Daniel Radcliffe has responded to the fallout with Harry Potter author JK Rowling over her views on the transgender community for the first time since 2020, saying: “It makes me really sad”.

Rowling, who has always denied being transphobic, has been widely condemned in recent years for her views on transgender rights, having claimed that she would rather go to jail than refer to a trans person by their preferred pronouns.

Radcliffe, who became a worldwide star after playing schoolboy wizard Harry in the blockbuster adaptations of the novels, said in an interview with US magazine The Atlantic he has had no direct contact with the writer throughout the controversy.

“It makes me really sad, ultimately,” he said, “because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”

The 34-year-old actor first expressed his support for the trans community in response to Rowling’s stance back in June 2020 when she took issue with the phrasing of a headline for an opinion article about healthcare equality, titled Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.

Her response to it on social media – “‘People who menstruate’. I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” – sparked a debate and ongoing criticism of her views.

Radcliffe waded into the controversy at the time in a blog post for the LGBT suicide prevention charity The Trevor Project, writing that while Rowling “is unquestionably responsible for the course my life has taken… as a human being, I feel compelled to say something at this moment”.

He added: “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”

Radcliffe told The Atlantic: “Obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person. But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”

Last month, Rowling reignited the row with the Harry Potter stars, hitting out at “celebs” who she said have “used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors” – after the Cass Review found there is “remarkably weak evidence” to support gender treatments for children.

One person replied to her post on X, writing: “Just waiting for Dan and Emma to give you a very public apology… safe in the knowledge that you will forgive them…”

Rowling responded: “Not safe, I’m afraid. Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces.”

In response, Radcliffe told The Atlantic: “I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.”

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Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, and Rupert Grint, known for his portrayal of Ron Weasley in the series, have also been outspoken in support of transgender people.

Meteors will be streaking across the sky as Earth passes through dusty debris in space left by Halley’s Comet in the annual Eta Aquariid meteor shower, with peak activity in early May.

Here is an explanation of this meteor shower.

WHAT IS A METEOR?

Meteors are space rocks and other material that burn up as they plummet through Earth’s atmosphere, leaving a bright streak in the sky. They also are called shooting stars or falling stars, though they are not stars. Comets can be a source of meteor showers because they cast off dust and debris as they orbit the sun. Meteor showers happen annually or at regular intervals when our planet, during its orbit of the sun, journeys through trails of such debris.

WHY IS IT CALLED THE ETA AQUARIID METEOR SHOWER?

It gets its name because the origination point in the sky – called the radiant – for the debris that burns up in the atmosphere is in the constellation Aquarius – the “water bearer” – and close to Eta Aquarii, one of the constellation’s brightest stars and one of the four stars that comprise the top of its “water jar.” Eta Aquarii and the other stars in the constellation have nothing to do with causing the meteors.

WHEN AND WHERE CAN YOU VIEW THE METEOR SHOWER?

According to the American Meteor Society, the Eta Aquariids are active from April 16-May 27, with the highest meteor rates from May 1-10 and the peak on May 5. The meteors can be seen during pre-dawn hours in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. The Southern Hemisphere offers an advantage because the Aquarius constellation is situated higher in the sky than in the Northern Hemisphere. Experts recommend viewing the shower in the darkest skies possible because most of the meteor activity is faint. During the peak, about 30 meteors can be viewed each hour, according to NASA.

WHAT DOES HALLEY’S COMET HAVE TO DO WITH THIS?

Comets are icy remnants from the time of the solar system’s formation, made up of rock, dust and ices. As they orbit nearer the sun, they release dust and gases. Halley’s Comet, named for English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) who studied it, is considered the most famous one. It takes a 76-year orbital lap around the sun. It was last seen in Earth’s skies in 1986 and will return in 2061, according to NASA. Debris released by Halley’s Comet causes the Eta Aquariid meteor shower. The Orionid meteor shower that peaks in mid-October each year also is driven by debris from Halley’s Comet.

HOW QUICKLY DO THESE METEORS TRAVEL?

According to NASA, Eta Aquariid meteors are particularly speedy, moving at about 148,000 miles per hour (238,000 km per hour) into Earth’s atmosphere. Such quickly moving meteors can produce glowing “trains” lasting for seconds to minutes. The American Meteor Society said meteor rates are expected to be enhanced this year by debris being perturbed by the gas giant planet Jupiter in a direction closer to Earth.

In an experiment reminiscent of “Frankenstein,” scientists found that rat brain cells can fill in for lost neurons in mice, even allowing the host rodents to sniff out sweets. 

While splicing rat and mouse brains together may sound odd, this work aims to build a basis for understanding how mammal brains develop, said Kristin Baldwin, a neuroscientist at Columbia University and the lead author of a new study describing the experiment. 

Baldwin and her team’s study, which was published in the journal Cell alongside a second study from collaborators at the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern, shows that the rat brain cells introduced into a mouse brain pick up cues from their new environment. These cells develop in the same time frame as nearby mouse brain cells, communicating with them and even adjusting their size to match.  

“The host is controlling at least two aspects: the size and also the developmental speed,” said Jun Wu, a molecular biologist at the UT Southwestern Medical Center and the lead author of the second study. “That’s very interesting and suggests the microenvironment has influence on the pace, as well as the size, of the donor cell.” 

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The study led by Baldwin focuses on how networks form in a hybrid mouse-rat brain, while the study led by Wu focuses more on replacing an entire brain region with transplanted cells. The research could lead to other cross-species brain tissue, helping scientists study brain development and disease and potentially develop new treatments for people. 

Baldwin’s team first used bacterial toxins to either kill or silence brain cells in developing mouse embryos. They started when the developing embryo was just a hollow ball of 100 to 200 cells, called a blastocyst, and targeted cells involved in sensing scents. Into these blastocysts, they also injected stem cells from rats, using a type of cell capable of developing into many cell types. 

They then implanted the altered blastocysts into mouse mothers and allowed the embryos to develop. They found that the rat cells developed apace with the mouse cells, filling in for the killed or silenced cells in the scent-sensing centers of the brain. Completely wiping out the mouse cells and replacing them with rat cells led to some odd-looking anatomy, Baldwin told Live Science, but the mouse’s sense of smell still worked completely normally.

The fact that the different neurons foraged a network together and gave rise to fairly normal behavior is promising, Baldwin said. There are hopes right now for treating brain diseases, such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, with donated or lab-grown cells that would replace the diseased cells in patients’ brains. 

Similar donations of brain tissue are a long way off — but there’s a need to ensure that neuron transplants of that sort could actually lead to functional brain networks. 

“You could say, ‘We can replace the cells that make dopamine and they will make dopamine,'” Baldwin told Live Science. Dopamine is a chemical messenger that’s dramatically depleted in Parkinson’s. “But what are they doing to the information processing in that part of the brain?” Baldwin added. “Are they participating in the right way, and could we improve that?”

Related: Will brain transplants ever be possible?

Wu’s study focused on replacing an entire region of the mouse brain with rat cells. The team used the gene-editing technique CRISPR to shut down a gene that triggers the development of the mouse forebrain in the womb. They replaced this large brain region with rat cells, and 60% of the cells in the mature mice ended up being of rat origin. Despite their hybridized brains, the mice acted like typical lab mice.

“We show that up to 60% of cells that are coming from a different species in the forebrain doesn’t really dramatically alter the behavior of the host recipient,” Wu told Live Science. 

No one’s planning to put human neurons in mouse brains. That would raise far more ethical issues than growing hybrid rodent-rodent brains, because the brains could cross a threshold and become “too human.” In any case, it would be far more technically difficult to achieve, Wu said. There have been attempts to grow other human organs in animals — for instance, scientists grew human kidneys inside pig embryos — but brain tissue would be another matter.

Researchers could theoretically apply these techniques to hybridize the brains of different monkey species. This could make it easier to genetically tweak the primates to model aspects of human diseases; that’s because different gene-modification techniques tend to be tried and tested in specific species and aren’t always easy to use across species. 

Such work in monkeys might be more relevant to people, as many diseases that humans get don’t affect mice or rats, Baldwin noted. But it would raise its own ethical questions. 

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