[NPR.ORG] The brains of dead pigs have been somewhat revived by scientists hours after the animals were killed in a slaughterhouse.We seen dis movie!
The Yale University research team is careful to say that none of the brains regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with consciousness or awareness. Still, the experiment described Wednesday in the journal Nature showed that a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored.
The implications of this study have staggered ethicists, as they contemplate how this research should move forward and how it fits into the current understanding of what separates the living from the dead.
"It was mind-blowing," says Nita Farahany, who studies the ethics of emerging technologies at Duke Law School. "My initial reaction was pretty shocked. It's a groundbreaking discovery, but it also really fundamentally changes a lot of what the existing beliefs are in neuroscience about the irreversible loss of brain function once there is deprivation of oxygen to the brain."
The brain is extremely sensitive to a lack of oxygen and shuts down quickly. But researchers have long known that viable cells can be removed from post-mortem brains hours after death, says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
Such cells can be studied in a lab dish, Sestan says, "but the problem is, once you do that, you are losing the 3D organization of the brain."
He and some colleagues wondered whether it might be possible to study brain cells while leaving them in an intact organ. Doing so meant somehow supplying them with oxygen, nutrients and various other cell-protective chemicals.
The scientists have spent the past six years developing a technique to do that, testing their methods on around 300 pig heads they obtained from a local pork processing center.
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"This really was a shot-in-the-dark project," says team member Stefano Daniele. "We had no preconceived notion of whether or not this could work."
After deciding on the final version of their technology, which they call BrainEx, they did a detailed study using 32 pig heads. Daniele says that while at the slaughterhouse, he and fellow researcher Zvonimir Vrselja flushed the brains to clear out residual blood and to cool down the tissue.
Back at the lab, they removed the brains from the pigs' heads and placed the isolated brains in an experimental chamber. The researchers hooked key blood vessels up to a device that pumped in a specially formulated chemical cocktail for six hours, starting about four hours after the pigs had been killed.
These brains ended up looking dramatically different from pig brains that were left alone to deteriorate. "We found that tissue and cellular structure is preserved and cell death is reduced. In addition, some molecular and cellular functions were restored," Sestan says. "This is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain."
The researchers' approach offers a new way to study brain diseases or injuries in the lab and to explore the basic biology of the brain. "We could actually answer questions that we can't now," Vrselja says.
"This is a real breakthrough for brain research. It's a new tool that bridges the gap between basic neuroscience and clinical research," agrees Andrea Beckel-Mitchener of the National Institute of Mental Health who works with the BRAIN Initiative. The BRAIN Initiative, which started in 2013 to accelerate neuroscience research, provided funding for the work.