Is it possible to resurrect

It raises medical hopes, but also leads to bioethical issues. At what point is an animal, or even a human, dead? Is death still the end? Yale University scientists have revived the cellular activity in 32 brains from pigs that had been slaughtered for food 4 hours earlier.

They put the brains into an apparatus in their lab and began pumping a specially designed blood substitute through the organs.

Essentially, they were still dead brains, so why does the experiment matter? It transforms ideas about how the brain dies. Until now, the belief was that death occurred quickly and irreversibly without oxygen supply. What we are showing is the process of cell death is a gradual, stepwise process.

Cornish, an American biologist who studied at the University of California Berkeley. Cornish reportedly managed to revive two dogs by rocking them back and forth to move blood around while injecting the animals with a mixture of anticoagulants and steroids.

When Cornish announced he was ready to perform his experiment on humans, a California death-row inmate, Thomas McMonigle, volunteered his body post-execution, but the State of California denied his request. Recently, a team of researchers from Yale University have been experimenting with reanimating pig brains and published their findings in April in the journal Nature.

The scientists restored brain activity and some cellular activity in pigs a few hours after the animals died in a slaughterhouse, Live Science reported. Although some brain cells began functioning again, it wasn't enough for the pigs to regain consciousness. Scientists not involved in the study told Live Science that the results throw into question what it means to be alive or brain-dead. Zombies are most certainly fake, but a few remarkable case studies suggest that some semblance of spontaneous resurrection is possible.

In , year-old woman Kelly Dwyer fell into a frozen pond while hiking alone in New Hampshire. Dwyer's heart stopped before the ambulance could reach her and her body temperature plummeted to near 60 degrees Fahrenheit 15 degrees Celsius , Popular Science reported. Dwyer had been dead for 5 hours when doctors switched off life support, and her heart spontaneously started again. As the dead would only be resurrected for a short time, usually to assist the magician with their prophecies, there were no reasons to try and preserve the corpses though.

This unimportance of preserving the deceased is also seen in early Christianity. As bodies can be remade and refleshed at the time of resurrection, it does not matter if they decompose after death. It was the development of modern embalming techniques in the 18th century that led to an association of better preserved corpses offering the best chance to one day rise from the dead and ensure the soul could be reunited with the body.

In these and other beliefs the means to resurrect the dead is firmly in the hands of the gods. But as we began to learn more about human anatomy and medicine advanced, some began to wonder if we needed to wait for the next life at all, when maybe it was possible to resurrect the dead in this one.

Early resurrection attempts were more accurately efforts to resuscitate individuals. Knowing a beating heart and breathing lungs were vital to life, physicians and other scientists searched for ways to restart these processes after death had stopped them. However, everything from tickling corpses with feathers to blowing smoke up their orifices proved unsuccessful.

But experiments, such as those of Giovanni Aldini, began to change things. Those witnessing the display understood that simple movements were different from life, yet it now seemed a real possibility that the recently dead might be brought back and debates about the potential impact, especially concerning the involvement of the soul, began.