Authors
Henry T Greely
Publication date
2022/11/2
Journal
The American Journal of Bioethics
Volume
22
Issue
11
Pages
4-7
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Description
In April 2019 Yale Professor Nenad Sestan’s “BrainEx” experiments startled the world (Vrselja 2019). Four hours after pigs were decapitated, researchers perfused the pigs’ brains using what they called “BrainEx,” a machine that circulated a fluid made up mainly of a synthetic hemoglobin. Astoundingly, many of the cells in the pig brains “came back to life” even though conventional wisdom had been that brain cells die, irrevocably, after about ten minutes without oxygen. The researchers found no signs of organized neuronal firings, no pattern on an electroencephalogram (“EEG”), and concluded “This is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain…”(Thompson 2019). BrainEx was a sensation but Sestan’s team has published nothing more about it and, after a few commentaries (Farahany, Greely, and Giattino 2019; Youngner and Hyun 2019), it quietly receded. In early August 2022, though, Sestan’s team …
Scholar articles
HT Greely - The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022