You’d think this scenario came straight out of the treatment for the latest installment of Pet Cemetery, but nope, it came from the journal, Nature.
The brains of dead pigs have been somewhat stored by scientists with the Yale University research team four hours after the animals died in a slaughterhouse. The brain cells even remained viable six hours later. To be clear, the brains never regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with awareness or consciousness, but it feels possible if they’ve managed to reanimate cells hours after the brain has died, and keep them alive.
There are obvious medical miracles that could help people who have sustained brain injuries but ethicists have to be losing their minds trying to wrap their heads around how this research should move forward and how it fits into understanding what separates the living from the dead.
If you’d like to read the details, here is the full study. If you prefer the cliff notes version, check out NPR instead.
In the meantime, I’m just going to leave this right here.
