It’s generally accepted that once an animal’s heart stops beating death is imminent if not immediate. Absent some pretty quick intervention to restart the heart or keep it pumping artificially, irreversible death of the brain and other organs will follow in a matter of minutes. But scientists at Yale performed an experiment that suggests the line between life and death may be more gray than it currently appears. The thrust of this experiment is that scientists were able to partially revive the organs of dead pigs a full hour after their hearts had stopped beating.

The latest experiments are “stunning”, says Nita Farahany, a neuroethicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Although this study is preliminary, she says it suggests that some perceived limitations of the human body might be overcome in time…

The authors warn that these results do not show that the pigs have somehow been reanimated after death, especially in the absence of electrical activity in the brain. “We made cells do something they weren’t able to do” when the animals were dead, says team member Zvonimir Vrselja, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “We’re not saying it’s clinically relevant, but it’s moving in the right direction.”

It’s true that the experiment didn’t fully revive the dead pigs but the full description of the experiment suggests they did revive at least some cells in various organs. This description of how the experiment was conducted is a bit Frankenstein so you may want to skip this if you’re easily made queasy.

Sestan’s team obtained pigs from a local farm breeder and monitored them for three days before sedating them, putting them on a ventilator and inducing cardiac arrest by delivering a shock to their hearts. After confirming a lack of pulse, they removed the animals from the ventilators. One hour after the pigs died, they restarted the ventilators and anaesthesia. Some of the pigs were then attached to the OrganEx system; others received no treatment or were hooked up to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine, which some hospitals use in a last-ditch effort to supply oxygen to and remove carbon dioxide from the body.

After six hours, the researchers noticed that circulation had restarted much more effectively in pigs that received the OrganEx solution than in those that received ECMO or no treatment. Oxygen had begun flowing to tissues all over the bodies of the OrganEx animals, and a heart scan detected some electrical activity and contraction…

The researchers also noticed that the livers of the OrganEx pigs produced much more of a protein called albumin than did the livers of pigs in the other groups. And cells in each of the vital organs of the OrganEx pigs responded to glucose much more than did the animals in the other groups, suggesting that the treatment had kick-started metabolism.

Some of the OrganEx pigs even started to move again:

The pigs treated with OrganEx startled researchers. During experimentation, the dead pigs’ heads and necks moved under their own power. The animals remained under heavy anesthesia.

“We can say that animals were not conscious during these moments and we don’t have enough information to speculate why they moved,” Sestan said.

The researchers do view the neck jerk is an indication some muscle function was restored after death.

The scientists know the pigs weren’t conscious because, as mentioned above, when they restarted ventilators they also used anesthesia to ensure their brains wouldn’t revive. The description in Nature suggests the impulses causing the pigs to move may have come from the spinal cord instead of the brain. Whatever the case, it’s a further indication that the OrganEx pigs weren’t dead in the same way that the control group was.

All of this really does seem like the set up for a new Frankenstein film or maybe a zombie apocalypse movie. But this could also have some eventual repercussions that aren’t purely horror. For instance, what if this process develops and eventually helps extend the amount of time doctors have to revive patients after their hearts stop. I’m not suggesting a full hour after death will ever happen but what if the window could be expanded to 15 or 20 minutes instead of 8. That could be a big different for a lot of people.