The brains of killed pigs have been partly revived hours after death. Here’s everything you need to know about the experiment and what it means for those of us with a human brain. What happened to the pig brains? The brains were removed from pigs four hours after they had been decapitated and were then hooked up to an artificial supply of blood-like fluid, in a device called BrainEx, for six hours. Surprisingly, this seemed to reduce the amount of brain cell damage that normally happens after bodily death, and it also seemed to restore brain cells’ ability to perform some functions such as using glucose and oxygen. Could the dead brains have been aware of what was happening? The fluid contained drugs that stop nerve cells from firing – partly to help the cells recover, but also to avoid any chance of the brains experiencing some form of awareness. But when some nerve cells were removed and tested separately in a dish without these drugs, they were found to still be capable of sending electrical signals. Advertisement Does this mean we can bring people’s brains back to life after they’ve died? Not at all. There were only limited signs of individual brain cells surviving and functioning – not the coordinated activity of all the brain cells and structures needed to achieve perception or awareness. It would be a massive leap to assume such higher functions are possible. “This is not a living brain, it’s a cellularly active brain,” says Nenad Sestan of Yale School of Medicine, who was part of the team that did the work. Are we sure the drugs will have blocked any brain activity? Yes, because Sestan’s team also measured activity of the brains with electroencephalogram (EEG) recording while they were hooked up to the device. There were no brainwaves, which are necessary for any kind of awareness. “The organised electrical activity associated with consciousness was never detected,” says ethicist and team member Stephen Latham of Yale University. If there had been any brainwaves they would have stopped the experiment. How ethical was this experiment? The group used pigs that had been killed for food, so caused no extra deaths, and they got approval from all the relevant ethics committees. But some US laws on animal research only concern work done on creatures that are alive, so it’s unclear how they apply to brains in this novel state. The team want the regulations reviewed. To be on the safe side, any such brains should be dosed with a general anaesthetic in future, Nita Farahany of Duke University in North Carolina suggests in an accompanying commentary published in Nature. How does this change our understanding of the brain? Until now, we thought that just a few minutes of oxygen deprivation could lead to brain damage, triggering a cascade of irreversible cell death and degeneration. Now we know that at least some cell activities can be restored even four hours after death without any cooling. “Cell death happens across a longer time window than we thought,” says Sestan Could this affect organ donation after brain death? Not any time soon. Donor organs usually come from someone who has had a severe brain injury and no longer have a functioning brain stem, a part of the brain that is essential for life. With existing technology, no one recovers after tests have shown brain stem death, says John Dark of Newcastle University, UK. Are there any other implications? For a start, the experiment provides a new way to study brains in the lab. And in medicine, the artificial blood substitute could be useful for helping to protect the brain or other organs after damage caused by lack of oxygen, as happens after heart attacks. The fluid contains chemicals that protect nerve cells from damage, and unlike blood, has no immune cells, which may contribute to brain damage. “If this works for brain cells it will also work with some less sensitive organs with some tinkering,” says Latham. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1099-1<doc-sep>The experiment poses questions about the barrier between life and death (Getty) In a morbid experiment which raises questions about the barrier between life and death, scientists have ‘revived’ pig brains hours after slaughter. The researchers found that cell death could be halted, and connections in the brain could be restored, even after death. But the thirty-two pig brains collected from an abbatoir showed no signs of consciousness, the researchers said. The Yale team use pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood at body temperature to keep the brains alive. Read more from Yahoo News UK: Bank holiday motorists face travel chaos over Easter break Woman dies after falling off cliff while posing for photo World’s smallest commercial jet takes flight Researchers found working synapses – connections between brain cells – and a normal response to drugs. This all happened 10 hours after ‘death’ – although EEG scans of the brain showed no signs of consciousness. Prof Nenad Sestan, a professor of neuroscience at Yale University, said: ‘Cell death in the brain occurs across a longer time window that we previously thought. ‘What we are showing is the process of cell death is a gradual, stepwise process. ‘And that some of those processes can be either postponed, preserved or even reversed.’ —Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK—<doc-sep>In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs. The brains did not regain anything resembling consciousness: There were no signs indicating coordinated electrical signaling, necessary for higher functions like awareness and intelligence. But in an experimental treatment, blood vessels in the pigs’ brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, and certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs. When the researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, they discovered electrical activity in some neurons. The work is very preliminary and has no immediate implications for treatment of brain injuries in humans. But the idea that parts of the brain may be recoverable after death, as conventionally defined, contradicts everything medical science believes about the organ and poses metaphysical riddles.<doc-sep>Over the course of a six-hour treatment, the brains were infused with a cocktail of synthetic fluids designed to halt cellular degeneration and restore cellular functions, such as metabolic activity. It worked: The brains continued to consume oxygen and glucose. Many brain cells, including neurons, which send messages within the brain and to the rest of the body, ceased decaying and appear to have been revived in dramatic and detectable ways.<doc-sep>
Did they really bring a dead pig's brain back to life? Well, sort of. In new research published Wednesday, scientists say that they restored "circulation and cellular activity" in a pig's brain four hours after its death. This is "a finding that challenges long-held assumptions about the timing and irreversible nature of the cessation of some brain functions after death," Yale University scientists report. Here's how it went down: Scientists obtained the brain of a dead pig from a meatpacking plant, then infused it with a specially designed chemical solution. Shortly thereafter, many basic cellular functions, once thought to cease seconds or minutes after oxygen and blood flow cease, were seen four hours later. However, researchers also stressed that the treated brain lacked any recognizable electrical signals associated with normal brain function. "At no point did we observe the kind of organized electrical activity associated with perception, awareness, or consciousness," said study co-author Zvonimir Vrselja, a research scientist in neuroscience at Yale. "Clinically defined, this is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain." While the findings have no immediate clinical application, the new research may one day be able to help doctors find ways to help salvage brain function in stroke patients, or test the therapies targeting cellular recovery after injury, the authors say. Andrea Beckel-Mitchener of the NIH's Institute of Mental Health, which co-funded the research said "this line of research could lead to a whole new way of studying the postmortem brain." The study appeared in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature.