Scientists Bring A Severed Brain Back To Life

Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan revealed the breakthrough during a meeting at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on March 28. Sestan’s team reportedly experimented on over 100 pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse and restored their circulation using a system of pumps, heaters, and artificial blood. The researchers said they managed to reactivate the brains for up to 36 hours.

“It’s at the extreme of technical know-how, but not that different from preserving a kidney,” Steve Hyman of the Broad Institute said, via MIT Technology Review. “It may come to the point that instead of people saying ‘Freeze my brain,’ they say ‘Hook me up and find me a body,’” the director of psychiatric research added.

The ability to preserve a pig’s brain without its body is leaving many fellow scholars terrified at the thought of this procedure being used on humans. “With absolutely no contact to external reality it might just be a living hell,” Nottingham Trent ethics and philosophy lecturer Benjamin Curtis argued, via The Telegraph. “To end up a disembodied human brain may well be to suffer a fate worse than death.”