The challenge is not to resuscitate people but to improve the quality of organs, for transplants and therefore the quality of survival afterwards. The feat is to have succeeded, one hour after the death of the pigs, in restarting the blood circulation and bringing the cells back to life. Concretely, researchers at Yale University caused a heart attack in animals (obviously anesthetized), the blood no longer circulated, the cells, without oxygen, died. Beforehand, they had taken the blood of the animal which they reoxygenated as is already sometimes done in humans. Except that in addition, and this is the novelty of the system called “OrganEx”, they added a cocktail of 13 drugs (synthetic hemoglobin, anticoagulants and others). When they perfused the animal, the blood began to flow again, waking up many cells including vital organs like the heart, liver and kidneys.
It “lasted” six hours, but what’s amazing is that according to co-author David Andrijevic of this study published in Nature : under the microscope, they now have difficulty in differentiating the normal organ from that treated post-mortem. In other words, they canceled and even reversed the cellular process.
There is a lot of hope among resuscitators and transplant specialists and lots of questions. “It confirms that we can improve the quality of grafts to save lives” explains Professor Djillali Annane, the chief resuscitator of the Garches hospital. He recalls that a team of Pasteur in Paris had advanced a few years ago on the awakening of a muscle. But here, the heart and the lungs are what we lack the most for transplants since by definition, there is never a living donor, unlike the liver or the kidney.
This obviously raises ethical questions of two kinds. That, recurrent of the use of the animal in these experiments because the pigs had an unexplained movement of the neck when they were injected with the cocktail. And then existential questions about life and death. In a commentary published in parallel by the journal Naturea great New York bioethicist, Brendan Parent, points out the risk “that the resuscitated people are then unable to come out of a state of life support.”
“Death is now a treatable and reversible biological process hours later.”
Sam Parnia, British bioethicist
Professor Annane (from Garches) believes that the scientific community is divided 50/50. He wants us to continue this work, a burden for society, he says, “to wonder: how far she wants us to go in this resurrection of fabrics.” He recalls that following the much decried cloning of the sheep Dolly, very quickly the whole world had noted that we would not necessarily clone the human being.