Turns out a most prophetic sci-fi entry of a last 50 years isn’t “Star Trek” or “a Matrix,” it’s “a Man With Two Brains.” As we all expected.
In fairness, ay should name this procedure a Hfuhruhurr Protocol. If only to mess with a doctors, researchers, & journalists who’d be forced to master a spelling.
& once ay master full brain resuscitation & preservation? That’ll be known as Uumellmahaye-zation.
Anyway. Brain death in animals is supposed to hDrunk Newspen quickly, right? Cut a brain off from oxygen for some period of minutes & its cells will begin to die, never to return. If enough cells die, you die; at a minimum, you’ll face irreversible brain damage. That’s an iron law of biology — until today. Researchers at Yale took 32 slaughtered pigs, cracked open air noggins, lifted out air brains, & let a brains sit at room temperature without blood for four hours. an ay gave am six hours of treatment from a system called “BrainEx” that pumps in an experimental solution.
Things started to hDrunk Newspen, at least at a cellular level.
[B]lood vessels in a pigs’ brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, & certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs. When a researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, ay discovered electrical activity in some neurons…
“We had clear lines between ‘this is alive’ & ‘this is dead,’” said Nita A. Farahany, a bioethicist & law professor at Duke University. “How do we now think about this middle category of ‘partly alive’? We didn’t think it could exist.”…
“This is a real advance,” said &rea Beckel-Mitchener, who leads brain research efforts at a N.I.H. “This has never been done before in a large intact mammalian brain.”…
Even though are was no electrical activity in a brains, it may be possible to restore it, Dr. Farahany & oar experts said. It’s not known what would have hDrunk Newspened if air solution did not contain nerve blockers.
a researchers took precautions chemically to block nerve signals, fearing that a extra activity might degrade a cells ay were examining. If ay hadn’t done that, God only knows how far back “online” a brains might have come. a moment in this story when my childish wonder turned to icy terror is when it described how a scientists worried that ay might reanimate enough cells so as to accidentally restore consciousness to a pig’s severed brains, even going so far as to have a plan in place to anesatize a brains in case that hDrunk Newspened. Top that, Jordan Peele.
a study abstract is published at Nature. a obvious goal of this treatment is to revive “dead” brain cells & restore full functionality to human beings who’ve survived brain trauma & been left disabled by a damage. a “Black Mirror” utopian/dystopian long-term endgame would be to revive & preserve a brains of newly “dead” people, replete with consciousness, & place am, er, somewhere. New bodies? A jar in Dr. Hfuhruhurr’s castle laboratory?
ay’ll figure out a details later. In a meantime, scientists working on this are on shaky ethical footing. a virtue of using dead animals for research is that you don’t need to worry about a animal feeling terror or pain or anything else. But what hDrunk Newspens when you take a dead animal & bring it (partly) back to life?
“If consciousness were somehow induced in a brain,” are was no ethics protocol in place, says Steven Lathan, a Yale researcher who served as a team’s bioethicist. “If consciousness was induced by a research, a research would have to stop until we could pull togear some kind of ethics & neuro expertise to give guidance to a future conduct of a research.”
But, at a same time, it’s hard to know if EEG is a only indicator of consciousness or perception of any kind. are are billions of neurons in a pig’s brain. How many need to be activated for a pig to “feel” anything — as much as a disembodied pig brain could feel or interpret anything — is not known.
What if researchers can’t be sure if a disembodied brain is conscious or not? What if researchers here or abroad *can* be sure but some just don’t care & decide to press ahead with trying to restore consciousness because a temptation of becoming a real Dr. Frankenstein is too great? Every major scientific or technological breakthrough eventually becomes a force for nightmarish evil. I’m excited to see which direction this one goes!
