It immediately offers a much better model for studying the human brain, which is extraordinarily important, given the vast amount of human suffering from diseases of the mind brain,” says Nita Farahany, a bioethicist at the Duke University School of Law who wrote a commentary about the study for Nature. “This is an extraordinary and very promising breakthrough for neuroscience. “It really enhances our ability to study cells as they exist in connection with each other, in that three-dimensional, large, complicated way.”Įven so, the finding opens up considerable ethical questions, a conversation that the researchers themselves welcome. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
#32 lives resurrected how to#
“We're really excited about this as a platform that could help us better understand how to treat people who have had heart attacks and have lost normal blood flow to the brain,” adds Khara Ramos, director of the Neuroethics Program at the U.S. Learn about the parts of the human brain, as well as its unique defenses, like the blood brain barrier. The brain constitutes only about 2 percent of the human body, yet it is responsible for all of the body's functions. Researchers say that the technique could give a major boost to studies of human health by providing a rich testbed for studying brain disorders and diseases. The new system instead kept the brains in far better shape than brains left to decompose on their own, restoring functions such as the ability to take in glucose and oxygen for up to six hours at a time. “Clinically defined, this is not a living brain,” says study coauthor Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at the Yale University School of Medicine. And technically, the pig brains remained dead-by design, the treated brains did not show any signs of the organized electrical neural activity required for awareness or consciousness. The researchers did not kill any animals for the purposes of the experiment they acquired pig heads from a food processing plant near New Haven, Connecticut, after the pigs had already been killed for their meat. Announced on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine devised a system roughly analogous to a dialysis machine, called BrainEx, that restores circulation and oxygen flow to a dead brain. Scientists have restored cellular function in 32 pig brains that had been dead for hours, opening up a new avenue in treating brain disease-and shaking our definition of brain death to its core.
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