Medical researchers are always trying to cure diseases or find ways to detect them faster.
But the most coveted goal in medicine (and most unlikely) is eternal life. Now scientists haven't figured that out yet, but they've got something close, not to mention creepy.
Researchers at Yale University may have almost beaten death itself. They've managed to successfully restore cellular activity, blood vessel structure, and circulatory function in pigs brains. I say restore because the brains were removed from the animal's heads four hours prior, when they died.
Until now, it's been the general acceptance that a brain dies very quickly once blood flow to it stops. The tiny capillaries spidering through them clog, and cells rapidly die. And yet Nenad Sestan and his team of researchers would say different.
The team took the brains of the dead pigs from a meat packing plant and pumped their grey matter full of a special solution they concocted. Though this was done four hours after the animals' deaths, it still protected their brains from the natural rapid degradation that would have occurred. It even restored some of their activity, but not all of it.
Dubbed BrainEx, (is it me or does that sound like something you'd hear about in Resident Evil?) the solution was able to preserve the structure of the brains for up to 10 hours after death. It doesn't bring the animals back to life however, which thank god.
"At no point did we observe the kind of organized electrical activity associated with perception, awareness, or consciousness," said ?Zvonimir Vrselja, a co-author on the paper. "Clinically defined, this is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain."
Image courtesy: Nature
This makes BrainEx an incredibly valuable compound. For one, it could let scientists and doctors preserve a brain for longer periods in order to conduct research. This could let them "revive" post-mortem human brains to study diseases and treatments that would have otherwise been impossible to test on humans.
Additionally, it could also potentially help with treating stroke and heart attack victims, when there's a prolonged loss of blood flow to the brain.