Researchers have restored circulation and cellular activity in the vital organs of pigs, such as the heart and brain, one hour after the animals died. The research challenges the idea that cardiac death — which occurs when blood circulation and oxygenation stops — is irreversible, and raises ethical questions about the definition of death. The work follows 2019 experiments by the same scientists in which they revived the disembodied brains of pigs four hours after the animals died, calling into question the idea that brain death is final.
The authors warn that these results do not show that the pigs have somehow been reanimated after death, especially in the absence of electrical activity in the brain.
…
Share this article
The study also further emphasizes that death is not a moment but a process, making it challenging to come up with a uniform way to declare a person dead, says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University. That means that the legal definition of death will continue to adapt as medicine continues to advance, he adds. “People tend to focus on brain death, but there’s not much consensus on when cardiac death occurs,” he says. “This paper brings that home in an important way.”
