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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."
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday December 29 2018, @03:19AM
Yes I did read that line to. Still considering that the brain is supposed to have ~180 billion cells, give or take a billion or a few, finding a billion cells or so that are still "working" after the induced massive trauma might not be what I would consider to be "alive", healthy and functional. As previously noted, something that goes to the slaughterhouse and gets decapitated and then prepared to become a science experiment in a brain-jar have sort of left the definition of what would constitute being "alive", at least as far as I'm concerned. But sure if you want to call that being alive then fine, I just wonder how many new things just got elevated to "alive" status now then if that is the new definition of being alive.