“There’s a growing amount of evidence that this line between life and death is not a sharp line at all,” said University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman on CTV’s Your Morning. “It could have implications for humans.”,” Yale scientists Stefano Daniele and Zvonimir Vrselja fashioned a makeshift circulatory system in attempts to stimulate brain activity.
It took years of trial-and-error to refine the research, they added, but they eventually observed electrical activity from individual neurons. The research shows that brain cells may survive longer than thought. “There really should have been almost no activity at all,” said Bowman on Your Morning, adding that the research does not mean that the definition of brain death is invalid. It is still early days for this type of research, which has not been tested on humans.
“For now, it raises more questions related to, potentially, the validity of brain death,” he said. “It may give energy to the movement of cryopreservation and more people freezing their brains in hopes they could restore function at some point.”