
Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body - tomcam
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611007/researchers-are-keeping-pig-brains-alive-outside-the-body/
======
Santosh83
Experiments like these were done even decades back. Every time, there is some
temporary indignation/outrage from some limited quarters and then the news
dies down while such experiments continue behind closed doors. Only the much
derided "animals rights" group keep up sustained focus but they're effectively
isolated and ignored.

Perhaps society will do well to keep in mind that what we do to animals we
will eventually do to each other too, when the circumstances and motives align
just right. Such things have happened in the past and will happen again,
unless we can find ways and means to elevate our collective ethics, checks and
balances as a global species. Yet daily we shrink from confronting the really
tough questions.

~~~
tertius
A culture where no mistakes are tolerated results in a culture where no growth
is allowed.

~~~
tivert
> A culture where no mistakes are tolerated results in a culture where no
> growth is allowed.

I don't think the parent is likening this to a "mistake," but rather a _moral
and ethical transgression_. There's a _big_ difference between the two.

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leoh
And what do we suppose they are experiencing? It may well be absolutely
terrifying. Beyond the normal torture of factory farming.

~~~
yunyu
Presumably nothing:

 _" The EEG brain activity is a flat line, but a lot of other things keep on
ticking"_

~~~
trevyn
If the EEG is flat, then presumably these brains aren’t doing anything useful
where we would start deliberately keeping them in vats at scale.

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everdev
> Sestan acknowledged that surgeons at Yale had already asked him if the
> brain-preserving technology could have medical uses. Disembodied human
> brains, he said, could become guinea pigs for testing exotic cancer cures
> and speculative Alzheimer’s treatments too dangerous to try on the living.

> The setup, jokingly dubbed the “brain in a bucket,” would quickly raise
> serious ethical and legal questions if it were tried on a human.

I'm surprised this got the go-ahead, even for pigs. The process involved
decapitating a pig. After the success of preserving healthy cells in a
decapitated pig brain for 36 hours, the researcher quipped:

> I think a lot of people are going to start going to slaughterhouses to get
> heads and figure it out.

~~~
taneq
This has always dumbfounded me about animal experimentation - it's perfectly
OK to decapitate a pig to make bacon but it's somehow horribly inhuman to do
so to potentially save millions of lives?

~~~
jonathankoren
It's because this could be some sort of bizarre unending Harlan Ellisonesque
torture.

Torturing animals is has been considered immoral for many, many, many years.

~~~
jobigoud
And yet is done everyday for food production.

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Dylan16807
Sometimes it happens as a side-effect of cost-cutting, but it's not desired.
The goal is to have animals wander around a barn/field for months to years and
then get instantly killed before being cut up.

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redisman
Is that the goal? Of the ad departments of meat companies maybe lol

~~~
kortilla
Of everyone in the meat company all of the way to the consumer. Nobody wants
the animals to suffer (outside the portion of psychopaths present in all
industries).

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TeMPOraL
How so? If that were true, we'd see factory farms lobbying for stronger laws
against animal cruelty, to prevent competitors that do not care about animals
from forcing everyone into the current state of things.

Truth is, a lot of people - inside and outside - just don't care. Ceteris
paribus, they'd prefer animals to have happy lives, but that preference is
outweighed by needs of convenience, profit, human healthcare, and food
security.

Psychopaths are rare. But, with apologies to Burke/Mill[0], the only thing
necessary for the triumph of evil is to separate good men from it by enough
layers of abstraction.

\--

[0] - Apparently [1], the Burke never said that, and the original sounds
closer to "Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men
should look on and do nothing", which is incidentally even closer to my
paraphrase.

[1] - [https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-
top-10-misattribute...](https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-
top-10-misattributed-quotations-a7910361.html)

~~~
filoeleven
> How so? If that were true, we'd see factory farms lobbying for stronger laws
> against animal cruelty

Right. And instead they throw their weight behind ag-gag laws, which
criminalize whistleblowing on factory farms.

I think that way more people outside than inside _do_ care, it’s just that you
have to go seeking this information yourself to find out much, and it’s highly
disturbing stuff. So without loud voices pushing people to confront the
issue,it’s easy to remain willfully ignorant.

------
torgian
Spoiler warning: I didn’t read the article (can’t access now due to vpn not
working)

So from reading others comments and such: yeah, I understand the idea that the
pigs could be comatose and not experiencing anything. From the science behind
brains as we know it, that seems to be the case.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this because, in the end, it will
benefit humans. And we are more important than pigs.

Personally, I’d be all for human experiments as long as it was done correctly.
This is why we do everything on animals first before human trials are even
approved.

Give me, or my family enough money, and I’d be happen to be a brain in a
bucket for a fixed period of time. Who knows what could happen. Maybe I’d be
dead, maybe I’ll be in a waking dream, or maybe nothing at all. We don’t know.

Pig experiments may give us some insight to it. I hope so. Consciousness is
one of those elusive things that we haven’t been able to pin down.

Who knows, we might even be able to Altered Carbon ourselves in the future,
all thanks to pigs.

~~~
perfmode
I’m curious. What is your basis for determining that it is okay to do this to
pigs?

Could we also do this to dogs?

Dolphins? Elephants? Monkeys?

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matz1
For me, I drew the line at human and non human. I'm okay to do anything to non
human.

~~~
wvlia5
Isn't that kind of arbitrary? What if I said "for me, I drew the line at white
people and non white people. I'm okay to do anything to non white"

~~~
bumby
Where do you personally draw the line? I'm not trying to be adversarial, just
trying to understand how cogent your argument is.

I think the race argument is a bit reductio ad adsurdum. Why is that any
different than if you decide to only eat plants? That draws the line at the
kingdom classification which is just another human convention. Drawing the
line between species seems to have some logic to it at least, given there is a
stronger biological definition rather than a contrived race argument. (e.g.,
we can strictly define a species, in part, by their ability to produce viable
offspring)

~~~
wvlia5-
I do not draw a line in kingdom either, that would be every bit as absurd and
arbitrary as drawing a line on species or race. In practice, I end up eating
only members of plant kingdom, but that is just a fortuitous artifact, not the
result of drawing a line at 'kingdom'.

I seek to avoid causing suffering (I'm an utilitarian, but you don't
necessarily have to be utilitarian to try to prevent suffering). Q: What
entities can suffer? A: Sentient beings, by definition of sentience. In
particular, animals that we usually kill, do suffer (but not necessarily every
individual belonging to that kingdom does). Carrots do not (but if in the
future we discovered an individual of another kingdom that suffered as much as
a pig on a slaughterhouse, I wouldn't eat him either, being there so many
other options).

Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer had a chat explaining well this issue:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU)

~~~
bumby
Thanks for the clarification on your stance and for sharing the link. Although
I know a lot of people think Dawkins worships on the alter of rationality, I
think some of his stances on this issue need to be taken with a grain of salt
because he openly admits that he occasionally makes emotional arguments when
it comes to (non-human) animal rights.

I think the assumptions that need to be called out in Singer's argument (and
possibly yours, given the little bit in your post above) are 1) we know how to
define sentience and 2) we understand the link between sentience and
suffering. These points may be a departure from Singer in part because he's
making a philosophical argument and not necessarily a scientific one. The
science part being relevant to this thread because I think part of the
discussion is how strict definitions are necessary to avoid the moral
relativism aspect of the conversation.

There doesn't appear to be any scientific consensus on how to define
consciousness or sentience. Some, like Sam Harris, define it simply in terms
of information processing. In that case, what suffers can get murky fast. Are
mollusks more conscious than, say, a venus fly trap? I don't know, but as a
layman, I haven't come across a good definition to parse that question
effectively.

Even if we have an understanding of sentience, there doesn't seem to be a
definition on how this translates to suffering. You seem to imply it is a
given that sentience leads directly to the ability to suffer, but I haven't
found a good consensus on this either. Some people like Gerald Edelman take
the stance that suffering is dependent on complexity of the nervous system, so
there's nothing morally wrong with killing lobsters and less complex animals.
There's others like Vilayanur Ramachandran who go further and don't think more
complex animals like cows suffer because they don't introspectively experience
pain the way humans do.

The above is a just a long-winded way of saying that I think we need strict
scientific definitions to make some sense of the topic or we'll just be
endlessly entangled in relativistic arguments. I'm not convinced we have made
sense enough of the problem to define it this thoroughly.

------
interfixus
> _If it were tried on a person, it might mean awakening in the ultimate
> sensory deprivation chamber_

It _does_ mean exactly that, person or pig. This is the true stuff of
nightmares.

~~~
deytempo
You realize that there are governments out there that probably wouldn’t think
twice about trying this on a human

~~~
kyriakos
Sadly they may have already tried it and hopefully failed.

~~~
hutzlibu
Or continuesly are trying it.

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berbec
The terrifying implications of this tech makes me shudder.

Science fiction has beaten me to considering the potential for abuse. I'm
picturing Hyperion meets Brainship with some Altered Carbon thrown in. It
hurts my brain even to contemplate.

~~~
deytempo
Yea, like you could end up disembodied in a laboratory hell with no way to
scream for help

~~~
berbec
They just wire up your pain receptors, ears and mouth. Mute your mouth, and
ears and set pain to 10. Wait an hour and then ask you if you're willing to
talk yet. Repeat until your break.

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vectorEQ
people have too much assumptions on what experience is, how that arises in the
brain / mind and what those things are to say if these animals are suffering
or not. i'd prefer if there was a more clear understanding of consciousness,
experience and how that relates to our brains, hearts and other bodily
functions before playing with it like this. that being said, like many posted,
it's better to govern such experiments properly than to drive them underground
as clearly there's many people with different opinions on this and basically
before there's a thorough understanding on things it's not possible to say
who's right or wrong. i'd just wish people did less work based on assumptions
in science and medicine, because that always tends to lead to messy
situations. from a personal perspective i think this kind of research is
disgusting regarding the lack of information on this topic, but that's my
personal opinion and i respect other's for having a different opinion even
though that grosses me out. have fun in hell :-) guess we gotta fill that
place too :D ( joking! for those atheists jumping on hate train)

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__blockcipher__
That is genuinely horrifying.

I seems people can stomach anything when you’re not experimenting on humans...

A brain still a brain. If you don’t believe in a soul it seems logical to
operate with the idea that as long as the brain has electrical waves
propagating through it _, it’s experiencing consciousness.

_ waves resembling normal consciousness specifically

~~~
mattnewton
I think the brain was likely totally comatose, from the article:

“””

Sestan now says the organs produce a flat brain wave equivalent to a comatose
state, although the tissue itself “looks surprisingly great” and, once it’s
dissected, the cells produce normal-seeming patterns.

The lack of wider electrical activity could be irreversible if it is due to
damage and cell death. The pigs’ brains were attached to the BrainEx device
roughly four hours after the animals were decapitated.

However, it could also be due to chemicals the Yale team added to the blood
replacement to prevent swelling, which also severely dampen the activity of
neurons. “You have to understand that we have so many channel blockers in our
solution,” Sestan told the NIH. “This is probably the explanation why we don’t
get [any] signal.”

“””

But yes this would be scary if that wasn’t true.

~~~
__blockcipher__
Ah, good catch there. I stand corrected. I definitely agree a flat-line is way
different from being fully conscious.

~~~
redisman
But if something goes wrong (which sounds very likely at some point in such an
imprecise operation)? That'll be a helluva existential crisis situation.

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bitxbitxbitcoin
This article is a great read as it scratches my science and comedic itches
simultaneously.

My favorite quote: “This is probably not unique to pigs.”

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badrabbit
This is too much. Uncrossable lines must be drawn immediately. Humanity cannot
afford to "wing it" when it comes to ethics and morality at this scale. There
needs to be clear lines where crossing means the highest criminal consequence
to the researcher. And people funding it. And it needs to be a global effort.

Everything needs a balance.

~~~
khazhoux
Why is this an uncrossable line, though? Clearly this research is meant to be
a first/early step towards preserving brains in the event of traumatic bodily
injury. Is that not a worthwhile goal? Is it outweighed by some possible
nefarious abuse of this technique?

There are obviously major issues to work out still, but I don't see how else
this research can advance but with animal experiments.

~~~
aerique
This is all fun and games until Peter Thiel needs a new host for his brain.

disclaimer: I am not Peter Thiel

~~~
starbeast
Not yet you aren't.

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palad1n
The horror. The horror.

~~~
dang
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

~~~
jayess
It is substantive. It's a horrifying situation.

~~~
dang
All the more reason to post a thoughtful comment, not toss off flamebait.

