Pig brains kept alive outside bodies for first time

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pig-brains-kept-alive-outside-bodies-first-time-yale-university-a8325331.html

by georgecmu • 8 years ago

97 130 8 years ago

independent.co.uk

colordrops• 8 years ago

While the researchers were certain the disembodied brains did not regain consciousness

I'm curious how they were able to verify this. I am under the (perhaps incorrect?) impression that consciousness is neither well defined nor a binary function.

newshorts• 8 years ago

Agreed. It may not be observing itself but there was obviously some brain function.

This is fascinating research.

staticassertion2• 8 years ago

"the scientists concluded they were producing a flat brain wave comparable with someone in a comatose state."

herpderperator• 8 years ago

I was also curious, but as I kept reading it seems they may have answered that.

After initially shocking results indicating the brains were partially conscious – which later turned out to be mistaken – the scientists concluded they were producing a flat brain wave comparable with someone in a comatose state.
“That animal brain is not aware of anything, I am very confident of that,” said Dr Sestan.

krona• 8 years ago

Simply that certain brain waves correlate with some definition of awareness of your surroundings.

I'd imagine its pretty hard to be certain that a brain-dead person can't perceive his or her surroundings, however.

TomMckenny• 8 years ago

But someone with far less brain activity than, for example, an unconscious patient on an operating table is not going to be more conscious.

monkpit• 8 years ago

How would a disembodied brain even be capable of being “aware of its surroundings” without any sensory information?

swebs• 8 years ago

They measured brain waves via an electroencephalogram. The lack of brain waves reflects a lack of brain activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_oscillation

Karlozkiller2• 8 years ago

It's not well defined, but we can compare a dead brain to a brain in comatose to a fully awake and perceptive brain.

I assume, given what they say in the article, that the pig brain activity in the experiment was somewhere close to the activity of a dead brain or a brain in a coma.

They also explained that the blood-replacement they used contain a lot of inhibitive substances probably preventing the brains from being active even if they could.

blueprint2• 8 years ago

How do you define consciousness such that pigs have actual consciousness on their own (without having spent some significant amount of time with humans)?

Shikadi• 8 years ago

What exactly does spending time with humans have to do with consciousness? Asking for a friend

cmrdporcupine• 8 years ago

You have to wonder if the evidence of lack of consciousness could just as easily be a result of the lack of any sensory input whatsoever.

I mean what does a brain do with absolutely no external stimulus at all?

rocqua3• 8 years ago

How would we stimulate such a brain? Would you put electrodes on nerves going into the brain-stem?

Baeocystin• 8 years ago

It hallucinates its own patterns.

the tl;dr is that a healthy brain produces a significant amount of activity, even absent of sensory stimulation.

https://www.quora.com/What-happens-in-the-brain-during-senso...

Razengan2• 8 years ago

what does a brain do with absolutely no external stimulus at all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream

yeukhon• 8 years ago

“However, Dr Sestan has since said he does not wish to elaborate on the findings of his pig brain experiment, as he is awaiting publication of the results in a scientific journal.”

Hmm why? No spoiler? I wouldn’t mind sharing it right away.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

Some journals are very picky about that. As in refusing to publish, if too much gets leaked.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

Here it comes ... pig-brain powered autopilot.

OK, maybe not pig brains. Maybe dog brains. Dogs are pack animals, and quite trainable.

Remember the watchdogs in Cryptonomicon :)

PETA would not be happy, however.

Edit: No, that was Snow Crash. How embarrassing :(

Someone• 8 years ago

You don’t need that advanced tech for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog

mirimir5• 8 years ago

I don't think that you'd actually want a dog driving your car. But yes, the anti-tank dogs didn't work out. So maybe you don't want dog brains.

noir_lord• 8 years ago

Or Rat Things from Snow Crash.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

Yes, that's what I meant. They were dogs.

gamw_mana_sou• 8 years ago

PETA might be the most known animal welfare-related organization, but they aren't really worthy to be a drop-in replacement for the generic term.

Also, allegedly, China experiments on humans. Human rights organizations probably wouldn't be happy to see the resulting scientific papers.

mirimir5• 8 years ago

Maybe human brains would work in China. But that'd be pushing the envelope.

In Hannu Rajaniemi's Flower Prince trilogy, he posits that the minds of billions of people will get uploaded, and that all but a few rich ones will end up as slaves. Basically apps.

georgeecollins• 8 years ago

Brain in a jar!

cup-of-tea• 8 years ago

This is truly horrifying. Makes me think of _I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_.

anvandare2• 8 years ago

They haven't figured out how to interact with the nerves to create any kind of sensory input (vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance, ...), so no Altered Carbon-like virtual reality where you can be tortured to death over and over again.

Well, not yet, anyway.

Sharlin3• 8 years ago

The point is we don’t know what sort of horribly torturous experience it might be to be a conscious mind disconnected from all sensory input.

YaxelPerez• 8 years ago

Is there any research being done into putting living neurons on a chip and having them process information?

gscott• 8 years ago

https://singularityhub.com/2010/10/06/videos-of-robot-contro...

ColanR• 8 years ago

I saw some research into that back in ~2004 (?), where researchers put rat neurons in a petri dish that had an electrode array inside. Had great success, the neurons were able to drive a little rc car around and fly a jet simulator.

I've seen nothing about it since then. I like to imagine the scientists are working on Terminators for DARPA.

Edit: guess I should've read the link in the other reply. :)

repsilat• 8 years ago

The article mentions "ethical implications" a few times, but doesn't really hint at anything potentially negative. Obviously the potential to save or prolong lives is an enormous potential benefit, and any negative consequences would need to be elaborated on to be weighed against it.

Is it just that the technology smells like scary sci-fi stuff?

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

"The ethical implications are left as exercise for the reader".

Keeping a brain alive outside the body might be have the problem that it in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way. What more terrifying experience could imagine than being aware and utterly "disembodied"?

But then again, it might have the implication that the brain might installed in a new body with the slight problem that existing brain is evicted. Sure, some healthy bodies with dysfunctional brains can be found but that's only a short term problem.

Nothing that hasn't covered by the scariest horror movies you can think of. The movie "get out" occurs to me - old people parasitizing younger bodies, rich people parasitizing poorer bodies, etc.

gtirloni2• 8 years ago

"Altered Carbon" also poses this problem.

pmoriarty• 8 years ago

"in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way"

This is how many factory farmed animals already live.

Where is the outrage?

lostlogin2• 8 years ago

CPR can be ethically complicated, this is a step more so. How does consent work? Who can give it? What if the revived brain somehow asks to be switched off - is that suicide or assisted suicide or neither? Does it have rights? Property rights? Can it make decisions about the things it owns? How do those decisions get authorised?

homonculus1• 8 years ago

Why should any of those answers be different than for a person under normal circumstances?

thaumaturgy2• 8 years ago

One group of concerns is probably around unintentional harms -- for instance, only discovering much later that the process causes the brain to experience unimaginable pain or fear and without any way to communicate it or take action against it or even escape it by dying. It would be a form of hell that should terrify even the most stalwart of us.

The other would be intentional harm. Imagining the technology developing into the hopefully-far future, it's fair to also imagine interest from organizations like the CIA, who are so very fond of finding new ways to cruelly torture people while pretending they get good intelligence from it.

saulrh• 8 years ago

I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out how... breathlessly far-fetched both of those scenarios are? You'd find out the "unimaginable pain and fear" thing the first time you woke someone up, and standard anesthesia already has this issue. And for the CIA, wouldn't "take out their brain and hook wires into it" kind of constitute "major surgery without consent or medical reason"?

digi_owl4• 8 years ago

Gets me thinking of the prison in Minority Report.

What do pre-crime do to someone they grabbed for what they were supposed to do if pre-crime didn't intervene? Put them in a stasis tank while they get to watch their supposed future crime on repeat.

What would even be the goal of such a prison?

rocqua3• 8 years ago

Is a disembodied but conscious human brain a pig? If so, suppose it is in pain? It certainly stands to reason that a brain without a body would be very confused. At the very least, fear would be a logical reaction.

None of this is certain, but I think little of this is very controversial.

fencepost• 8 years ago

Is prolonged solitary confinement considered torture? How about if it's in a sensory deprivation tank? Then add paralytics.

Now contemplate consciousness with no sensory input at all (not even your own heartbeat or normal bodily sensations when you move, etc.) leaving only whatever phantom sensation the traumatized nerves generate, like amputees' phantom limbs and phantom pain, but for your only sensation.

On an individual basis this may be the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine.

vivekd• 8 years ago

This is the part I'm wondering about - my uncle died of a malignant brain tumor recently. I wonder if it would be possible to use a technique like this to transplant parts of a healthy donor brain to his brain. I read about two being done on wikipedia but it seems like something that is largely out of reach for now.

p1esk• 8 years ago

I think it might be easier to transplant a whole brain than to transplant a part of a brain. I'm not even sure the latter is possible at all.

spydum• 8 years ago

So... Krang? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krang

fogzen3• 8 years ago

It’s odd people talk about ethics here but have no problem torturing and killing pigs so they can eat them.

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

Most people would not be concerned if this were somehow just something people did and could only do to pigs. But the thing is that this is clearly showing what might be possible to do with people in a little bit.

jacquesm5• 8 years ago

Pigs are not typically tortured before they are killed for consumption.

horsecaptin4• 8 years ago

Do you not think that hitting them, packing them into cramped conditions, transporting them in similar conditions is torturous?

fogzen3• 8 years ago

Yes, they are. We can split hairs over what qualifies as torture, but I invite you to familiarize yourself with how commodity pigs are raised and slaughtered.

QML• 8 years ago

It’s one thing to kill a pig; it’s another to bring them back.

clavalle• 8 years ago

I'd prefer an animal not be tortured before I eat them.

And that's the concern, here; torture.

trhway• 8 years ago

industrial scale meat production is basically a life-long torture for animals. Note: i gave up on pork and beef, still eat chicken, fish. Hope to get easy on chicken with time too. Artificial meat can't come too soon. Its impact on our civilizations would hardly be possible to overestimate. We'll be able to go off the hypocrisy of "only humans have soul" and finally look with open eyes and meet other intelligent creatures beside ourselves (i mean i hope we're intelligent creatures).

Karlozkiller2• 8 years ago

I did find the experiment a bit more eerie than 'killing for food'. But that aside, some of the ethical problems they discussed in the article were regarding whether the possible revival of ones brain would mean that the person and his juridical status as a person would also follow, as well as his thoughts etc.

As opposed to if we experiment on some dead persons liver, if we experiment on his revived brain we might actually be experimenting on a conscious being (human), is what I believe is the main thing here.

staticassertion2• 8 years ago

The people talking about ethics here are not necessarily people who would have no problem torturing and killing pigs for food.

dschuetz2• 8 years ago

Hmm, but killing plants and fungi is totally OK then, yes?

tao_oat2• 8 years ago

Yes. There’s a huge difference between a sentient being and a plant. I don’t think anyone seriously believes that these are morally equivalent.

pavelrub• 8 years ago

Why is it odd? Those are very different kinds of "torture". This is like saying that it's odd that people are against waterboarding, but are fine with keeping people locked in prisons, even when done for purely retributive reasons.

Vegans have this bizarre tendency of reducing human ethics to a bunch of incorrect generalizations (i.e. a dog is sort of like a cow, therefore it's "odd" that people eat cows but consider it wrong to eat dogs), and are then baffled that the world doesn't follow their artificial ethical formalism.

thret• 8 years ago

I don't think it's the eating they object to, but the killing. They protest this by not consuming, which lowers demand and reduces the need for violence against animals.

teaneedz• 8 years ago

Why is it incorrect?

Why is it artificial?

Very curious about your reasoning?

vpribish• 8 years ago

cool. but that's a lousy article just playing up the ick factor for clicks. I'd guess that this makes studying the living brain much easier - but they don't get into any detail.

no1youknowz• 8 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Psycho-pass just yet [0].

The Sibyl System is made up of networked human brains giving tremendous computation ability.

Would not surprise me that the answer on what's beyond silicon is actual living brain tissue being the CPU.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379308/

kpil2• 8 years ago

Spintronics.

It's possible to build compact neuromorphic devices using spintronics... Denser and more energy efficient.

digi_owl4• 8 years ago

Not quite.

The setup is that the brains come from people that "broke" the system, and are wired up to look for others that match their kind.

They are effectively there much like Neo and Zion are to the Matrix, a way to rebalance the system over time.

nukeop• 8 years ago

I don't see this being any more unethical or unnerving than keeping a liver a or a lung or a heart alive outside of a body. A brain is just another organ, it's not a mind. It is a vital organ, to be sure, but the article equates it with the "essence" of a living being. This involves too many assumptions.

creep4• 8 years ago

This is true. The "mind" could very well exist outside of any organ system.

kpil2• 8 years ago

No it can't.

codingdave• 8 years ago

Assuming it is not a mind and isn't in massive pain is also too many assumptions. If your stance can be proven, fine - but the ethical problem is getting to that proof without creating disembodied minds living a life of absolute torture, with no senses or possible actions or communications... just an endless experience of pain.

cheez• 8 years ago

I would suspect that being deprived of sensory input, you would become a vegetable after going crazy at some point.

rocqua3• 8 years ago

“To ensure the success and social acceptance of this research long term, an ethical framework must be forged now”

It seems to me like the ethical framework surrounding this depends rather a lot on the outcome of these experiments. We have no idea what a disembodied consciousness experiences. Nor do we know what, if anything, they would express. To me, the answers to these questions determine the ethics of this to a very large degree.

One might argue that the possibilities are so horrible that we should not proceed. And yet I cannot help but be curious.

x3haloed4• 8 years ago

We should experiment on ourselves instead of animals if we expect to reap all the benefit. We do have an idea. Try dissociatives. Or at least read about them.

x3haloed4• 8 years ago

Hint: it CAN be extremely terrifying.

ItsMe0000012• 8 years ago

We have no idea what a disembodied consciousness experiences.

Try sensory deprivation (or isolation) tanks, or just solitary confinement. Both and especially the latter obviously are just a tiny fraction as bad. You don't spend much time in a tank, and the solitary confinement still leaves you with your senses. But already getting too much of either is pretty bad.

As an exercise for yourself: Just sit completely still in a completely quiet and dark room for as long as you can (try the cellar).

Herodotus383• 8 years ago

While I am not sure how long the Soviets were able to keep the dogs alive for (they say "hours"), there is a very interesting film about reanimation of dogs from decades ago.

Warning that the film does show a decapitated dog being artificially kept alive through a bypass device. A much different era.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KDqh-r8TQgs

theonemind3• 8 years ago

I have seen this. I tend to question whether they actually did it, and whether this represents an authentic film.

Consider, say, the space race. They have a clear motivation to demonstrate superiority close to this era. I have also gotten the impression that the classic soviet government didn't exactly have a reputation for sterling honesty, and this doesn't seem wildly far afield from something you could achieve with practical effects.

I have limited specialist domain knowledge, but the head doesn't really have a power source. Blood can give the brain oxygen, but hours seems a bit far-fetched. They definitely skip a lot of detail here, like where/how they oxygenate the blood without lungs. The head has the brain, which takes a lot of energy to run for its size, and probably doesn't carry out the metabolic processes of energy production, with the blood/brain barrier. So, you have a big power draw, and no engine. Hours of observable or verifiable life seems like a lot for stale blood with no power source and a big power draw.

I also don't know the authentic history of the video to verify it didn't come as a complete fabrication of a historical curiosity at a later date.

I would like to see credible verification, but it doesn't really add up.

Herodotus383• 8 years ago

Thank you for your response. I do have some domain knowledge as it seemed to be a crude form of ECMO (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxyg...) , but it made me dig deeper into the history of extracorporeal perfusion. I think you will enjoy the link below which has a lot of information about the video.

The scientist in the beginning of the film is the famous physiologist Haldane, which is why I originally believed the video. However your response led me to find out he was a Marxist! Now I was torn and had doubts.

Turns out that while the film was propaganda aimed toward Western Scientists, it was real and did work.

http://perfusiontheory.com/who-really-invented-the-heartlung...

liveoneggs• 8 years ago

finally wilbur will be able to survive without charlotte.

CocoaGeek• 8 years ago

This is really disturbing :(

acd• 8 years ago

Somebody will connect a neural interface to the pig brains. Then run neural programs on the brains as that will be power efficient. This seems like a scene from the movie the matrix.

Pig brains kept alive outside bodies for first time

Related Stories