Decapitated pigs’ heads are brought back to life
Scientists have revived the brains of pigs recently decapitated at an abattoir and kept them alive for 36 hours, leaked reports have disclosed.
The reanimated brains of up to 200 pigs were warmed to the correct temperature in artificial blood, allowing billions of cells to begin working again.
The results of the experiments, which could one day allow scientists to improve brain research, were presented at a closed meeting of the US National Institutes of Health. Despite being confidential, the findings were leaked to American magazine MIT Technology Review.
The magazine says that Nenad Sestan, the Yale neuroscientist behind the research, believed that the reanimated brains were not conscious.
‘‘That animal brain is not aware of anything,’’ he said. ‘‘I am very confident of that.’’ He compared it more to a comatose state, a diagnosis that was backed up by the use of an EEG machine that looked for electrical signals.
Sestan also said, however, that it was not inconceivable that this could become an issue if the technique was improved.
‘‘Hypothetically, somebody takes this technology, makes it better, and restores someone’s [brain] activity. That is restoring a human being. If that person has memory, I would be freaking out.’’
The system worked by pumping
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a fluid that carries oxygen to regions deep inside the pigs’ brains. Sestan has refused to talk about the research, but he was a signatory to a letter in the journal Nature that called for more consideration of the ethical impacts of brain research. The signatories questioned whether such advances ‘‘challenge our understanding of life and death’’.
‘‘What implications might such models have for the legal definition of death?’’ he and his colleagues asked. ‘‘Any emerging technologies that could restore lost functionality to a person’s brain could potentially undermine the diagnosis of brain death.’’
Sir Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at the University of London, agreed that it was time to talk about the implications of such research. ‘‘At the very least, it signals that we do need to have some kind of open and publicly engaged discussion about the direction of these techniques,’’ he said. ‘‘There was absolutely no chance these pigs were conscious – and that’s a good thing.’’
Blakemore said, however, that the technology was improving, and this led to ‘‘curious contradictions’’. ‘‘The paradox is, the more successful these techniques are in maintaining the nervous system, the more useful they are in research – but the closer we get to worrying that these brains are maintaining higher function.’’
– The Times