WHY ARE YOU KEEPING PIG BRAINS ALIVE, Professor Sestan?

Death and brain death are often considered synonymous. But Dr. Nenad Sestan is trying to disprove that assumption. He and his team at Yale University have conducted experiments on hundreds of pig brains that were obtained at a slaughterhouse. After the pigs had been decapitated, their brains were placed in jars, reoxygenated, and kept alive for some 36 more hours. Sestan is a professor of neuroscience, comparative medicine, genetics, and psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, where he developed a technique known as Brainex. With the help of a pump system and artificial blood bags maintained at a pig’s body temperature, he is able to keep the brains alive by restoring their blood flow. But his technique is not specific to pigs: Sestan says it can probably be generalized for other species, including primates and even humans. Comatose brains have sometimes been kept alive for decades in people attached to ventilating machines, but Sestan’s team is the first to do it with more promising results in a large mammal. So far the brains have shown the same flat brain wave patterns seen in comatose patients, but that could be due to the four-hour delay following the pigs’ decapitation or to chemicals in the blood-replacement solution. Speaking at the National Institutes of Health, Sestan said other measures could possibly be used to restore awareness, but his team had not tried to do so: “That is uncharted territory,” he said of such total reanimation.