Dead’s spirit

Loss of blood leads to death. A severely bleeding animal or human should be quickly transfused with blood to replace the lost fluid and stay alive. Otherwise, the bleeder dies.

A team of American researchers from Yale University was able to revive dead cells from a pig that died from an induced heart attack by pumping a mix of its blood, synthetic hemoglobin and an anti-clotting drug one hour after it died.

Based on the researchers’ experiment, details of which were recently published in the journal Nature, the pig’s blood circulated again and dead cells started functioning again one hour after its death.

Revived cells, including those in the heart, liver and kidney, were alive for the next six hours of the experiment, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

“What this tells us is that the demise of cells can be halted,” Nenad Sestan, the study’s senior author, told journalists, according to AFP.

Co-lead author David Andrijevic, also from Yale, told AFP the team hopes the blood infusion technique, called OrganEx, “can be used to salvage organs” for transplant, the report said. It is also applicable in resuscitating the dead, though the “revived” pig did not regain consciousness.

In another experiment, Ecuadoran bioengineer Javier Carvajal took a “dead” fungus from a splinter of an old oak barrel in 2008. The 400-year-old barrel was stored in a brewery in the San Francisco Convent in Quito, reputed to be the first such factory in Latin America that began operation in 1566.

The tiny yeast specimen, Saccharomyces cerevisiaerescatada, was dormant, like dried seeds, having deteriorated over the years. In his laboratory at the Catholic University of Ecuador, Carvajal reportedly hydrated the single-cell microorganism until its vital signs returned.

Following the recipe of the Franciscans who ran the brewery, Carvajal then used the revived yeast to recreate their ancient beer flavor at his home in 2018. He now plans to market the beer fermented with a previously dead fungus.

 WITH AFP @tribunephl_wjg

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *