The neuroscientists are already doing experiments
with the hippocampus - an artificial one.
The issue of ethics could be a grave one. On the other hand, such
technical advances remind me of a chat I had in the late nineteen
sixties with some colleagues, when one day we were sitting together
near a then for us astonishingly fast computer which was however
extremely extremely costly. We came up with a question concerning
the 'principal' feasibility of a project which is devoid of (or
anyway almost so) any ethical problems: Electrically connect the
brains of a large number of pigs to do computations. (You see we
were babbling about networking and even cloud computing in
ultra-modern terminology!) We envisaged pigs, because they are
comparatively intelligent among animals having large-sized brains
and are quite cheap.