Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing

https://www.science.org/content/article/not-alive-not-dead-disembodied-human-brains-used-drug-testing

by Timofeibu • 2 months ago

225 186 2 months ago

"alive" is not a meaningful term. It makes sense only when you have blunt instruments to measure aliveness, like pulse, respiration, heart beat, etc.

Once you go much more granular, there's no particular spot to make a distinction between "alive" and "not alive", until you stop seeing any electrical, biochemical and mechanical activity of any kind, at which point you're basically saying "inert".

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

And yet, "my child is alive" versus "my child is dead" have some… meaning.

lapetitejort• 2 months ago

With what we are learning about how gut flora, can a brain be considered conscious while detached from the digestive system?

oh_my_goodness• 2 months ago

Is this dry humor and/or a deliberate attempt to make the reader even more horrified by the experiment? Or only a different sensibility from mine? No judgement. I just really can't tell.

prewett• 2 months ago

I just finished reading "That Hideous Strength" (CS Lewis) this weekend where they have a disembodied head kept "alive", and some convicts in the pipeline whose heads/brains, it is implied, will be experimented on similarly. Lewis was remarkably prophetic.

renticulous• 2 months ago

The Dust Theory in Permutation City by Greg Egan pushes the concept to bizarre levels.

bicx• 2 months ago

Greg Egan is a legend

quirk• 2 months ago

Came here to say this. The Space Trilogy is one of the best series I've ever read. That Hideous Strength reminds me a LOT of what's happening these days. Even moreso than 1984. Would love to see a great director tackle it as a film.

acheron• 2 months ago

“We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?”

Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)

gavmor2• 2 months ago

Give credit where credit is due: Descartes, Kant, Putnam, etc.

sodaplayer• 2 months ago

It'll be Brian Reynolds in this case. It's a quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.

mattlondon• 2 months ago

Hmm pretty sure I saw this in the thought traces of Claude the other day...

dhosek4• 2 months ago

Meditations on First Philosophy messed me up bad. All of Descartes’ reasoning about the inability to determine whether experience was real made complete sense to me. But when I got to where he started to try to build back reality, I didn’t buy it. I can only believe in reality by willfully forgetting Descartes.

Gooblebrai4• 2 months ago

Source: Bioenhancement Center (SMAC), Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

aetherspawn• 2 months ago

Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?

pavel_lishin3• 2 months ago

Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.

Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.

The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.

gavmor2• 2 months ago

That’s somewhat overstated.

We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.

harimau777• 2 months ago

My understanding was that we now believe that patients under anesthesia are often "awake" but the drugs prevent them from forming memories so they can't complain once the anesthesia wears off.

Is that incorrect?

garethsprice• 2 months ago

From the article:

The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.

1234letshaveatw• 2 months ago

I could've done without reading the word almost

Barbing5• 2 months ago

I recognized that anesthetic from its famous irresponsible use-

"Attention to the risks of off-label use of propofol increased in August 2009, after the release of the Los Angeles County coroner's report that musician Michael Jackson was killed by a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam, and diazepam on 25 June 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propofol

Used properly, however:

"To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental."

raffael_de3• 2 months ago

oh, look, seems like we found the guy who can define what consciousness is! and not just that ... he even knows the lower boundary of it, too.

joegibbs• 2 months ago

I don't trust them to always give the brain propofol. The subject has no way of reacting because they have no body, so what are they going to do?

crooked-v• 2 months ago

The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.

EA-31673• 2 months ago

It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.

IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.

genxy• 2 months ago

isn't something we can reverse

Until you hook it up to a lightening rod in the top of a castle!

DontBreakAlex3• 2 months ago

Everyone upvote this guy more, thanks

mikeweiss• 2 months ago

So your saying you would be comfortable putting yourself on the donor list then?

kreyenborgi• 2 months ago

Reminds me of a certain scene from Knausgård's Morning Star.

koolba• 2 months ago

Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental.

There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.

dostick• 2 months ago

Brain does not have physical feelings, and with all other feelings cut off and not possible, even with consciousness it won’t be a horror scenario like in MetallicA’s “One”.

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

People go crazy in solitary confinement, and they at least have senses left. I’m not sure I’m as confident as you on this one.

cj• 2 months ago

I’ll volunteer to waive my rights here. Feel free to do whatever you wish with my brain once it’s detached from my body :)

Can’t be worse than my organs being harvested for donation.

rendx7• 2 months ago

It's still an open debate whether the seat of consciousness (or even simpler, perception) is the brain.

see e.g. Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594

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

Same for memory, which is "needed" as well for your question to make sense. The more current theories assume memories are stored not only in the brain, but throughout the body.

see e.g. Repetto, C., & Riva, G. (2023). The neuroscience of body memory: Recent findings and conceptual advances. EXCLI journal, 22, 191–206. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2023-5877

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

echelon_musk• 2 months ago

See also: Hridaya.

raffael_de3• 2 months ago

I believe to some extent that everything is conscious and that it's specifically our species' prized mental features that lessen it's level at least temporarily. purely esoterically the statement "a rock is more conscious than a human being" doesn't even seem too outrageous to me.

ywain2• 2 months ago

Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.

cogman103• 2 months ago

It's still an open debate

No it's not, not by anyone serious.

We know the brain is the seat of consciousness because damage to the brain damages consciousness. There is no other organ in the body where that's true. You can completely replace all other organs without changing consciousness.

You can always find a paper by a quack that posits the earth is flat, that doesn't mean there's serious debate.

dhosek4• 2 months ago

When I had my ear surgery about 20 years ago, the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it.¹ It’s a weird thing to think about whether that lack of memory would obviate the pain or discomfort of the moment.

⸻

1. As it turned out, I was so frightened in the lead-up to the surgery that they had to do general anesthesia on me because I was shaking too much for them to operate so I was unconscious for the whole thing.

thih9• 2 months ago

so I was unconscious for the whole thing

Or so they claim - the patient would have no memory of that anyway.

yoyohello13• 2 months ago

Purely anecdotal, but I had surgery a few years ago (relatively minor). But I could feel for months after a sort of 'unconscious PSTD' I don't know how else to describe it. Even after it was healed and the pain was gone, there was just a deep sense of 'something bad happened in there' feeling. I'd have dreams of someone digging around in my body. Anyway, it's all gone now, but a weird experience for sure.

VectorLock2• 2 months ago

I had the same thoughts "but won't i feel it THEN?" when I was getting an upper endoscopy. The anesthesiologist said you're in such a trance, dreamlike state plus with the inability to form memories its like you're not your real "consciousness" but something different. Sort of like your brain is in "limp mode" and its not really _you._ This was both comforting and slightly terrifying in a different way.

andy99• 2 months ago

I had a dentist explain to me the same for getting my wisdom teeth out, as if it was a selling feature. At least for me, having my memory wiped is far more scary than just being put unconscious (or having some pain and a local anaesthetic).

Gooblebrai4• 2 months ago

the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it

The short story "Transition Dreams" by Greg Egan touches on this concept

steve-atx-7600• 2 months ago

Colonoscopies used to be like this in the US more often (“you’ll be awake but won’t remember it”). I feel bad for the me that existed in that time window of discomfort. 20 years later they did general anesthesia (family history of colon cancer).

WithinReason• 2 months ago

...or that's what they told you afterward 0_0

rickydroll• 2 months ago

Oh yeah, I've had two cath lab visits. In both of them, I woke up in the middle of the process, conscious enough to recognize that the black-and-white image on the screen was me with a wire in my heart and little puffs of dye.

The first time it happened, I was fascinated watching the process. I thought I asked them a question about what I was seeing. I probably was just mumbling. The second time, I had a bright white ball of nuclear fire in my chest, and in my mind's eye, my ribs were slumping under the heat. I tried to tell them about the burning sensation, and I apologized for complaining (one should always be polite to the doctor running a wire through one's arteries and into one's heart).

In both cases, after I tried to speak, the room went black again.

As I relate the story, I can see how, for some people, it would be nightmare fuel. But for me it was this abstract "hey, that's cool."

retrochameleon• 2 months ago

I had a low stakes cyst removal from my butt crack once. Sparing the other details, the anesthesiologist explained the different drugs, one to numb, one to prevent my memory from forming. I asked if they could leave out the memory drug and I could remain cognizant. She didn't mind and I had a nice chat with her about anesthetics while on my stomach having doctors cut out part of my butt.

eudamoniac2• 2 months ago

I've thought a lot about this. If you experience immense pain for half a second, then immediately forget, it doesn't seem so bad. And anything bad that has happened to you that you completely forgot doesn't really affect you. Sometimes when I'm feeling ill, I'll think to myself, "If I remember having this thought, then this sickness is terrible, but if I forget the whole experience, it isn't. If I eventually forget this happened, then this current pain is not real." Then when I remember that, I know that moment in time contributed to my total self. But surely I have also thought this without remembering it.

Does a full day of torture, completely forgotten, really matter? How long before it does matter? We forget vast amounts of our lives constantly. And after death, forgetting everything, how much mattered then? It's a mindfuck.

rootsudo• 2 months ago

This, exactly.

Every other part of the human body is understandable but the brain.

Reading the article and imagining its you, sheeeeesh. I really wonder how this passed ethical review. Yes the brain is an organ, and yes there’s probably consent and the body is officially proclaimed dead and this is near the best way to really extrapolate the empirical data prior to alive human trials.

But damn this article is a combination of words I did not want to read today nor imagine.

Balgair• 2 months ago

To add to the discussion in the comments:

There is also the practice of not using anesthesia on infants when undergoing medical surgery.

Anesthesia is hard to do even on adults, harder on children, and very difficult on infants. Not accidentally killing one is quite hard.

So, for a long time we just didn't. I think some countries still don't, but can't remember.

The idea really gets back all the way to philosophy. If you can't remember if you were in pain, did you get hurt? And then you add in the medical problem itself, the duty to do no harm, the difficulties, etc. The conclusion was to just not use pain meds.

hokkos• 2 months ago

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

ReptileMan2• 2 months ago

We don't create the torment nexus, we are creating all the possible torment nexuses

jpwesselink• 2 months ago

Just no.

abtinf2• 2 months ago

I will be removing my organ donor status. This is horrifying.

pavel_lishin3• 2 months ago

It looks like the families have to agree to do this, before your brain can be donated:

Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.

smeggysmeg• 2 months ago

Until we find out otherwise. There have been multiple organ harvesting scandals lately. Informed consent has become a marketing concept, no longer a reality.

dnnddidiej• 2 months ago

Can't the donor stipulate take anything but the brain?

JimTheMan3• 2 months ago

I highly highly doubt that by consenting to be an organ donor you are consenting to this.

Unless you live in some incredibly lawless country?

Organ donation is so very sensitive, and those who use the service are so aware of the sensitivities I think that you'd be insane to have such a reaction to this media piece.

In fact, I'll go one further. I have serious doubts you were ever an organ donor at all.

abtinf2• 2 months ago

Your doubts are solidly founded; I can confirm I am not yet dead and my organs have not yet been donated.

caconym_• 2 months ago

What the fuck? This is beyond the pale.

NDlurker3• 2 months ago

This is legal but I can't legally pay another adult for sex or take drugs that could harm me? And there are many restrictions on gambling. It's weird how some morals are legislated but not others.

Aboutplants• 2 months ago

This provides humanity with a greater good than gambling

throwaway613746• 2 months ago

So did Nazi eugenics.

booleandilemma• 2 months ago

Can't make having fun too easy. It ruins the control the elites have over us.

croes6• 2 months ago

Drugs and gambling are ways to get controlled

croes6• 2 months ago

All you mentioned can have negative side effects for third parties.

NDlurker3• 2 months ago

Disagree

subscribed2• 2 months ago

Compared to legal and regulated drugs? Rarely.

ethanrutherford• 2 months ago

This makes me feel physically ill. It's like something straight out of a sci-fi dystopia, how did this get approved? Who determined that reinjecting biological activity into a human brain is definitely not some form of reanimation? If they're using heavy sedation to prevent electrical activity, is that not tacit admission they're not 100% sure that consciousness might return otherwise? How did this pass ethics review, or did they even bother?

DontBreakAlex3• 2 months ago

[flagged]

wanoir2• 2 months ago

This is an interesting point

I think for direct comparison, the way of re-animating the brain described in the article would need to be attempted on the cardiac arrest patient as well so as to be sure it isn’t a “revival”-capable method

Might already be an obvious answer to practitioners in the field

tomhow• 2 months ago

Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

willis9362• 2 months ago

Approved? Ethics review? This is a private company. I was shocked when NYT Daily casually mentioned this exact behavior at Altos last week and just laughed it off. Like what is funny about making infinite torture machines because billionaires want to live forever?

ckemere• 2 months ago

The obvious question I would have asked: given the concern that this may not be ethical if the brains are still “alive” AND the concern that a brain separated from the body probably doesn’t function these same, why wouldn’t we test things in living monkeys (instead of mice)???

It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???

cduzz• 2 months ago

NEW VISTA, OUTER RIM—Just a cycle ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its first owner died, it sits on a slab draped in tubes that quiver as they pump liters of blood substitute and other fluids through the organ, supplying oxygen and removing waste. As far as anyone knows, with many of its key functions intact but maybe awarness muffled by drugs, the brain hovers between life and death. As people subject it to experimental drugs, sensors record the brain's reactions, capturing hundreds of data points on its cells, proteins, and physiology. Then, after 24 hours in this state, it will be sliced into hundreds of pieces for more detailed study.

acdbddh3• 2 months ago

To be honest, if my only other option was to be buried, I would love to let my brain be connected to some machine that try to keep it as alive-like as possible.

Just please don't remove my brain before I'm 1000% certainly dead.

saalweachter• 2 months ago

To some extent, volunteering for any sort of medical study is signing up to be tortured in the hopes that someone down the line might be saved by the research. Most cancer treatments, for instance, are objectively terrible to go through, and when you're testing and developing the protocols you're pumping already sick people full of poisons and hoping for the best.

There's some fraction of people who would prefer to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, depending on the alternatives, but getting to that point is going to require a bunch of people to volunteer to undergo excruciating torture as we learn how to keep the brain alive, how to keep them comfortable, how to keep them conscious, sane and let them interact with the world.

bsimpson• 2 months ago

This is precisely why I've never been interested in being an organ donor.

I don't remember where specifically I learned this, but I was taught that tissue has to be alive to be useful, so they harvest it when you're almost-dead. Having my last moments be being literally dismembered is not something I wish for my future self.

scratchyone• 2 months ago

They will never remove tissue if you're still alive. This is the reason organ donation is most common in brain-death cases, because the tissue is still alive but you are entirely dead. As you point out, it would be horrible to dismember someone who is still alive and would certainly violate their oath.

I hope this is a comforting answer, I choose to be an organ donor because of these details.

FrinkleFrankle• 2 months ago

True. You'd probably go crazy as a brain disconnected from your body, regardless of what drugs they give you.. But It'd be an interesting final experience, I guess. I do hope they're getting pain killers along with the anaesthesia, though.

acdbddh3• 2 months ago

I guess they would plug us some electrodes which we could learn to use to communicate. ;)

The brain itself doesn't have pain receptors, so painkillers would not make any difference. The only pain would be existentional ;)

JacobKfromIRC• 2 months ago

Another option is cryonics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics

It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.

acdbddh3• 2 months ago

this actually started to look promising recently, since https://eon.systems/ somewhat managed to scan and upload fly brain to the computer, maybe one day the same would be possible with the frozen human brain.

imagine waking up in the simulated environment...

WalterBright• 2 months ago

There is a documentary about this:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052646/mediaviewer/rm713036545...

aftbit• 2 months ago

“We'll send only a brain"

ReptileMan2• 2 months ago

They have no mouth and they must scream...

kypro• 2 months ago

This is literally my biggest fear. The idea that my biology or consciousness could be keep alive and in a state of suffering for years, decades, centuries or longer via neural simulation or biological intervention.

I do wonder if AI advancements will allow me to see these horrors play out. Hopefully not to myself.

https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-hello-cru...

jjk166• 2 months ago

Let me add Johnny Got His Gun to the surprisingly large number of works that seem to anticipate exactly this premise.

akomtu• 2 months ago

That's demonic creativity.

aussieguy1234• 2 months ago

Does this tech take us one step closer to a human brain in a robot body, or some kind of simulated reality?

artursapek• 2 months ago

A nice reminder to not check the "organ donor" box at the DMV

cogogo• 2 months ago

I find it hard to believe the donors had any idea they were authorizing an experiment like this but sure hope I am wrong.

Reminds me of the Three Body Problem and sending a live brain to the cosmos because the tyranny of the rocket equation made a whole human impossible.

efitz• 2 months ago

As long as this practice is legal then I am unwilling to be an organ donor.

JimTheMan3• 2 months ago

All of these comments are making me realise that the US is an incredibly low trust environment, where people think horrific things are going to happen to them without the their/or their families consent.

And who am I to judge? Maybe that is the reality.

BalinKing2• 2 months ago

horrific things are going to happen to them without the their/or their families consent

Indeed, that is (allegedly) the case with organ donation: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/organ-transplants-dono...

Gooblebrai4• 2 months ago

I'm curious, before you knew about this article, why were you willing to be an organ donor?

croes6• 2 months ago

So the definition of being dead is an individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.

Does this mean the donor was (1) or can the "revive" after (2)?

netbioserror• 2 months ago

Ah sweet, manmade horrors beyond comprehension.

Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing

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