The chopped pig’s head came from the local slaughterhouse. It would normally be ignored, though Zvonimir VrseljaThe Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist and his colleagues had other ideas. Four hours after this particular animal was cut down, the brain was removed from its skull. They then connected the dead brain’s vasculature to tubes that pumped a special cocktail of preservation agents into its blood vessels and turned on the perfusion machine.
It was then something incredible happened. The cortex changed from gray to pink. Brain cells began to produce proteins. The neurons came back to life, showing signs of the metabolic activity of living cells. Basic cellular functions, activities that would have been irreversibly stopped after stopping blood flow, were restored. The pig’s brain wasn’t alive, exactly, but it certainly wasn’t dead.
Now, for the first time, the team is using the technique on the human brain.
“We’re trying to be transparent and careful because there’s a lot of value that can come out of that,” says Vrselja. In one sense, reviving a dead human brain would have enormous medical benefits. Researchers can test drugs in cellularly active human brains to improve treatments. Similar techniques are already being used to better preserve other human organs for transplant. And in perhaps the most immediately useful application, the resuscitation technology involved raises the possibility of saving people on the brink of death.
The problem is that it is an ethically complicated undertaking. And…
