Reanimating The Brain After Death

Scientists at Yale are claiming to have reanimated pigs' brains after the pigs have died. This raises the question of whether this should ever be done with a human brain. Stephen Latham, director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, says that the pigs' brains never regained conscious.

Others are already concerned, however, about what could happen once this technology is improved. Benjamin Curtis, from Nottingham Trent University, says it would be "a fate worse than death" with only a person's own thoughts for company.

Researchers at Yale are calling for a public debate on the issue and bioethicists agree. “The techniques, even to a researcher, sound pretty ghoulish — so it is very, very important that there should be a public discussion about this..." said Colin Blakemore, a professor at the School of Advance Study at the University of London.

I generally side with science when it comes to, well, just about everything. In this instance, however, I'm not so sure. For a few years now I've been considering donating my body to medical science to be used in whatever way seen fit, but under no circumstance do I want my disembodied brain brought back from death. So what now, DNR instructions for the brain?

Pigs' Brain Cells Kept Alive After Slaughter For Experiment, Stirring Ethical Debate

 

And what's the end goal? Total reanimation of the dead? Literally bringing the dead back to life?

If people no longer die, we're going to have a massive population problem. I see no reason to even go down this road.

 

If you don't think it's already been done, "underground" by the government, I think you'd be naive.

 

Like a lot of things if you have enough money it's no issue. One day maybe the rich will simply get a new body when they need it. Transfer the brain which you reanimate and a 70 year old is 20 again. With stem cells and that sort of thing it's not impossible.

 

Curious that the reanimated brain did not contain consciousness. Perhaps there is some use for a brain devoid of consciousness. How could they tell there was no consciousness if they reanimated it? Maybe we could just turn dead people into drones that do work. I can hear people going "ew" but bear with me on this.

 

The further we advance in technology the further we get from what it means to be human

 

Quite an odd study based on the article, I'm interested to see if/when they release the official studies to the general public on what exactly their findings were, before I come to any particular conclusions.

While poetic, I don't know if this is necessarily so. There does seem to be a transformative quality about technology insofar that it allows for phenomena that we are unfamiliar with but I don't think the essence of humanity is contingent on it's presence or lack thereof. There's been bizarre practices in other cultures such as having animal/human sacrifice to their deities, is that more human than research such as this? I don't see why that would be.

 

Food for the zombie apocalypse...

 

If the majority of studies I've read about ancient religious practices are any decent representation it seems that such sacrifices were seen as giving something incredibly precious up so as to appease the "gods". In other words these worshippers understood that human & animal life is extremely valuable & only gave it up so as to keep the majority safe, in their eyes. Modern technology does the opposite of this. It devalues life in favor of more mechanical methods.

 

"In their eyes" is a key phrase there, today you would have many people, including myself, who view the act of ritual sacrifice as a barbaric, this gets to my point, which of these views suggests what it means to be human ? If it's subjective, than why not our utilization of technology as well.

In this instance, these Pigs were already going to be slaughtered, it's not like they (the researchers) arbitrarily killed the animals, we haven't got the full details of the purpose of the study either, as stated in the article. Might it be that "in their eyes" this research could potentially lead to further research in studying things like brain trauma, disease and cancer?

 

We should start by animating the brains of the living.

 

Yeah, that would make a great cartoon.

Hentai?

 

No way that I would agree.
Unless they kept a couple of fingers going so that I could post on HF.