Researchers Are Keeping Pig Brains Alive Outside the Body (technologyreview.com) 150
In a step that could change the definition of death, researchers have restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours. From a report: The feat offers scientists a new way to study intact brains in the lab in stunning detail. But it also inaugurates a bizarre new possibility in life extension, should human brains ever be kept on life support outside the body. The work was described on March 28 at a meeting held at the National Institutes of Health to investigate ethical issues arising as US neuroscience centers explore the limits of brain science. During the event, Yale University neuroscientist Nenad Sestan disclosed that a team he leads had experimented on between 100 and 200 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse, restoring their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and bags of artificial blood warmed to body temperature.
Pure filth and evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pure filth and evil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pure filth and evil (Score:5, Informative)
Sestan says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state
So no, pig brains were not feeling. They were effectively shut down.
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Reading TFA:
Sestan says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state
So no, pig brains were not feeling. They were effectively shut down.
So you're saying a Futurama Trump head in a jar is right around the corner?
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So those are brain dead brains?
Re:Pure filth and evil (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, this is likely very cruel to pigs if they ever regain consciousness. Which is not given. This will also help treat trauma and organ failure patients and will save human lives.
I'm not falling for that. I saw The man with 2 brains. I learnt my lesson from that- I know where that leads. Steve Martin does make documentaries right?
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save human lives.
Good luck putting it back into a living human body...
Re:Pure filth and evil (Score:4, Insightful)
So pretend a person is in a car accident and bleeds out. A procedure like this could be done to preserve the brain while the surgeons repair the wounds..
Or while waiting on blood transfusion, or a donor organ.
Your absolutely right, this has no practical application other than pig torture and every doctor's latent desire to emulate Frankenstein.
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save human lives
Someone already mentioned the Nazis, so I give you Unit 731 [wikipedia.org]. Experimenting on American POWs helped save human lives!!!, so it was not only perfectly okay, pardoning the researchers was even more so, right? Right?
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It doesn't really matter, but Unit 731 "logs" were mostly Chinese. There are some differences, though.
We routinely kill pigs. My last ham and cheese omelette tasted fine, and I rather suspect it involved an untimely demise for a pig. We don't routinely kill humans, and generally don't eat them afterwards.
Also, neither the Nazis nor Unit 731 cared a bit about how the subjects felt. (One Unit 731 role was to let Japanese doctors practice battlefield operations, like say amputating a limb, and they th
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We routinely kill pigs.
Killing isn't the problem. The problem is causing pain for long periods. US factory farms are particularly cruel endeavors on that side of the equation, and on the other ethical constraints on animal research provide hardly better living conditions for those used in them. That pain, and the brutality that goes into producing and maintaining it, are the aspects that need corrected, specially because it isn't uncommon for both to "overflow" into how humans themselves get treated by other humans.
Re: Pure filth and evil (Score:1)
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And yet when we talk about extending human lifespan or trying head swap surgery all of a sudden that's against nature and 80 years of life is enough!
I was wondering, where's that Italian surgeon whose name escapes me, who pops up every six months and announces he's going to do a head swap operation with a different rich client? As I faintly recall, the last one was some Russian oligarch with a terminal illness.
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Who knows how much physical and mental pain these brains-in-jars are feeling right now?
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The brain doesn't have pain receptors.. However it does process sensations from pain..
People who have limb amputations often complain of "Phantom Limb Pain" (Yes.. Its googleable)
So Im glad the flat-line output of these brains does imply no processing, because I gather phantom limb pain is bad, I would hate to think what Phantom Body pain would feel like.
Re: Pure filth and evil (Score:1)
Bu, but, butt....
BACON!!!!!1!
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wrong, brains were from a slaughterhouse that transform pigs into that highest and most noble achievement of being bacon, ham, chops and pork tenderloin. Brains tacos are a thing in some places, but I doubt a couple hundred brains missing from the market inconvenienced any mexicans.
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I don't think it would be that horrible to experience. If they could recover brain function, I assume it would be sort of like dreaming. When your brain is disconnected from the outside world, you start to make up your own reality.
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Ahh, so I see you have never suffered from a headache. You are aware you do not really feel pain in the rest of your body, you feel that pain, in your brain. You nervous system feeds those sensations back to your brain, so only the connections in your brain to that nervous system need to be intact to feel, literally anything, from you body being onfire, to being shredded in a mulching machine, of course anything except probably anything fun. The way to tell if the brain is alive is that it is in fact functi
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It's pure speculation on either of our parts..
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it involves taking a thing with some degree of sentience, keeping it in a sensory-deprived state and conscious
Were that the case, I'd agree wholeheartedly, but TFA states
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness.
Later, TFA states
Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose state
although that statement is made in the context that they were looking to see if an ex-vivo brain could regain consciousness. Initially they thought they had found evidence of this, then put it down to artifacts in the equipment.
So, I'm not sure I'd give them a pass just because they failed to take a brain from an animal that has died and restore it to a kind of disembodied consciousness.
without the balls to hunt and torture something more dangerous than an animal.
Um, the only way I can get that sentence to p
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Is the pig brain conscious? I got the impression that the researchers were preventing that, and were verifying with the brain waves.
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I don't bother with a moral framework for what has been natural for humans for millennia, bon appetite!
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Wasn't aware the soldiers were eating enemy afterwards.
I'm all for self-defense too and right to bear arms, that's natural and right.
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I have no mouth and I must scream. [wikipedia.org]
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Not to mention their pets. The only way to get healthy cats on a vegan diet is to use all parts of the vegan.
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Feel free to look through my posting history. You'll notice that I'm not, in fact, right-wing. I find the Democrats as a party to be too right-wing.
Veganism as a moral stance is stupid. That said, I really don't care in general what other people do to themselves, so I'm not upset with them.
I have no mouth and I must scream? (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, there's living tissue and functioning tissue... I'm not sure this is the latter.
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The summary makes it sound like they took a dead brain and pumped blood through it. Not at all what the title said. I, of course, didn't read the article.
But we are looking at the possibility of a future in which a whole new kind of torture, more horrible than any invented before, becomes an actual possibility. Combine tech that keep a brain alive with implants that create a virtual reality for that brain...and you can make the religious myth of "Hell" an experiential reality for any helpless victim you
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Humans have already mastered the art of keeping other humans in extreme distress for a long time. Heck, I've heard accounts from people who had large third-degree burns, and that sounds less comfortable than most torture devices.
Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Already covered the ethical issues of this in detail. Nixons head must not be allowed to take over again!
Re:Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Came for the Futurama reference; leaving satisfied.
Re:Futurama (Score:5, Insightful)
Nixons head must not be allowed to take over again!
Given another Clinton/Trump choice in 2020 . . . I'll vote for the third party disembodied pig head, instead.
Re:Futurama (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd write in Cthulhu as the lesser evil.
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Next thing you know we will be talking to our meat! (go to 1:24 in video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Kramer (Score:5, Funny)
Believe me, somewhere in this hospital the anguished oink of pig-man cries out for help!
Dilbert ... (Score:1)
Wow, this weeks Dilbert [dilbert.com] seems especially relevant now.
Donovan's Brain (Score:2)
If people keep repeating the word 'pork', I'm outta here!
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:Stop making fun of POTUS! (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean? We're talking about disembodied comatose pig brains, not.... oh.
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While I can intellectually understand the argument that the people who voted for Trump got what they deserved, I don't see that those of us who didn't got what we deserved.
Next Step: Drones (Score:2)
No need to create complicated AI chips. Just use brains from convicts.
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No need to create complicated AI chips. Just use brains from convicts.
But, please...not "ABNORMAL" ones
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A convicted decapitated abnormal Go player - who plays on AI levels - would finally be a challenge for me! /me looks around for his go books
Re:Next Step: Drones (Score:4, Interesting)
Cordwainer Smith figured that mouse brains would suffice for many uses. But I think he cheated when letting them understand English. (OTOH, he had the sliced into thin sections and, preserved somehow, not really specified. But they didn't require lots of support equipment. This wasn't the same as his "underpeople", I think I'm remembering from "The Lady that Sailed the Soul".)
Summary missing key detail (Score:5, Insightful)
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
So the brains are still dead. There is no consciousness, no functioning of the brain itself. All this really shows is something that really isn't a surprise: the brain cells don't die right away. Because the neurons are still dead, this is no different than keeping an arm or an organ alive outside the body. It might lead to some improvements with transplants, but until they can actually show renewed neuron activity in the brain, this idea is as dead as a slab of bacon.
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The brains are being artificially deadened by the blockers in the solution, per the article. They are probably thinking about what happens if they took those out...
No reason for a brain to die. Supply it with what it needs, and it can stay alive...who know how long. If you can feed the auditory and retinal input, you'd have something that has no haptic reality, but can still think, see, hear. Neural cybernetic links are doable.
Death as we always define it is nonsense. If the brain is alive, death doesn't co
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Brains are, in fact, biological, and it isn't clear to me that they'd be immortal if properly taken care of outside the body.
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until they can actually show renewed neuron activity
but, as per your own quote...
billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
Care Dog Meets Pee Bear: a SubGenius bedtime Story (Score:1, Troll)
(Trust me, it's relevant.)
(originally published in "Bob's" Big Book of Fables for Sleepy-Heads, Simon & Schuster, 1943)
Once upon a time!
Care Dog was strolling along on a bright, sunny Summer's day. Sweet-hearted fellow that he was, he enjoyed the beautiful singing of the birds and the comforting buzz of the bees. He was on the road through Sweet-Wood Forest, with Care-A-Lot town far behind him, when quite suddenly he happened upon Pee Bear, who was sitting right in the middle of the road. That rascally
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I came here to deliberately NOT post a link to that story. With big, red straps!
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It's a story written by Paul Mavrides, you've honestly never heard of the Church of the SubGenius or Bob Dobbs? You should have gotten a copy in your Nerd Starter Pack. Sad, you are missing out on some really good comedy. Here's a link https://www.amazon.com/Book-Su... [amazon.com]
The potential implications are staggering (Score:5, Insightful)
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I share the same concerns about this type of research. I seem to remember another recent experiment where they grew mice with brains containing some human brain cells. It's not just animals though, what about artificial intelligences?
Since we can't enter the consciousness of something else, how can we be sure we haven't created something that exists in a state of constant agony?
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That's not clear. Admittedly my first thought was "This is something new in the way of sensory deprivation!", but on further thought I'm less sure. From what I've heard, people who have recovered from being "locked in" don't report anything dreadful. They just became fuzzy and disconnected. It's as if because they weren't receiving any messages, they just didn't think. They don't seem to have been aware that time was passing.
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Pain is transmitted by a specific kind of neuron called a nociceptor. If they aren't transmitting pain signals, then, if conscious, the brain would not experience pain. That doesn't mean it could relive the final moments over and over in sensory deprivation and experience mental anguish. Not pleasant however you slice it (no pun intended), but that doesn't seem to be the case here. The investigator stated that there was a flat EEG, and we don't have any reason to believe a brain is "thinking" without EEG ac
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Re:The potential implications are staggering (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course the ethical point of this is serious. Even if you could achieve human brain transplant. I mean,,,,,,the other host,,,,is or was someone else,,,how do you cope with that, the family sees their love ones walking and talking but with someone else's brain, brings me to Altered Carbon sci-fi series.
Kind of really scary
Kinda really scary... but... if we can achieve some sort of economically viable cloning/body growing technology. So say growing a new body costs about the same or less than buying a new car so most people can afford it, then I think that could be on balance a good thing for society and especially for individuals whose bodies become permanently disabled well before "their time".
I think some aspect of Altered Carbon's view of a potential future are terrifying, especially if the ability to restore life in its fullest is reserved for the wealthy and a token few. We don't want to create a vampire class where the wealthy maintain their wealth and power over others simply by refusing to die while others remain poor simply because they don't live long enough to accumulate relative wealth.
If economically viable for a great number of people, then the ability to live another lifetime in a younger healthier body could really improve our existence in a variety of ways and people would always retain the option to just to live out their existing natural lifespan and be done with it.
In some scenarios it could make overpopulation worse, but society needs to adapt to the lower death rates we have already achieved with modern medicine regardless of any radical life extension that would be measured as a couple hundred years. Just random accidents and degradation of the brain itself will still cause attrition, unlike in the fictional Altered Carbon universe where it is a lot harder to die and the biological limitations of the brain are circumvented with a literary device.
Speaking for myself, I think I could go for another couple rounds of a healthy youthful life.
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My guess is what you describe only really works with an Altered Carbon type of device to store brain contents and transfer it to a new brain.
I'd guess that the surgical complexity to actually move a physical brain between skulls makes it necessary to treat the brain's contents separately from its physical entity.
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My guess is what you describe only really works with an Altered Carbon type of device to store brain contents and transfer it to a new brain.
I'd guess that the surgical complexity to actually move a physical brain between skulls makes it necessary to treat the brain's contents separately from its physical entity.
I think you have the notion of complexity backwards. It seems far less complicated to try and connect 31 nerve bundles in the spine and optic nerves than to map out an entire living human brain and try to make a working copy of it. The brain is very very complex. 125 trillion synapses in the cerebral cortex alone and the brain is constantly changing.
If we can ever get to the point we can repair spinal cord injuries, then we can do brain to body transplants. Somehow mapping the human brain to make an exac
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You're forgetting that those brains need a body. It would neither help the masses, nor affect population levels. Unless the bodies are being artificially grown in their entirety, someone's brain is going to be sacrificed so another can be hosted.
The only ethical solution here would be for the host to already be brain-dead.
A bit misleading (Score:2)
As far as I got it, they managed to keep the brains "alive" in the sense that cells were getting nutrients through artifical blood flow. There was no sign of any remotely normal functioning of the brains though. So, outside of any ethical considerations, that's still completely pointless.
One thing to consider is that once a brain is deprived of any afferent information, its ability to function probably declines very quickly. It may be interesting for neural experimentation but that's pretty much it.
Of cours
reminds me of the 90's TV show LEXX (Score:2)
Somewhere in Heaven... (Score:3)
Don Adams looks at Stephen Hawking and says, "Missed it by THAT much."
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Don Adams looks at Stephen Hawking and says, "Missed it by THAT much."
Stephen Hawking pretty much proved that the will to live is nearly limitless, and that a healthy body is only a small part of what we are.
Brain, brain, brain, what is this brain? (Score:2)
Just don't let this technology fall into the hands of the Imorg... Pain and delight may ensue...
Brain And Brain (Score:1)
In what sense are these pig brains "alive"? How do the researchers know what these discorporated brains are even thinking?
Maybe the pig brain thinks it is breathing and feels like it is pumping blood and maintaining physiologic temperate. But could it be re-circulating air, running heating plants, purifying water?
Wake me up when they can put the brain back in the pig.
A child could do it. A child could do it.
Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking? (Score:2)
This non-kosher headache nightmare will be with me for some time, Pinky.
Are You Thinking What I'm Thinking? (Score:2)
This non-kosher headache nightmare will be with me for some time, Porky. Errrr, Pinky.
Thee-a-tha-thee-a-butt That's All, Folks!
anything worth doing is worth militarizing (Score:2)
I'd be astonished if someone hadn't wondered if pig brains could pilot a missile.
Old news, russsians did this long ago... (Score:3)
...and it was all done in the 1950s. Search for Doctor Sergei S. Bryukhonenko.
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms
Check the weird stuff in youtube [youtube.com].
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According to some scientists who claim to have seen the experiments in the film, the severed dog head only survived for a few minutes when attached to the artificial heart, as opposed to the hours claimed in the film. [wikipedia.org]
I can see the movie now; (Score:2)
"They Saved Arnold's Brain"
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Only that?
Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (Score:2)
If you've got 20 minutes, check out this video from Moscow in 1940 [archive.org] showing attempts to keep severed dog heads alive. Even J B S Haldane makes an appearance.
That's amazing. (Score:2)
I had a good look during the recent State of The Union and I couldn't see any mechanical devices whatsoever. They must've really cracked the miniaturization problem.
From the pig's point of view... (Score:2)
From the pig's point of view, being slaughtered and eaten is already pretty much the most horrifying thing imaginable. Supposing that consciousness could be restored, isn't that better than death? What's the issue here? Maybe we shouldn't be killing and eating pigs.
The big take away for me is, there's no debate at all about whether a pig has consciousness and self awareness. It hasn't always been that way.
And I Must Scream (Score:2)
Bad idea, folks. Very bad idea. [rhjunior.com]
Biology still remains in the dark age ... (Score:2)
The only way our human understanding of biology has been able to progress has been by the brutalisation of living organisms. While that was understandable centuries ago in the past century (at least) there have been the tools in place for biology to take a more theoretical approach say, the development of mathematical models to explain and simulate living organisms. Yet instead biology has overwhelmingly continued to embrace crass approaches to the study of organisms using modern technology only to persis
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Biology is a science. Mathematics isn't. A science is something where we find objective evidence of things, make theories, make tests and observations to try to falsify the theories, and repeat. Mathematics is something where we start with basic assumptions and make deductions from them. It's very useful as an assist in science, but it isn't science.
Physics doesn't have first principles. It has assumptions and theories. A little over a century ago, space and time were first principles. We now know
Sweating (Score:2)
Must ... Resist ... Trump ... Jokes...