"The brains of dead pigs have been somewhat revived by scientists hours after the animals were killed in a slaughterhouse.
"The
Yale University research team is careful to say that none of the brains
regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with
consciousness or awareness. Still, the experiment described Wednesday in the journal Nature showed that a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored.
"The
implications of this study have staggered ethicists, as they
contemplate how this research should move forward and how it fits into
the current understanding of what separates the living from the dead.
"'It was mind-blowing,' says Nita Farahany,
who studies the ethics of emerging technologies at Duke Law School. 'My
initial reaction was pretty shocked. It's a groundbreaking discovery,
but it also really fundamentally changes a lot of what the existing
beliefs are in neuroscience about the irreversible loss of brain
function once there is deprivation of oxygen to the brain.'
"The
brain is extremely sensitive to a lack of oxygen and shuts down
quickly. But researchers have long known that viable cells can be
removed from post-mortem brains hours after death, says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn."
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