Scientists Keep Brain Alive Without the Body for 36 Hours
Scientists report being able to keep a pig’s brain alive — outside the body — for a day and a half. I know I’m just kinda restating the headline, but that’s flat bonkers. To be clear, the pigs are definitely not conscious through this process, but they were able to pull this off by circulating oxygen-enriched blood throughout the organs.
The paper, published in the MIT Technology Review has already got some mixed reactions. Many are cautioning people to avoid thinking that we’ll be able to pull off some whacky brain transplants any time soon, or that this result could be replicated in a human and then later given restored consciousness. Instead, it’s better to think of this as a technique for imaging and studying brains, as well as better techniques for sustaining the body when it has experienced extreme physical trauma.
“That animal brain is not aware of anything, I am very confident of that,” Yale neuroscientist and lead on the project said. Still, there are some complex ethical considerations to ponder. “Hypothetically,” they added,” somebody takes this technology, makes it better, and restore’s someone’s [brain] activity. That is restoring a human being. If that person has memory, I would be freaking out completely.”
To further delineate just how this absolutely could not be done with a person, another scientist said basically that.
“It would be a major, pretty much impossible step even to get this far with a human brain,” Frances Edwards, professor of neurodegradation at University College London told the Guardian. “Both in the pig and in a human, the whole brain is only available at death, but in the pig, you are taking a healthy animal and able to control exactly when and how it dies and immediately take out the brain. It would need to be cooled within a few minutes and then only rewarmed when oxygenated.”
Essentially, the issue comes down to the fact that we can control a lot more of the variables surrounding the pigs’ death to make this possible. Unless you’re adapting the tech and also killing a person to pull this off, it won’t happen. Even in comatose patients, “by the time the brain is accessible, it would be well and truly compromised.”
Still, it’s a massive achievement that, until known, has only worked in very small creatures like guinea pigs. This demonstrates that it’s possible, at least, to keep oxygen supplying a large brain. It’s also fucking creepy. And weird. But cool? But definitely weird. But cool… But also creepy.
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This is so informative.