The pigs are poor. We subject them to all sorts of weird and crazy experiments because we enjoy them as a delicious meal.
According to a press release, a team of researchers were able to revive the organs of pigs that had been dead for an hour.
The study is a continuation of an earlier experiment in which researchers were able to restore brain activity in long-expired pigs.
A new system called "OrganEx" was built by the same team that built the previous one.
The team used OrganEx to inject blood into the pig corpses. Anti-coagulants and other compounds were found in this pseudo-blood. Researchers were able to start the pig's organs.
The implications could be huge. Given the ongoing organ shortage, the researchers hope that their new findings will help make more potential donor organs available for transplants.
The technology has a great deal of promise for our ability to preserve organs after they're removed from a donor, according to study co-author and Yale bioethicist Stephen Latham.
Medical personnel could preserve the organ for longer periods of time if they hooked it up to the OrganEx system.
Current methods can only hold donor organs for a short time.
OrganEX could be an incredible, life-saving innovation. Experts are happy that the system can extend the shelf life of organs.
Sam Parnia, who was not involved in the study, said that the press release was accurate but that the significance of the discoveries was overstated.
The underlying cause of death could be saved with OrganEx.
Athletes who die suddenly from a heart defect, people who die from heart attacks or massive bleeding after trauma are included in today's definition. It is possible for the OrganEx system to prevent brain damage in people after death.
There are a lot of ethical questions raised by those kinds of implications, like whether it's morally right to use the technology to revive someone who died of traumatic injuries.
Should you subject the outcomes to this if they are going to be bad? The emergency medicine physician at Mount Sinai Health System was told to write a book. The study didn't involve Mitra. There are worse fates than death according to emergency medicine. It does not mean that we should bring someone back.
The definition of "death" is a topic of debate.
Brendan Parent, a transplant ethics and policy researcher at NYU, responded to the study's findings in an essay published in Nature.
Parnia was very clear about what he thought. He said that the study shows that the social convention about death is not valid.
Scientists and lawyers don't know what being dead really means. Does death happen when the brain stops working or when the heart stops pumping?
OrganEx is one of the complicating factors in that morbid equation.
The researchers don't know why some of the OrganEx pigs moved during testing. The technology doesn't induce the kind of coherent brain activity that makes us conscious.
Senior author and Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan said at the briefing that animals were not conscious during certain moments. We don't know why they moved, but it implicates preservation of some motor functions.
The methods used to test OrganEx will not sit well with some onlookers, but at the very least there's a lot to be said about the technology's potential to save lives.
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