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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 27 2018, @09:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the man-with-two-brains dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In a step that could change the definition of death, researchers have restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours.

The feat offers scientists a new way to study intact brains in the lab in stunning detail. But it also inaugurates a bizarre new possibility in life extension, should human brains ever be kept on life support outside the body.

The work was described on March 28 at a meeting held at the National Institutes of Health to investigate ethical issues arising as US neuroscience centers explore the limits of brain science.

During the event, Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan disclosed that a team he leads had experimented on between 100 and 200 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse, restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature.

There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a "mind-boggling" and "unexpected" result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.

[...] Today in the journal Nature, 17 neuroscientists and bioethicists, including Sestan, published an editorial arguing that experiments on human brain tissue may require special protections and rules.

They identified three categories of "brain surrogates" that provoke new concerns. These include brain organoids (blobs of nerve tissue the size of a rice grain), human-animal chimeras (mice with human brain tissue added), and ex vivo human brain tissue (such as chunks of brain removed during surgery).

They went on to suggest a variety of ethical safety measures, such as drugging animals that possess human brain cells so they stay in a "comatose-like brain state."


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  • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday December 28 2018, @07:35AM

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 28 2018, @07:35AM (#779280) Journal

    a mixed bag of alluded-to anecdotes. Not all comas are equivalent.

    Some are gone. Some are just trapped. It is mainly the nurses and various assistants who spend enough time to have an educated guess about which patients are in which group. Every once in a while some patient recovers and can recall everything [syracuse.com]. Some bring themselves out.

    Others need a nudge or the right cue. One anecdote in a ham operators' magazine was about a teenager who hadn't come out of his coma and his family had more or less given up. However, a visitor heard that and tapped a Q-code on the kid's forehead and got the smallest of responses but a still response. It was enough to lead to his reawakening. fMRI [theguardian.com] can help a little to identify which patients are still mentally available, but time with the machines (and the relevant doctors) is considered a money-maker and unavailable in large blocks even at a high price.

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