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Health

The radical treatments bringing people back from the brink of death

Reperfusion technologies that can reanimate human brains are raising the possibility that death could be a reversible condition, even hours after a cardiac arrest

By Helen Thomson

26 November 2024

×îÐÂÂé¶¹ÊÓÆµ. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Kolotuschenko/iStock

The severed pig’s head had come from the local abattoir. It would have typically been discarded, but , a neuroscientist at Yale School of Medicine, and his colleagues had other ideas. Four hours after this particular animal was decapitated, they removed its brain from its skull. They then connected the dead brain’s vasculature to tubes that would pump a special cocktail of preserving agents into its blood vessels and turned the perfusion machine on.

That was when . The cortex turned from grey to pink. Brain cells started producing proteins. Neurons juddered back to life, displaying…

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