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Science

'Partly Alive': Scientists Revive Cells in Brains From Dead Pigs (nytimes.com) 128

Posted by msmash from the breakthrough dept.
In a study that raises profound questions about the line between life and death, researchers have restored some cellular activity to brains removed from slaughtered pigs. From a report: The brains did not regain anything resembling consciousness: There were no signs indicating coordinated electrical signaling, necessary for higher functions like awareness and intelligence. But in an experimental treatment, blood vessels in the pigs' brains began functioning, flowing with a blood substitute, and certain brain cells regained metabolic activity, even responding to drugs [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. When the researchers tested slices of treated brain tissue, they discovered electrical activity in some neurons.

The work is very preliminary and has no immediate implications for treatment of brain injuries in humans. But the idea that parts of the brain may be recoverable after death, as conventionally defined, contradicts everything medical science believes about the organ and poses metaphysical riddles. "We had clear lines between 'this is alive' and 'this is dead,'" said Nita A. Farahany, a bioethicist and law professor at Duke University. "How do we now think about this middle category of 'partly alive'? We didn't think it could exist." For decades, doctors and grieving family members have wondered if it might ever be possible to restore function to a person who suffered extensive brain injury because of a severe stroke or heart attack. Were these brains really beyond salvage?
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'Partly Alive': Scientists Revive Cells in Brains From Dead Pigs More

'Partly Alive': Scientists Revive Cells in Brains From Dead Pigs

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  • Great, let's make pig zombies now (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That can only end well.

  • Do you want zombies? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dracolytch ( 714699 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @01:27PM (#58449830) Homepage

    Because that's how you get zombies.

  • Miracle Max was on to something! (Score:5, Informative)

    by rcderp ( 5733190 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @01:28PM (#58449834)
    So the pigs are "mostly dead"! There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.

    • I came here to say... "All you can do is go through his pockets and look for loose change."

      • Well, actually it is a pig. So like bacon and pork loin and ribs and ham and ....

        Of course, if it were a sheep then you could make yourself a nice MLT - mutton lettuce and tomato - where the mutton is all nice and crisp and ...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Of course, if it were a sheep then you could make yourself a nice MLT - mutton lettuce and tomato - where the mutton is all nice and crisp and ...

          ... then bring it back to life.

          Inconceivable!

    • "thdead"

  • Let's re-animate his brain to help solve the murder mystery

  • Chemical machine (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @01:41PM (#58449874)
    Is this surprising to non-biologists? Cells are like machines made of chemicals. You can run electrical current through a dead frog to make its leg jump... until it finishes breaking down. Doesn't mean you could 'repair' the frog back to life.
    • Why can't we?
    • Assuming that you could repair it back to regular state, would we still consider it dead to begin with at that point? Death implies a kind of terminal state from which one cannot return.

      A lot of cells in a dead body can function fine or be revived and repaired and continue to function fine, or we wouldn't have organ transplants. Unfortunately the brain passes the point or repair relatively quickly. We even have the term brain dead to refer to those kinds of edge cases.

      But if we did develop the ability

      • Re:Chemical machine (Score:5, Insightful)

        by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @03:24PM (#58450468)
        We have been consistently pushing back the line at which someone is well and truly "dead" for quite some time. It used to be that if someone's heart stopped that was it. But then we learned how to restart hearts. Then it became an issue of starting it fast enough. The window of time to resuscitate someone has gotten larger and larger over the last few decades to the point where someone can be "dead" for minutes at a time and can still come back. It logically follows that as time goes on that window will get bigger and bigger and we will be able to repair greater and greater damage. Just the other day we found it is possible for hearts to repair after damage from a heart attack. Previously that was thought impossible. Who knows, maybe some day we will get to the point where most causes of death can be reversed.

        • Cryonicists have been banking on this for decades. They* have a not-entirely unreasonable faith that scientific progress will keep pushing that line far beyond where it is today.

          * I am one of them. I'm a life-insurance funded member of the Cryonics institute.

      • Only thing is, when they bring you back, you'll be alive.. but you won't be *the same*. See what happened to the Mountain in Game of Thrones!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Is this surprising to non-biologists? Cells are like machines made of chemicals. You can run electrical current through a dead frog to make its leg jump... until it finishes breaking down. Doesn't mean you could 'repair' the frog back to life.

      But is the machine broken or is it stopped? How much of us survive death, for example I have a bunch of memories chemically stored in my brain. Could you read them from my dead brain? Can you read out my neural patterns and build a machine that thinks like me? Basically, how much of "me" actually dies when the synapses stop firing? And yes, technically what would it take to "reboot" me like am I the running state of the machine or can "I" mostly reboot like I've been in a deep coma? These questions are stil

      • So... if you're very recently brain dead some of cells may still work but enough of them are gone that the connections between them - where your memories are stored - have degraded and are also gone. You could probably flip some bits on a hard drive platter by hand, but if it is rusting in the open air it'll never spin up again. If we got some sci-fi nano tech and could repair the individual cells somehow, your neuron net is going to end up reformatted because those connections are fairly tenuous.

        • So... if you're very recently brain dead some of cells may still work but enough of them are gone that the connections between them - where your memories are stored - have degraded and are also gone.

          Have they really? Do axons and dendrites break down that quickly? I suspect that the structural elements actually stay intact for some time, until other processes (drying out, decay, etc.) start to disrupt them. I'm only guessing here, I have no actual knowledge. Do you? If so, could you elaborate on what breaks down and how?

          • To put it succinctly, it isn't the protein/lipid structure that is doing it, which would be more stable, but the ions and chemokines bound to the right spots on the cell surfaces. That's why your brain function can be affected by drugs rather than just the way the neurons grow.
    • This isn't a surprise to biologists either, the person quoted is a law professor, not an actual biologist.

      The very medical definition of "dead" has been argued over by doctors for decades. Is it heart death, brain death, but people occasionally seem to come back from "brain death" so how dead does the brain have to be? The article isn't written for people with in depth knowledge of chemistry or biology or etc. It's written to shock and clickbait people that aren't that. "What's dead really like, is dead a
  • I remember when I was a kid going to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and among other wondrous things, seeing a crickets' leg connected to a couple electrodes. You had a control for frequency and another for amplitude of the signal being sent through the electrodes to the cricket leg, and as you 'tuned' it, you'd make the let twitch in various ways. Very much a dead cricket-leg, but it was still capable of contracting the muscles, given the right stimumlus. Why should brain cells be any different? I'm no
  • Have scientists not seen zombie movies? Because this sort of stuff is often what we see in the opening scenes before something unexpected happens and the zombie apocalypse results. Time to guy buy some 22LR and breakfree I suppose.

  • I heard the strangest music in the dumb waiter and I just followed it down. Call it...a Lunch!

  • This pig is only mostly dead.

  • It's not a new state.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @01:58PM (#58449968)
    It's not a new state between life and death; it's a new state between death and decomposition. Cells, tissues and organs have a "life" of their own and can continue "living" after the organism dies given the right conditions (as organ transplants prove).

    • 's not a new state between life and death; it's a new state between death and decomposition.

      Even if it can actually be returned life? What if your brain could be restarted but you were left only partially intact, with significant deficits... as is the case for many stroke victims. We consider them to be alive, and to be the "original person" in most senses.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Even if it can actually be returned life? What if your brain could be restarted but you were left only partially intact, with significant deficits... as is the case for many stroke victims. We consider them to be alive, and to be the "original person" in most senses.

        But what if they come back evil?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Matheus ( 586080 )

        Glass half full version: What if this or a future version of this process enables us to more fully restore said stroke victims so they have fewer or even no deficits?

        Let's just say I don't want to be in the beta trial but version 2.0 or 3.0 could be pretty spectacular assuming we survive version 1.3 creating zombies...

  • the lead Scientist stated

    "I was classed as a madman, a charlatan, outlawed in the world of science which had previously honored me as a genius. Now, here in this forsaken jungle hell, I have proved that I am alright!"

  • The mind is in the microtubules. And those, are stable molecules. If they can get the cells to work again then they will find the mind mostly intact.

    Is my expectation.

    I think they suspect this, also, which is why they are digging around in dead brains.

    I leave it to the reader to guess where all this goes after they find the mind intact.

  • They're confused with the definition of death. In my opinion, the best definition comes from cyronics: Information Theoretic Death.

    http://www.merkle.com/definiti... [merkle.com]

    WRT these pig brains, they're experiencing iscemic damage that may result in infodeath, but it's a slide into that vs a singular moment of death. Of course some cells still work, only 4 hours passed from loss of blood flow.

  • We think we know definitively when brain death occurs, but what if some consciousness survives for a time after that? You could be conscious of people around you talking about your death, be they surgeons or bystanders. If unusual circumstances, such as having your supposedly dead body fished out of very cold water, lead you your revival, that consciousness could be the near-death experience that some people live to tell about.

  • We are now one step closer to immortal heads in jars...

  • I was hoping the pig was just dead.... but noooo. They had to reanimate the brain of a pig that had been slaughtered. Let's revive the brain for a bit so it can feel the phantom pain of a missing, body. We're either working toward Zombies or Necromancy. I think we should stop in either case. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to revive dead portions of the brain... but what if the brain damage is really just to protect the rest of the being?
  • Now all Trump has to do is get these babies on the voters list and they'll be as good as any Republican voter!

  • They are ex-pigs.

    Now they have the souls of crows inhabiting them, and they are not friendly.

  • Metaphysics and religion confuses people (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @03:41PM (#58450592) Homepage Journal

    People are all messed up in how they think about this because we are so misguided by metaphysics and religion. Consciousness is not a real thing. "You" are a story that your brain tells itself. The way your brain and body actually work have little to do with that story.

    Nobody would blink an eye at restarting a machine after it was long idle and rotted parts were repaired. But when they consider it happening to a human being, they get tripped up in metaphysical stuff that isn't real.

    • Re:Metaphysics and religion confuses people (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 ) on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @06:22PM (#58451368)

      Consciousness exists because I can perceive myself. It is as simple as that. "We" may or may not exist, I perceive others and they seem to be self-aware like me but that could well be a self-reinforcing delusion.

      The big issue that stands in the way of your assertion is our inability to actually create anything with even a minimal sense of self. We can build abstraction on top of systems and complex ordered systems so that those pieces come out in ways that match the "code" for desired outcomes. We have made some level of progress toward making that behave in a way that shifts around pieces semi-autonomously toward some result. The problem is that everything we build is merely a logical abstraction on top of something and given meaning by our own consciousness and not innate to the actual medium.

      '"You" are a story that your brain tells itself.'

      There simply is no direct evidence to support this claim. We can't even successfully model it at this point, let alone prove that the observer is manifested by the medium rather than the medium being a tool of the observer. Sure we can alter perceptions to some extent via physical processes but we can also do that with a broken scale, fake image, or any number of blatantly external mechanisms. It is very easy to forget that science is an applied philosophic model which provides results we perceive as useful but it is just a model. Just as geometry is useful even though there aren't really any circles, points, lines, or squares... those are just ideas we made up and then ran with.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      Nobody would blink an eye at restarting a machine after it was long idle and rotted parts were repaired. But when they consider it happening to a human being, they get tripped up in metaphysical stuff that isn't real.

      The metaphysical stuff doesn't bother me (since, like you, I think everything is implemented entirely via physical processes); rather it's the physical stuff. Any biological body that has been "dead" for more than a short while is going to be physically deteriorated to the point where you really wouldn't want to inhabit it any more.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lurcher ( 88082 )

        So you do agree that its possible to live again after being dead, its just a matter of arguing about the duration of the "short while"

        And of course blood transfusions would like to have a word.

  • They are serving in Congress right now.
  • Or is too little too late for them?

  • This will go through lots of phases, including (a very long while from this) we'll be able to reanimate the cells but find that their former electrical state is too degraded to recover the person. Eventually through some laborious side channel technique we'll be able to recover that state. Some day you'll be able to do it and upload an entire graveyard of consciousnesses onto the galactic quanta-net just by thinking about a code word that is information entangled to a chain of sequences that unfold into the

  • -Obligatory zombie comment- -Reasoned scientific response- -ZOMG!- -sigh- -Rational scientific observation- -ZOMG bacon!- -Wait, what?- -ZOMG bacon!- -OMG! ZOMG bacon!- -I know, right?- -Zombie BLT?- -Braaaiiiinnnnssss- -Braaaiiiinnnnnsssss- (Top that, George Romero! :) )

  • Every time I see this headline I read "Party Alive"...

  • We already have a number of stories describing this phenomenon:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Also, I recommend my favorite tag for this story: "whatcouldpossiblygowrong"

  • ... Flat Earth YouTube videos.

  • "I'm getting better!

    "No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment."

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