The severed pig’s head had come from a local slaughterhouse. Normally it would have been scrapped, but Zvonimir Vrselja, a neuroscientist at Yale School of Medicine, and his colleagues had other ideas. Four hours after the animal was decapitated, they removed the brain from the skull. They then connected the dead brain’s vasculature to tubes, pumped a special cocktail of preservatives into the blood vessels, and turned on the perfusion machine.
Then something unbelievable happened. The cortex turned from gray to pink. Brain cells began to produce proteins. The neurons trembled back to life and showed signs of metabolic activity indistinguishable from living cells. Basic cellular functions, activities that were thought to cease irreversibly when blood flow stopped, were restored. Technically the pig’s brain wasn’t alive, but it certainly wasn’t dead.
Now, for the first time, the team is applying this technology to the human brain.
“We try to be transparent and very careful, because the value we get out of it is huge,” Vrselja says. Reviving a dead human brain in some sense would have enormous medical benefits. Researchers are testing drugs in human brains with activated cells, which could lead to improved treatments. Similar techniques are already being used to better preserve other human organs for transplantation. And, in perhaps the most immediately useful application, related resuscitation techniques increase the chances of saving people on the brink of death.
The problem is that this is an ethically complex undertaking, to say the least. And by…
(translate tag) death
