Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising questions about the definition of death.
Scientists restored some activity within the brains of pigs that had been slaughtered hours before, raising hopes for some medical advances and questions about the definition of death.
The disembodied brains could not think or sense anything, researchers stressed. By medical standards “this is not a living brain,” said Dr. Nenad Sestan of the Yale School of Medicine, one of the researchers reporting the results Wednesday in the journal Nature.
But the work revealed a surprising degree of resilience among cells within a brain that has lost its supply of blood and oxygen, he said.
“Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window than we previously thought,” Sestan said.
Such research might lead to new therapies for stroke and other conditions, as well as provide a new way to study the brain and how drugs work in it, researchers said. They said they had no current plans to try their technique on human brains.
The 32 brains came from pigs killed for food at a local slaughterhouse. Scientists put the brains into an apparatus in their lab and began pumping a specially designed blood substitute through the organs four hours after the animals had died.
The brains showed no large-scale electrical activity that would indicate awareness.
