Scientists Have Proven It’s Possible to Bring a Dead Brain ‘Back to Life’—But There’s a Catch
About five years ago, Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist Zvonimir Vrselja, Ph.D., and his colleagues shocked the medical community with a groundbreaking experiment. They removed a slaughterhouse pig’s brain from its head and deprived it of oxygen at room temperature for four hours. Then, they hooked it up to their resuscitation machine and revived it—to an extent.
A living brain’s vasculature, or network of blood vessels, carries oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood to the brain through arteries and capillaries. So, the researchers used their machine, called BrainEx, to pump a mixture of preserving agents and drugs into the dead pig brain, targeting pathways typically damaged due to a loss of oxygen. The blend contained a substitute for blood made up of molecules that balance cell pH levels, drugs that prevent an excessive immune response, and antibiotics.
Several remarkable things happened: the gray cortex blushed pink. Brain cells resumed the production of proteins. Neurons began displaying signs of metabolic activity just as living cells do. The brain was once again carrying out basic cellular functions, but it wasn’t conscious—researchers didn’t expect anything that extreme—and couldn’t be called “alive.”
