Scientists revive cells, organs in dead pigs

PARIS: Scientists announced on Wednesday that they have restored blood flow and cell function throughout the bodies of pigs that were dead for an hour, in a breakthrough experts say could mean we need to update the definition of death itself.

The discovery raised hopes for a range of future medical uses in humans, the most immediate being that it could help organs last longer, potentially saving the lives of thousands of people worldwide in need of transplants.

However, it could also spur debate about the ethics of such procedures, particularly after some of the ostensibly dead pigs startled the scientists by making sudden head movements during the experiment.

The United States-based team stunned the scientific community in 2019 by managing to restore cell function in the brains of pigs hours after they had been decapitated.

For the latest research, published in the journal Nature, the team sought to expand this technique to the entire body.

They induced a heart attack in the anesthetized pigs, which stopped blood flowing through the bodies.

This deprives the body’s cells of oxygen, without which the cells in mammals die.

The pigs then sat dead for an hour.

‘Demise of cells can be halted’

The scientists then pumped the bodies with a liquid containing the pigs’ own blood, as well as a synthetic form of hemoglobin — the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells — and drugs that protect cells and prevent blood clots.

Blood started circulating again and many cells began functioning, including in vital organs such as the heart, liver and kidney, for the next six hours of the experiment.

“These cells were functioning hours after they should not have been. What this tells us is that the demise of cells can be halted,” Nenad Sestan, the study’s senior author and a researcher at Yale University, told journalists.

Co-lead author David Andrijevic, also from Yale, told Agence FrancePresse (AFP) that the team hopes the technique, called OrganEx, “can be used to salvage organs.”

OrganEx could also make new forms of surgery possible, as it creates “more medical wiggle room in cases with no circulation to fix things,” Anders Sandberg of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute said.

The technique could potentially also be used to resuscitate people. However, this could increase the risk of bringing back patients to a point where they are unable to live without life support — trapped on what is called the bridge to nowhere, Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University’s (NYU) Grossman School of Medicine, said in a linked comment in Nature.

Could death be treatable?

Sam Parnia of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine said it was “a truly remarkable and incredibly significant study.”

It showed that death was not black and white, but rather a “biological process that remains treatable and reversible for hours after it has occurred,” he added.

Benjamin Curtis, a philosopher focused on ethics at the United Kingdom’s Nottingham Trent University, said the definition of death might need updating because it hinged on the concept of irreversibility.

“This research shows that many processes that we thought were irreversible are not, in fact, irreversible, and so on the current medical definition of death a person may not be truly dead until hours after their bodily functions have stopped,” he told AFP.

“Indeed, there may be bodies lying in morgues right now that haven’t yet ‘died’, if we take the current definition as valid,” Curtis said.

During the experiment, pretty much all of the OrganEx pigs made powerful movements with their head and neck, said Stephen Latham, a Yale ethicist and study co-author.

“It was quite startling for the people in the room,” he told journalists.

He emphasized that while it was not known what caused the movement, at no point was any electrical activity recorded in the pigs’ brains, showing that they never regained consciousness after death.

While there was a “little burst” on the EEG machine measuring brain activity at the time of the movement, Latham said that was probably caused by the shifting of the head affecting the recording.

However, Curtis said the movement was a “major concern” because recent neuroscience research has suggested that “conscious experience can continue, even when electrical activity in the brain cannot be measured.”

“So it is possible that this technique did, in fact, cause the subject pigs to suffer, and would cause human beings to suffer were it to be used on them,” he added, calling for more research.