According to the Nature journal, a team of researchers was able to partially revive the organs of pigs that had been dead for an hour. Although it is regarded as a groundbreaking experiment, it does raise some ethical concerns. The study builds on an earlier 2019 experiment in which researchers used a system called BrainEx to restore brain activity in long-expired pigs.
Piglet Mammal Species
OrganEx Experiment in Restoring Pigs' Life
The same team that conducted BrainEx used their findings to develop OrganEx, a system that aims to preserve the organs of deceased pigs. The team used OrganEx to inject a blood substitute into the pig corpses. The substitute contains anticoagulants and other compounds that prevent decomposition and cell death in the pseudo-blood. The pig organs were able to start up due to the scientists' efforts. The researchers hope their new findings will help make more potential donor organs available for transplants, which is more important than ever given the ongoing organ shortage.
"The technology has a great deal of promise for our ability to preserve organs after they're removed from a donor," Stephen Latham, study co-author and Yale bioethicist said.
According to Latham, medical personnel could preserve an organ from a deceased donor for longer periods of time by connecting it to the OrganEx system. The current methods can store donor organs for a few hours to, at best, two days.
If successful in humans, OrganEX could be a life-saving breakthrough. But it is not yet known how long the system can extend organ shelf life.
In a statement, Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, said that the press release is accurate, but it understates the significance of these discoveries. Parnia added that OrganEx could be used to save the lives of people for whom the underlying cause of death is still treatable.
The director said that it would include people who die from drowning, have heart attacks, or experience massive bleeding after trauma, and athletes who pass away suddenly from a heart defect. The OrganEx system can preserve such individuals' organs, and brain damage can be avoided hours after death.
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OrganEx Raises Ethical Concerns
The implications are mind-boggling, but it raises a number of moral issues, such as whether it is morally acceptable to use technology to resurrect someone who has already died due to such severe trauma.
Avir Mitra, the emergency medicine physician at Mount Sinai Health System, told Wired that just because someone can bring someone back doesn't mean we should.
Brendan Parent, the transplant ethics and policy researcher at NYU Grossman, responded to the study's findings in an essay published in Nature. According to him, the most recent discoveries raise a number of questions, not the least of which is whether medical and biological definitions of death will need to be revised.
On the other hand, Parnia claimed that the study shows that the social convention regarding death, i.e., as a black and white end, is not scientifically valid.
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