Brain research opens up Pandora’s box
A pair of medical science breakthroughs this past week hold out hope for future victims of injuries and conditions that shut down our brains or disable their control of our bodies’ complex functions. Researchers at the University of California in San Francisco announced they have discovered a way to transform brain signals into spoken words and sentences. While they cannot restore damaged neurological circuitry that connects the brain with the larynx, they can detect and decode brain activity as it attempts to create words and speech, convert that activity to digital signals, and “play” it much as one would voicemail. Someday, people who have lost the ability to speak due to things like strokes or paralysis may once again converse.
Across the continent, a Yale University research team reported that it had restored levels of normal activity in the brains of pigs that had been “dead,” by all current definitions anyway, for four hours. Given the similar size and complexity of pigs’ mammalian brains and our human version, this development could mean that before long, people now declared “brain dead” and allowed to die quietly may be revived and could resume living.
The Yale researchers took elaborate precautionary measures to insure humane treatment of their porcine subjects. For one thing, all the brains involved came from pigs already destined for slaughter and use as food. Researchers also took extraordinary measures to prevent the pigs’ brains from returning to a level of consciousness. (If possible, imagine yourself a pig waking up not only blind and deaf, but startled, frightened, or even hungry, and unable to move.)
A host of ethical issues surrounds the prospect of reviving brains, including many related to the harvesting of precious organs from willing donors — but not before they die. However, do we still know “dead” when we think we see it?
Some of us harboring wilder imaginations, perhaps because a teacher once introduced us to Mary Shelley’s 19th-century “Frankenstein” novel, can think of scenarios and dilemmas much more bizarre. Suppose we linked the speech research in California with the Yale project and connected a revived, disembodied brain with technology that enables communication. Might we then keep certain genius types around indefinitely, the Kierkegaards, Einsteins, and Beethovens among us, folks who mostly live in their heads anyway, to provide us their special wisdom? (We could keep a few poets’ brains around, too, although so much poetic genius lies in how they see, hear, and feel the touch of things. That may prove an insurmountable problem.)
Despite the serious technological and ethical difficulties, researchers would likely have an adequate supply, if not an abundance, of human volunteers should they attempt such experiments. Some folks will try anything. Indeed, we have at least one well-known, potentially revivable brain ready and waiting. When baseball legend Ted Williams died in 2002, family members followed his wishes to have his body frozen in liquid nitrogen, the head separate from the body, awaiting an expected time when medical science has developed cures for what killed him. Surely the old Splendid Splinter wouldn’t mind if we thawed him out a decade or so from now, fired up his brain, hooked him up to speech technology, and let him teach young batters. As his old friend and rival Yogi Berra once explained, “Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical.” If not a public treasure, Ted’s brain could become some team’s secret weapon.
Come to think of it, the sports world already has too many talking heads. Someone must warn those Yale researchers now, lest they open this new Pandora’s box any further.