Good day all, this is the Angry Systems Administrator. The other day, I saw a story regarding bringing back the dead. My first thought was, “Oh great! Here comes the Zombie Apocalypse!”
instead, it looks like scientists are trying to restore brain dead people. Here are the details from Vocative:
No, it’s not science fiction. Indian researchers are embarking on a study to try to literally revive the brain dead. A person is both medically and legally dead when the brain stops working, an irreversible condition known as brain death. Now, if one group of scientists have their way, the definition of death might get a bit more complicated—they are kicking off a clinical trial in which they will try to regenerate a portion of the brain in 20 people with brain death.
The problem I see at this point, when someone is brain dead, their brains are basically…dead. The damage is so severe that even if they could regenerate it, the person who was there is long gone. Basically, you would wake up someone with the mind of a newborn.
The next section of the story involves who is doing this, Bioquark and Revita Life Sciences of India, and some of the drugs and other stuff they’re going to use. Feel free to hop over and read that if it interests you. Me, I’m more interested in the potential Zombies.
In this first trial of the Reanima project, the researchers are simply looking to see if a drug can prompt the “dead” brain to regrow functional neurons that could help restore the brain function. The study will take place in India.
So when we hear reports of the dead walking from India, we can quickly narrow down the cause? Great! According to the story, they have 20 brain dead subjects they can experiment on. It will take about 6 weeks with injections into the brainstem.
At the end of the trial, the researchers will take MRIs of the brainstem to see if there’s been any promising growth in the brain—“Not just willy nilly nervous tissue, but actual structural growth,” Ira Pastor, the CEO of Bioquark, told Vocativ.
Wait, what? The brainstem controls the body’s functions. The higher brain functions are in a different area altogether, and those are the areas that hold things like thought and suppress the desire to eat brains.
The researchers are keeping their goals modest for this initial trial. “We don’t believe people will be independently breathing after six weeks,” Pastor says. Eventually, though, they would like to get to the point where brain dead patients can progress gradually through levels of increasing consciousness—through vegetative state, then coma, then minimally conscious state—until they can simply wake up.
And if they wake up and start eating your brains?
The one community he has gotten pushback from, though, are people worried that Bioquark is going to create real-life zombies like those in “The Walking Dead.” “I’m amazed at how people think will start the zombie apocalypse,” he says, admitting that if he truly had the technology to raise the dead from the ground, it would be pretty cool, despite their hankering for human flesh.
If the trials go well and hint at a future in which brain dead people can be reanimated, the research will bring up a number of philosophical and ethical questions.
Gee, ya think?
For example: if a person is revived using stem cells to grow new neurons, is she still the same person she was before she was brain dead?
That’s an interesting question. For example, what if the memory section of the brain isn’t damaged, or only lightly damaged? Will the Zombie have the memories of the person he or she was?
Some neuroscientists and philosophers believe the answer will be no, that it’s the wiring that makes us who we are, no more than the summation of links and connections between brain cells.
So in reality, they don’t have a clue.
The definition of death, too, would have to change. As Wired pointed out in 2014, experts still debate exactly how to define death.
Well, if they are rotting and smell bad, I would say it’s safe to say, they’re dead.
If Pastor’s projections are correct, these issues will enter our national conversation sooner than later. This trial may just be the first step.
“It’s not going to be decades,” Pastor says. “With everything going right, this is something that could happen sooner than we think. But it’s not going to happen in six weeks.”
If we get any news in the next 6 weeks, it will probably be along the lines of screaming in terror with lots of running.
[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nc2Ug7PSxo’]
Thank you
~The Angry Systems Administrator~
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