Nenad Sestan was working in his office one afternoon in 2016, when he heard his lab members whispering with excitement over a microscope. He realized something beyond their expectations was happening.
The researchers, at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, had found electrical activity in brains taken from dead pigs. With that shocking result, Sestan realized what had started as a side project to find ways to better preserve brain tissue for research had changed into a discovery that could redefine our understanding of life and death.
The excitement soon turned to concern, when the researchers thought they saw widespread, consistent electrical activity which can indicate consciousness( 意识 ). Sestan brought in a neurologist, who determined the readout was actually an error, but the possibility had frightened them.
Sestan kept his cool and immediately did two things: he shut down the experiment and contacted the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as a Yale bioethicist(生物伦理学家). Over the next few months, experts discussed the potential ethical implications, such as whether the brains could become conscious and whether physicians needed to reconsider the definition of brain death.
They submitted the work to Nature. But before the final paper was published, Sestan met sharp criticism from the press. Some even suggested that the researchers were engineering immortality(永生), or maintaining a room full of living brains in jars. Neither he nor his team wanted to discuss the results until the paper was out, but as their inboxes filled with concerns and anger from animal rights activists and futurists, Sestan became depressed. He felt all they could do, however, was to hold off on correcting public misunderstandings until the expert review process had run its course.
Since the paper was published in April, 2019, the team has been so busy fielding questions from the media and scientists that it hasn't performed any further experiments. Sestan wants to focus on his original questions and explore how long the brains can be maintained and whether the technology can preserve other organs.
"We want to get outside opinion before we do anything," Sestan says. "When you explore uncharted territory, you have to be extremely thoughtful."
