A Matter of Life and Death

Life is filled with uncertainty: as Christopher Bullok famously said, “‘Tis impossible to be sure of anything but Death and Taxes.” Death may be losing its place on the list of certainties, as a group of primarily Yale based researchers managed to partially restore function to the brains of pigs who had 

been dead for hours.

According to Simon Makin in his article Brain Restoration SystemExplores Hazy Territory between Being Dead or Alive, the researchers were compelled by the use of neural cell cultures harvested from animals in labs. They wondered if they couldn’t do the same thing in an intact bran that is commonly done in a dish. The team used a system they call “BrainEx” to protect and oxygenate the tissue, and even hours after death the cells treated returned to a state resembling life, even showing immune responses. It should be noted that there was no activity in the brains as BrainEx included neural activity blockers to prevent spontaneous firing. It is unclear if the brains themselves could return to an active state had these blockers not been used.

This study has, as one might expect, sparked enormous ethical debate. Before addressing the matter of bringing back the dead, it might be wise to look at bringing back the living. Dr. Joe Vukov, an ethicist Loyola University, has been attempting to parse the nature of death for some time. His focus has been primarily on people who are in a minimally conscious state, where a patient has exhibited some response to the world around them, even if it is only slight. This is different from a vegetative state where the patient is completely unaware of their surroundings. Patients in either state are often unable to breath on their own and always unable to eat, but patients in a minimally conscious state are more likely to recover then those in a vegetative state, causing enormous controversy of when it is okay to pull the plug

In Dr. Vukov’s paper When Does Consciousness Matter? Lessons from the Minimally Conscious State, he suggests that the moral fabric of when it is okay to let a person go who is unable to autonomously maintain life can be roughly assessed by their probability of regaining consciousness. This makes a lot of sense, it obviously is not okay to murder someone who is simply sleeping, but if they have been unconscious for years and may never return it seems more justifiable to let them go.

But what does this have to do with mostly dead pigs? Well, if it is possible to return a brain from dead to inactive or partially active, it will become extremely important to understand what it means for a thing to have consciousness. Currently, complete lack of brain activity is classified as death, and it will likely remain that way, so if the science stops here there is not much more to discuss. But if it is possible to regain partial brain activity with the BrainEx method, the ethics of consciousness will quite literally become a matter of life and death.

Joseph Vukov (2018) When Does Consciousness Matter? Lessons From the Minimally Conscious State, AJOB Neuroscience, 9:1,5-15, DOI: 10.1080/21507740.2018.1428237

Simon Makin (2019) “Brain Restoration System Explores Hazy Territory between Being Dead or Alive,” Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-restoration-system-explores-hazy-territory-between-being-dead-or-alive/