NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT — Keeping the mind alive outside the body may not just be science fiction anymore.<br /><br />According to MIT Technology Review, Yale neuroscientist Nenad Sestan claims he's pioneered a way to keep animal brains alive for 36 hours after detaching them from the body.<br /><br />After obtaining more than a hundred pigs' brains from a slaughterhouse, he and his team restored circulation within four hours.<br /><br />To do so, they used a system called BrainEx, which warms artificial blood to body temperature and pumps it right into the brain.<br /><br />Despite detecting no electrical activity, and finding brain waves similar to that of a person in a coma, the individual brain cells were surprisingly healthy and capable of normal activity. So not quite conscious, but still very much alive.<br /><br />Theoretically, the researchers say the technique could work on other species, like primates or even humans.<br /><br />But before that even happens, scientists will need to talk long and hard about ethics, since this is a road that can get weird and problematic very quickly.
