
New research makes it harder to define death - pseudolus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/new-research-makes-it-harder-to-define-death/2019/10/11/bb060412-ea93-11e9-85c0-85a098e47b37_story.html
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gus_massa
The experiment only keep alive some cells of the brain of the pigs.

The setup was more creepy, because after half an hour of no blood (and oxygen)
flow, they connected the whole brain to an artificial blood like flow (with
oxygen), and after some hours they extracted the cells and measure the
activity of the cells, and some of them where alive. I think this is not
unexpected.

The part that the article is "hiding" is that a big part (most?) of the brain
cells where dead, so the whole structure of the brain was heavily damaged and
it was impossible to restore the state to a functional pig.

It's like putting the pig in a giant blender, then collect some neurons from
the smoothie, verify that some of them are still working, and then claim that
now death is more difficult to define.

[Note that they didn't cold down the pigs before the slaughter. With a cold
pig, this may work. With a low temperature a functional brain survives more
time, but the process to warm it is tricky if you want a functional brain.
Somewhat related
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030095721...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957214005243)
]

