In 1944, Suspense presented one of old-time radio’s strangest and most unsettling experiments.
What if a human brain could remain alive after the body had died?
Starring Orson Welles as Dr. Patrick Cory, Donovan’s Brain begins as a tale of scientific curiosity and gradually becomes something much darker. More than eighty years later, its central idea no longer seems quite as safely confined to science fiction.
Researchers today are growing tiny structures of human neural tissue known as brain organoids, connecting them to electronic systems, and studying their ability to respond, adapt, learn, and process information. Some researchers have even proposed a new field called “organoid intelligence”—exploring whether living neural networks might someday perform forms of computation.
No, scientists have not created Donovan’s brain.
But they may have brought us close enough to the old story to make its questions worth asking again.
In this episode of The Common Room, we return to the extraordinary 1944 Suspense production of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain and place it beside the emerging science of living computers.
What is the difference between intelligence and consciousness?
If living neural tissue can learn, is it simply biological hardware?
Could a biological computer ever become something toward which we have moral obligations?
If a human brain could somehow survive without its body, would the intelligence inside still be the person who once inhabited it?
And beneath all of these questions lies an older and deeper one:
Is a human being merely a brain?
Pull up a chair in The Common Room at The Little Station on Commercial Street in Atchison, Kansas, as an 82-year-old radio nightmare meets one of the strangest frontiers of modern science.
⚠️ SPOILER NOTE: This conversation discusses important events in Donovan’s Brain. If you haven’t heard the original Suspense production, consider listening first:
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