36 | New Scientist | 23 November 2019designed to make them dilate and contract.
Cells began to regain their metabolism.
Changes to the structure of the brain thought
to lead to irretrievable damage reverted to
normal. And, astonishingly, when stimulated
by an electrode, neurons responded by
creating action potentials, the electrical
activity by which brain cells communicate.
Although the team didn’t see any signs
of consciousness or pain, these kinds of
technologies have serious implications for
our definition of death. If the procedures could
be done in humans, people who are declared
brain dead by our current standards might
be resuscitated. At the very least, this would
exacerbate the tension between doctors trying
to save the life of an individual, and those
wanting to use their organs to save others.
The notion of brain resuscitation is being
explored elsewhere too. Accidents involving
people falling into freezing lakes reveal that the
brain can withstand a lack of oxygen much
more readily at low temperatures. At UPMC
Presbyterian hospital in Pennsylvania, doctors
aim to replicate this phenomenon, putting
people with severe wounds into a state ofTO
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suspended animation, providing more time to
save their lives. The trial will replace patients’
blood with cold saline, flushing it through
the heart and into the brain. With no blood
circulating and no brain activity, they will
be clinically dead for 2 hours during which
surgeons will try to fix their injuries before
slowly warming them again with fresh blood.
“The brain isn’t like the heart,” says Greg Fahy
at 21st Century Medicine, a biotech company
in California. “It doesn’t need a jump-start.
If you restore normal conditions, that gives
it the opportunity to start again.”
As if that wasn’t eerie enough, consider
this. Hundreds of people across the world
are stored in giant metal tubes full of liquid
nitrogen, being cryogenically frozen. “Frozen”
is actually a misnomer – most have had all
the liquid in their bodies replaced with a kind
of de-icer, which is then cooled rapidly to a
crystal-like state. In theory, this process, called
vitrification, maintains cells in the state they
were in at the moment before cooling, while
also stopping ice crystals forming, which can
puncture tissues and destroy delicate brain
cells. Whether these people are alive or dead“HELLO, I’m Scout. Want
to play?” My daughter has
a toy dog that yaps and comes
out with a few stock phrases.
When it gets too annoying,
I don’t hesitate to turn it off.
I sometimes think about
“losing” Scout, or even
“accidentally” breaking it,
acts that would be cruel to
my daughter but not to the
dog. But for how much longer
will this be true? Technology
is getting better all the time.
What will it mean if we
can create a robot that is
considered alive? If I find
myself annoyed by such
a robot, would it be wrong
to turn it off? Would thatCan you kill a robot?
If we can create a robot that’s “alive”,
will we kill it when we turn it off,
wonders Rowan HooperNot barking:
there are
good reasons
to celebrate
a “dead”
robotic dogservices for “dead” Aibo robot
dogs. In Japan, inanimate
objects are considered to
have a spirit or soul, so it
makes sense for Aibos to be
commemorated in this way.
Such sentiments aren’t
confined to Japan, however.
Julie Carpenter, a roboticist in
San Francisco has written about
bomb disposal soldiers who
form strong attachments to
their robots, naming them
and even sleeping curled up
next to them in their Humvees.be the same as killing it?
The answer isn’t obvious.
Many people already regard
robots more sensitively than
I do. At Kofukuji temple
(pictured) near Tokyo, Japan,
Buddhist priests conduct“I know soldiers have written
to military robot manufacturers
requesting they fix and return
the same robot because it’s
part of their team,” she says.
This is attachment. You
might feel the same about
an old coat, yet no one will
argue that a coat is sentient.
Even machines that seem
very human-like, such as
Alexa, Siri and those capable
of face or voice recognition,
have internal states that are
completely different from
those of humans or animals.
“They have no consciousness,
no awareness, no emotions,
no attachments,” says
Bernd Stahl of De Montfort
University, UK. “Speaking of
the ‘death’ of a robot is thus
a metaphor similar to the
‘death’ of your car or phone
when they stop functioning.”
Yes, at the moment it is
a metaphor. But it is feasible
that we will one day make“ Earlier this year,
a team managed
to revive pig
brains hours
after death”