Parcel delay leads to scientific discovery

Researchers coax ‘dead’ brain cells back to life

Accidents have led to several scientific breakthroughs; from Alexander Fleming noticing that the mould in his Petri dish was a powerful antibiotic, to Oxford COVID-19 vaccine researchers recently finding the wrong dose was more effective.

But now it has emerged a shipping delay led to the discovery that “dead” human brain cells can be coaxed back to life more than two days after death.

Last year, researchers at Yale University announced they had restarted the brains of dead pigs which had been slaughtered and decapitated in a nearby abattoir four hours earlier. Although the animals never regained consciousness, many basic cellular functions, including blood circulation and metabolism, switched back on for 10 hours, ending longheld assumptions that brain death is irreversible.

It has emerged that the scientists embarked on the study after a delay in the shipping of human brain tissue from the Wellcome Trust in London in 2016.

The researchers were attempting to grow stem cells from fetal brain tissue, for studies into Zika virus. While frozen samples were usually shipped from Britain to the U. S. within a day, on one occasion the tissue was delayed in the post, so that experiments did not start for two days after clinical death.

Yet scientists were amazed to find that the tissue could still be “woken up” to produce stem cells.

The discovery led the team to devise an experiment to see if the entire brains of pigs could be restarted several hours after death. And to the amazement of the scientific world, they found that they could. A source said: “They were trying to get brain tissue to do experiments on and there wasn’t a proper brain bank in the U.S. so they were getting it from the Wellcome Trust in London, who was shipping it with DHL.

“And then one time DHL was delayed by 48 hours. So they have this box of the brain tissue that’s been shipping for 48 hours, and one of the post-docs said to the lead scientist, ‘ Look we can’t use it, it’s been sitting around for too long,’ so the scientist gave it to him to practise techniques on, and then the guy shows up with all these data. And they found it was the same as the fresh brains, except this brain was 48 hours old.”

Nenad Sestan, a professor of neuroscience at Yale who carried out the pig experiments, said his team had already been considering the possibility that brain cells remain “alive” days after death, but the postal delay had given them greater hope that they were right.

“We had already started working on the project, but this event gave us more confidence for our hypothesis.

“I don’t remember if it was DHL or Fedex. We actually used both shipping companies at the time.”