https://www.vox.com/science-and-hea...-brain-nature-study-revive-cell-death-brainex
Around 15 minutes after a mammal's brain is cut off from oxygen, the organ is supposed to die.
Without life-giving oxygen, the cells of the brain quickly starve. Some of the cells burst open, while the chemistry of others becomes so imbalanced that their membranes break down. This frenzied spiral ends one way: in death.
It is thought that this process is widespread across brain anatomy and irreversible. After brain cells die, they are thought to be impossible to revive.
But a stunning new finding published Wednesday in the journal Nature turns that conventional wisdom around.
In a paper that reads a bit like an adaptation of Mary Shelley, researchers at Yale describe how they were able to partially revive disembodied pigs' brains several hours after the pigs' death.
First, the researchers took 32 pig brains from pigs slaughtered for food and waited four hours. Then, they hooked them up for six hours to a system called BrainEx, which pumped those brains full of oxygen, nutrients, and protective chemicals.
At the end of the 10 hours, the scientists found that the tissue of the pig brains was largely intact, compared to controls. Individual brain cells were up and running, performing their basic duties of taking up oxygen and producing carbon dioxide.
To be clear: The neurons in these brains were not communicating, so there was no consciousness. But the cells were alive — and that alone is a very big discovery.
"Previously, findings have shown that in basically minutes, the cells undergo a process of cell death," Nenad Sestan, the Yale neuroscientist who led the effort, said during a press conference. "What we're showing is that the process of cell death is a gradual step-wise process, and some of those processes can be either postponed, preserved, or even reversed."
The implications are bigger than just basic science research. The ethics of experimenting on partially reanimated brains is uncharted territory.
