The heart stops beating. Breathing and blood circulation are interrupted, biochemical cascades in the living organism slow down, cells die. Such is the death of an organism, a process that is certainly progressive, but whose consequences very quickly become irreversible. Irreversible, really? Techniques exist to compensate for the lack of circulation in the patient for the time it takes to heal or, if salvage is not possible, to best preserve the patient’s organs so they can become functional transplants. But they have their limits and must be administered within minutes of cardiac arrest or the damage is too great.
A team at Yale University has just succeeded in reversing or even reversing cellular processes an hour after death. Work has been done on a pig that won’t wake the dead tomorrow, but is already showing promise…
Source: Le Figaro
