addressed in another comment, Article 3. is a discussion about the impacts of gut microbiome on mood. It is not a discussion of "consciousness".
I think for direct comparison, the way of re-animating the brain described in the article would need to be attempted on the cardiac arrest patient as well so as to be sure it isn’t a “revival”-capable method
Might already be an obvious answer to practitioners in the field
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Are you kidding me?
Prostitution has a big forced prostitution problem
Organ harvesting of living patients hasn't fully scaled up as a practice yet, but it's definitely a major source of income for some rural hospitals.
I would say accidentally mistaking the patient is dead in any case is hardly the same as purposefully harvesting the organs from people they know are alive to get paid. The article does not state any evidence to suggest they are doing this.
There is obviously going to be some pressure to make a decision to retrieve the organs in the interest of not wasting something that could save another's life as there is a limited time frame where these organs can be viable. There is a huge distinction between that and going to patients that have no doubt they are alive and harvesting their organs.
Unless you live in some incredibly lawless country?
Organ donation is so very sensitive, and those who use the service are so aware of the sensitivities I think that you'd be insane to have such a reaction to this media piece.
In fact, I'll go one further. I have serious doubts you were ever an organ donor at all.
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I don't remember where specifically I learned this, but I was taught that tissue has to be alive to be useful, so they harvest it when you're almost-dead. Having my last moments be being literally dismembered is not something I wish for my future self.
I hope this is a comforting answer, I choose to be an organ donor because of these details.
It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.
imagine waking up in the simulated environment...
The brain itself doesn't have pain receptors, so painkillers would not make any difference. The only pain would be existentional ;)
And who am I to judge? Maybe that is the reality.
Indeed, that is (allegedly) the case with organ donation: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/organ-transplants-dono...
Hell, if I had to choose between MY cat and YOUR daughter, the choice would will be easy
If you could only rescue one member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize the pet over a human member of your family?
> If you could only rescue one member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize the pet over a human member of your family?
If you could only rescue one family member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize a stranger over a member of your family?
I'll preface by saying that I don't have a pet. However, if one had to burn alive between a stranger's little girl and my cat, it's easier to empathize, "what if that were my daughter?". It's easy to imagine the father's pain, and because the girl is human, it's easier to imagine what might be going on in the little girl's head as well. As the heat's becoming too strong for her to bear, it's easier to imagine her expression, her pain, and her fear.
It's harder to imagine and empathize with what might be going on through a cat's head. They don't think as we do and don't express themselves as we do. It's not like one can't anthropomorphize and empathize that way, but it's not the same as empathizing with a human. It's harder to imagine and feel their thoughts and emotions to the same level of detail.
I'd feel for the cat, but I think the girl burning alive would give me the worse nightmares.
Torture - the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.
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I’m still on the acceptance side of abortion, stem cell research and other things like human cloning. They advance science, reduce human suffering - yes I get abortion doesn’t fit there exactly but it should be the mothers/parents right to ave access to abortion. All very political and highly debatable points today.
I understand if I accept that, what’s accepting experimentation on a brain dead brain - it should be a no brainer.
Easier because it’s just an artifact of a person that’s deceased but it is easy to invoke imagery in my own brain of an eternal torture chamber, someone’s consciousness locked away never recoverable or removable undergoing this amount of pain, but also is it pain if it can’t feel it?
The bodies other organs, it’s easy to dismiss as collections of cells, etc but: the brain just makes it harder to justify because it is the organ we use to interpret the world and imagining a world of pain and wondering what if that is the layer we are in now… is just scary.
I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive, and why are people still publishing documentaries? You don't need a documentary to make an allegation. They're doing it because they want to make money, then. Off a dead man, who can't defend himself.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/film/michael-jacksons-biopi...:
> Over the years, Jackson and the estate have paid out millions to settle various claims, with some lawsuits still pending without ever admitting wrongdoing. A significant reason for the large settlement totaling about $25 million made by Jackson in 1994 to the Chandler family and their lawyer was the drawing of specific markings Jackson had on his penis caused by the skin condition vitiligo.
> Jordie Chandler drew the markings and the drawing was put into a sealed envelope. During the criminal investigation, Jackson was so resistant to having his genitals photographed that he slapped one of his doctors. It didn’t matter for the civil suit. My reporting showed that when Jordie’s drawing was unsealed, it matched the photos.
He was not “proven innocent”; that’s not how the legal system works. He was “found not guilty” which is a much lower standard than “proven innocent”.
(OJ Simpson was similarly found not guilty; do you think he was also “proven innocent”?)
How is it obvious pedophilia, if you say he may have never done a sexual thing to them?
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
Never connected Jackson to e.g. Weinstein - if allegation’s true that’s a horrible thing
The evidence that the brain is where thinking happens is overwhelming, the minor influence of the rest of the body notwithstanding. There are no other theories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mind
Plenty of examples of theories listed there, no? Picking a random one: "Open individualism states that individual personal identity is an illusion and all individual conscious minds are in reality the same being".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind_thesis
"the extended mind thesis says that the mind does not exclusively reside in the brain or even the body, but extends into the physical world"
To state it explicitly, I am not saying I believe in these alternative theories. I am also not stating anything about their probabilities. I just want to be accurate in my understanding, which is that multiple theories do exist and none of them have been proven or disproven. It is not known whether you only need a brain to think, or how much other regions like the nervous system spread throughout the body play a crucial role for "thoughts" to form.
If you discard a theory just because you judge there not to be sufficient evidence, you're working from a belief, and not from scientific reason.
In this particular thread, we're not even coming from "thinking" or "mind", but from sentience -- the stated idea that the "brain can feel pain", as brain alone (!). Depending on which physical regions and matter you include in "brain", it doesn't even have any structures that according to the current scientific consensus provide or relay perceptive data. Unless you believe in one of the many theories that place the mind outside of the physical structures of the brain.
You can't find a single case study where someone's consciousness was notably altered due to bowel resection. Something that has happened all the time.
Where are the people losing or having alerted consciousness after having their stomachs stapled? Their perforated bowels resected? Their bowel cancer polyps removed?
The closest you'll find is soldiers suffering from, understandable, PTSD.
Also, I'd point out that the studies you referenced aren't suggesting your point. They are saying that the gut can affect our mood and cravings. But as anyone that's taken a powerful antibiotic can attest, that did not modify their consciousness even though it nuked a huge portion of their biome.
People also get fecal transplants, they don't share consciousness as a result.
Unless you want to define consciousness as an eternal soul that exists in rocks, then you'll find no support for the suggestion that it exists outside a brain.
You also need to explain why it is that traumatic brain injuries alter consciousness and memory. Why it is that we can observe physical changes in the brains of dementia patients.
Let's wait and see what happens with brain or head transplantation. :)
We'll see!
I am saying: we can guess, but we don't know. I am not saying it's likely. I just want to remain precise in what are theories. It is a theory that consciousness "lives" inside the physical brain, as much as it is one that it doesn't. It is physically possible that it exists energetically and moves and stays with "the larger chunk of body".
I think that's the part that might get people though. Since a comatose brain is not necessarily fully gone
So I guess the question is what differentiates a comatose brain from one that is no longer capable of consciousness?
DUI kills people no matter if the drug is legal or illegal.
Crimes to finance the next drug dose or bet also don’t care if legal or illegal.
And yes, alcohol should be banned or at least not glorified
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A more straightforward angle could be money spent: would someone spend more for the wellbeing of their pet than for a family member (elderlies included).
It’s worth noting that it’s common for it to take years or decades for victims to speak out against an abuser. Especially when the victims are children. Especially when the abuser is a prominent figure, like the literal King of Pop.
I’m not going to try and convince you that these allegations are credible (though I believe they are), I just want you to think about how a child victim might behave in that situation. There’s almost never any objective evidence or 3rd party witnesses of abuse. It’s almost always the word of one person against another. And it may be years before a child victim even fully understands what was happening, and years beyond that to come to terms with it.
Another big allegation is from Wade Robson, who has turned the accusations into two documentaries. Wade Robson was 25 years old when, in 2005, he testified under oath that Jackson had never abused him as one of the witnesses called by the defense. He is now suing the Jackson estate for $400 million.
It's not like I can't imagine a child victim growing up and taking time to come to terms with abuse, but these people were actively defending him as fully mature adults, only to suddenly turrn on his estate for some reason. I see a pattern in the accusations, and that pattern is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Maybe it's a sign
But it is not necessarily pedophilia. Because that means wanting to have sex with children.
The explanation I heard is he wanted to be close to children to compensate for his own lack of innocent childhood. Children don't do sexual intercourse. Now if he was a child in his mind, then I as a parent would surely not have gave my children to his care, but this is still something very different from child molesting.
So what you are saying is flawed. Even if Michael was a child in his mind, he was not inherently asexual.
Treating children as incapable of sex is dangerous and you are giving a prime example. Treating Michael Jackson like a child is absolutely insanity because I don’t know a single child with a vacation Ranch and private security detail keeping everyone from witnessing how he actually lived.
Pedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. The attraction is the disorder; acting on it is a separate thing (child sexual abuse). Michael was definitely a pedophile but maybe not a child sex abuser.
Maybe he liked playing with children because adults are evil and only saw him as a moneybag to try to extricate a payday from. If he wasn't harming them, it's not my business.
Michael had a secluded ranch with private security to ensure we would never know what he did with the children.
So I don't know what happened in Michaels bedroom, was it the innocent or the weird or even sick version. But I certainly won't condem the innocent version in general. The world needs rather more of this very normal close bonding, not people being afraid of being close with children for fear of being called a pedophile.
"Michael was definitely a pedophile"
So I would like to know what makes you so sure of it, that there was a sexual desire?
Apart from that, you are right, that also children can experiment or be very early. But normal childrens play or adult children interaction is not sexual. So I don't see the final conclusion. Did you read the article linked above? The media reporting about it was anything, but not fair nor factual. Did you consider you might have been influenced by that? I certainly do consider that I might be wrong here with my judgement, but all evidence so far I read against him seems either fabricated or hysterical from the point of view of puritans.