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Researchers Are Keeping Pig Brains Alive Outside the Body (technologyreview.com)
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.
This type of experimentation is absolutely evil. This should not be done, even to animals. This is possibly the cruelest thing I have ever heard. Leave it to human beings to invent something that's even worse than death. Because killing isn't bad enough, we need to invent a way to put things into a literal living hell.
Already covered the ethical issues of this in detail. Nixons head must not be allowed to take over again!
Believe me, somewhere in this hospital the anguished oink of pig-man cries out for help!
What do you mean? We're talking about disembodied comatose pig brains, not.... oh.
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.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Admittedly, the article suggests a comatose state. However, imagine being in this state: No sensory input from any normal sources. The potential for the final state of the body to translate into a sensation of pain from any/all possible sources. I understand the goal here, and maybe at some point this would be a viable option. However, to me, this is kind of terrifying. The animal cruelty implications aren't minor, either.