Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
technologyreview.com
Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
1–10 of 108 posts
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#2The horror. The horror.
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#3The horror. The horror.
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#4And what do we suppose they are experiencing? It may well be absolutely terrifying. Beyond the normal torture of factory farming.
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#5> Sestan acknowledged that surgeons at Yale had already asked him if the brain-preserving technology could have medical uses. Disembodied human brains, he said, could become guinea pigs for testing exotic cancer cures and speculative Alzheimer’s treatments too dangerous to try on the living.
> The setup, jokingly dubbed the “brain in a bucket,” would quickly raise serious ethical and legal questions if it were tried on a human.
I'm surprised this got the go-ahead, even for pigs. The process involved decapitating a pig. After the success of preserving healthy cells in a decapitated pig brain for 36 hours, the researcher quipped:
> I think a lot of people are going to start going to slaughterhouses to get heads and figure it out.
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#6That is genuinely horrifying.
I seems people can stomach anything when you’re not experimenting on humans...
A brain still a brain. If you don’t believe in a soul it seems logical to operate with the idea that as long as the brain has electrical waves propagating through it, it’s experiencing consciousness.
waves resembling normal consciousness specifically
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#7And what do we suppose they are experiencing? It may well be absolutely terrifying. Beyond the normal torture of factory farming.
Presumably nothing:
"The EEG brain activity is a flat line, but a lot of other things keep on ticking"
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#8The terrifying implications of this tech makes me shudder.
Science fiction has beaten me to considering the potential for abuse. I'm picturing Hyperion meets Brainship with some Altered Carbon thrown in. It hurts my brain even to contemplate.
Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#9Re: Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
#10This article is a great read as it scratches my science and comedic itches simultaneously.
My favorite quote: “This is probably not unique to pigs.”