Scientists have managed to restore cell function in the brains of pigs hours after they died.
File: The findings of the trial show that the brains of pigs can have their blood flow and cell function restored even hours after death.PARIS - Scientists have managed to restore cell function in the brains of pigs hours after they died, in a breakthrough that experts said threw into question the very notion of what makes animals -- or even humans -- alive.
The team from the NIH BRAIN initiative, a federally funded US research programme, used the brains of 32 pigs that had been slaughtered for food and discarded, without blood or glucose flow, for four hours each. "I was tremendously surprised," Nenad Sestan, a researcher at Yale University and lead study author told AFP.
"That is a clinical sign that the brain is alive, and we never found it," said Sestan."This is not a living brain, it is a cellularly active brain." But for experts invited to comment on the study, it raised deeper philosophical and ethical questions.
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