Oh What Have They Done With the Brain
Remember the wacky Steve Martin film, The Man With Two Brains? A crazed neurosurgeon is in love with a disembodied brain.
When it comes to animating brains, most of us have seen on film some iteration of the Frankenstein motif. Many of us have also read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, from which these films are derived. So, the idea of a brain retaining function, or regaining function after death has been around for a long time. It's been around in the realm of conjecture. But it's not conjecture anymore. Now it is reality.
Welcome to the 21st century and Bexorg, a biomedical research company studying the human brain. Bexorg is looking not at the brains of corpses, or the brains of the living. Bexorg is studying the brains of the not-quite-dead.
One of the most horrifying articles I have read in a very long time discusses Bexorg's project of keeping brains alive after the bodies in which they have resided are gone. The researchers at Bexorg satisfy themselves with the ethics of their cyberborg-like endeavor.
In an article titled "Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing", the researchers explain their goals and their ethics. Here's a quote from the article:
Just a day ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its owner died, it sits on a cart draped in tubes that quiver as they pump liters of blood substitute and other fluids through the organ, supplying oxygen and removing waste. With most of its key functions intact but its electrical activity quenched by anesthesia, the brain hovers between life and death.
That's not an excerpt from a science fiction movie. That's science. If it seems grotesque to you, think of what the second sentence says: "after its owner has died."
Has died. Hmmm. What does that mean? There was a time when death was determined to have occurred with brain death--the absence of all activity, an irrecoverable state. It seems that time, when brain death was determinative, has passed.
If brain death isn't the measure, doesn't mark the boundary between life and death, then how do we know absolutely that someone has died? It turns out, that's a tricky question. The definition of death is a moving target.
A 2023 article in the Journal of Philosophy and Medicine discusses the sunsetting of brain death as a diagnostic measure of death. This article suggests that if doctors must wait until a brain is absolutely and irretrievably dead, gone, no longer viable, then the door is closed on almost all organ transplants.
Aha...now I understand. The definition of death is not a matter of science, or morality. It is a matter of convenience. We want those body parts. Death is an inconvenient detail.
The researchers at Bexorg satisfy themselves with the ethics of their cyberborg-like endeavor. They describe the measures taken to protect the brain. Or, rather, to protect the remnants of being that still exist in the brain. A quote from the article:
The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
There it is...consciousness. They speak with such certainty of something we don't understand. What is consciousness? How can the researchers be certain that consciousness is absent when we don't really know what consciousness is?
Christoff Koch, a preeminent neuroscientist who has worked at MIT, the Max-Planck Institute and Caltech, challenges the traditional notion that consciousness is derived exclusively from the brain. A 2026 article in Science Daily summarizes the thrust of Koch's theory:
Koch's talk focuses on three major areas where current explanations fall short. First is the difficulty of fully reducing conscious experience to physical brain mechanisms. Second are questions raised by modern physics about what can truly be considered "real." Third is the persistence of unusual experiences, such as near-death experiences, mystical states, or episodes of terminal lucidity, which do not fit neatly into existing scientific frameworks.
So what are we left with after thinking about the nebulous notions surrounding death and consciousness? Researchers at the biomedical company Bexorg are working on brains, brains that are still alive. The researchers are running chemicals through brains, experimenting with the effects of different exposures on those brains. These scientists are confident that the people who belonged to the brains no longer have awareness, no longer are conscious. What arrogance. Those researchers don't know anything of the sort. They don't know if someone is dead, or aware.
The scientists need a brain. They take that brain from someone who may be dead. They experiment, go forth, and work blindly on the remnants of what may be (likely is) an aware entity.
The article describing Bexorg's work goes on to explain that families approve of the brain research. A quote from the article:
once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
I think this approval might be characterized as informed consent. The question looms large, though, how informed is the consent? How much do families know about the uncertain nature of awareness? How informed are families about the 'death' of their loved one? One might reasonably ask, as one might in most medical informed consent procedures, what does the family understand? Can consent truly be informed when the matter is so complex?
Studies have shown that patients' understanding of what they are consenting to is often limited. A 2021 article published by Springer Links, The reality of informed consent: empirical studies on patient comprehension—systematic review, concludes:
We found that participants’ comprehension of fundamental informed consent components was low, which is worrisome because this lack of understanding undermines an ethical pillar of contemporary clinical trial practice and questions the viability of patients’ full and genuine involvement in a shared medical decision-making process.
Organ transplants save lives, and improve lives. That is true. But organ transplantation is also a business. A lot of money is made by doctors and institutions when an organ is transplanted. Also, Bexorg is experimenting to find new drugs, new ways of treating neurodegenerative diseases. That's a wonderful goal, but when a drug is discovered, who will make money from it?
Bexorg is a private company, funded by venture capitalists.. Think about all those brains, donated with good will:
People somewhere are going to make money from these experiments, from the good will and good intentions of the families. People are going to make money off the possible suffering that disembodied brains might suffer.
I don't know about you. The organ donor business is a bit too morally muddy for me. I'm keeping my brain.
Thank you for reading my blog.
Peace and health to all.
Hive on!
Here are a few of the articles I consulted in researching this article. There were many more but I lose track:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10501183/
Thank you for reading my blog. Health and peace to all.
Hive on!
It's a dark path this one, keep brains "alive" when one is "dead" has some ethics doubts, you don't know if the person is still suffering with the neural transmitters
Indeed it is a dark path. I would have thought this was something I'd find in The Onion, satire. But it's real. Horrifying to me.