Reviving a dead brain would be ‘living hell’

AN EXPERIMENT to reanimate dead brains could lead to humans enduring a “fate worse than death”, an ethics lecturer has warned.

Last month, Yale University said it had successfully resurrected the brains of 100 slaughtered pigs using a system of pumps, heaters, and artificial blood warmed to body temperature and found the cells were still healthy.

The reanimated brains were kept alive for 36 hours and scientists said the process, which should also work on primates, offered a way to study intact organs.

Although the pigs did not regain consciousness, the team said it may be possible to restore awareness, and the experiments open the door to the prospect of human brains being kept alive outside of the body. However, Benjamin Curtis, a Nottingham Trent ethics and philosophy lecturer, told The Conversation, the academic website: “Even if your conscious brain were kept alive after your body had died, you would have to spend the foreseeable future as a disembodied brain in a bucket, locked away inside

‘With no contact to external reality, it might be a fate worse than death’

your own mind without access to the sense that allow us to experience the world.

“In the best case scenario, you would be spending your life with only your own thoughts for company. With absolutely no contact to external reality, it might just be a living hell, a fate worse than death.”