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A recent Nature paper describing an artificial blood perfusion used in an attempt to restore brain function after pigs were decapitated has generated great discussions in the medical, scientific, and bioethical academic arenas. Although the study’s results showed marked improvement and restoration in many cellular and molecular functions within the brain, the artificial blood perfusion system, called BrainEx, failed to restore global brain activity associated with awareness, perception, or other higher-order brain functions whose absence are intrinsic to defining death.
Before such a system were to be applied to, say, revive brain activity in stroke patients, there are three scientific questions that remain to be addressed from the researchers’ study. First is whether their failure to restore global brain activity was due to the fact that the researchers waited up to four hours after decapitation before hooking up their system to the decapitated pigs. In ...
