"Scientists Partially Revive Disembodied Pig Brains, Raising " Topic

…Huge Questions.

"Researchers from Yale have developed a system capable of restoring some functionality to the brains of decapitated pigs for at least 10 hours after death. The achievement has tremendous scientific potential, but it raises some serious ethical and philosophical concerns.

Developed by neuroscientist Nenad Sestan and his colleagues from Yale University, the system was shown to restore circulation and some cellular functionality to intact pig brains removed from the skull. The brains were hooked up to the system, known as BrainEx, four hours after death was declared and after severe oxygen starvation, or anoxia, had set in. The system pumped synthetic blood and other compounds into the disembodied organ, restoring partial functionality for a period of six hours. This research was published today in Nature…."
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Amicalement
Armand

Pig Sematary

Increase the polarity, try again!

Don't these individuals read Sci-Fi or watch the movies.

This never ends well.

Why do they not credit Dr Herbert West for his stunning research that made their small step possible?

Reviving brains that lack full higher consciousness (especially when we don't know completely where consciousness resides)? That's not Kosher!

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

From Evolutionary Biology prof PZ Meyer's blog

One thing they did not see was restoration of overall activity of the brain — consciousness, even at its most primitive level, is a property of a network of interactions, and that property was gone. That's what death is to a multicellular organism, a loss of coordination and integration between its components, and finding that bits and pieces still retain functionality at a cellular level doesn't mean that the whole has been restored.
[…]
A crude analogy: take a hammer to your computer. You open it up and find broken circuits and cracked connections. You can still pull out an IC and hook it up to an oscilloscope and find that the transistors and resistors and various subcomponents can operate to spec, but you know, that computer ain't gonna be playing Fortnite no more, and isn't even going to boot up.

And that's how I see this study. It's a useful exercise in salvaging components that could be useful in research, but this isn't a resurrection protocol. The pig is irreversibly dead with wholesale damage across its nervous system, but some pig cells take longer to die. There's an important distinction here between global meta-properties of the whole brain, and single cell properties, and you shouldn't confuse the two. The authors don't.