Scientists have managed to restore cell function in the brains of pigs hours after they died, in a breakthrough Wednesday that experts said threw into question the very notion of what makes animals -- or even humans -- alive.
Authors of the US-based study said their research could one day be used to help treat victims of heart attacks and strokes and unravel the mysteries of brain trauma.
The team from the NIH BRAIN initiative, a federally funded US research programme, used the brains of 32 pigs that had been slaughtered for food and discarded, without blood or glucose flow, for four hours each. "I was tremendously surprised," Nenad Sestan, a researcher at Yale University and lead study author told AFP.
The team stressed that they saw no"higher level functional activity" such as electric signalling associated with consciousness in the revived brains. "If some activity shows up that indicated consciousness, we would have to stop the experiment," said Stephen Latham, from Yale's Centre of Bioethics.The findings suggest that scientists may have underappreciated the brain's capacity for self-restoration after a patient is declared brain dead.
She said researchers had inadvertently created an ethical grey area where the pigs used were"not alive, but not completely dead."
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