The Rise and Fall of Animal Experimentation by Richard J. Miller

Author:Richard J. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nowadays, a unique vital spirit seems like a simplistic idea; life is not just about one thing like adding yeast to bread and getting it to rise. We would certainly say from our modern perspective that life isn’t a single process but a set of interlocking systems of great complexity. But understanding exactly how this works in practice has eluded us.

Of course, our general ignorance as to what precisely contributes to and sustains life has not stopped us speculating about it, attempting to produce it, and, from the very beginning of our efforts, worrying about the potential consequences of doing so. Writing at a time when the winds of change were carrying the concepts of Romantic biology throughout the world, Mary Shelley warned us about the possible insanity that might result from our attempts, and her message has been often repeated in stories like H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator” down to the present day. For Herbert West, the secret wasn’t electricity, but a powerful fluid extracted from freshly disinterred corpses that could be injected into the dead. They came back to life but were horribly changed.

Even the most up-to-date thinking in the sciences and the humanities struggles to define what death actually entails and how irreversible a state it really is. In most countries, a person can be legally declared dead if they show irreversible loss of all brain functions (brain death) or irreversible loss of all circulatory cardiovascular functions (circulatory death). This implies, of course, that such things cannot be reliably restored. Most people would probably agree that this seems reasonable; if the brain and heart show no activity, then what remains?

Surprisingly, the contemporary scientific answer to this question would be “quite a lot.” The brain, for example, the most fragile of all our organs, requires a great deal of energy to work properly, and even a few minutes without oxygen, something that might occur during a stroke, usually leaves the brain “irreversibly” damaged, producing lifelong problems with movement and cognition. Indeed, a serious stroke is frequently fatal. In such cases the brain ceases to function and that is that; there is no going back. That is what most of us believe. Frankenstein is a nice story, but it’s just a story. In 2019, this conclusion was tested by a group of researchers at Yale University and published in the journal Nature.1 They took the brains from 300 pigs that had been slaughtered and waited four hours. They then hooked the brains up to a perfusion system containing a nutrient-rich solution called BrainEx. The result of this procedure was remarkable. The investigators observed that many brain functions were restored. Blood vessels in the brain could be made to dilate and contract like a normal brain and so on. When nerve cells in slices of the treated brains were examined in a laboratory, they were able to fire action potentials, the electrical signals that are fundamental to a functioning brain. On the other hand, brains that hadn’t been perfused with Brainex showed no activity of any kind.

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