I will be removing my organ donor status. This is horrifying.
Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
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Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#12Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.
Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#13Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
From the article:
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#14I will be removing my organ donor status. This is horrifying.
It looks like the families have to agree to do this, before your brain can be donated:
> Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#15What the fuck? This is beyond the pale.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#16This is legal but I can't legally pay another adult for sex or take drugs that could harm me? And there are many restrictions on gambling. It's weird how some morals are legislated but not others.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#17This makes me feel physically ill. It's like something straight out of a sci-fi dystopia, how did this get approved? Who determined that reinjecting biological activity into a human brain is definitely not some form of reanimation? If they're using heavy sedation to prevent electrical activity, is that not tacit admission they're not 100% sure that consciousness might return otherwise? How did this pass ethics review, or did they even bother?
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#18Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#19Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.
IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.
Re: Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
#20The obvious question I would have asked: given the concern that this may not be ethical if the brains are still “alive” AND the concern that a brain separated from the body probably doesn’t function these same, why wouldn’t we test things in living monkeys (instead of mice)???
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???