By: Derek Chang

On August 4, 2022, scientists managed to semi-revive some pigs hours after the OrganEx system was used on them.

OrganEx is a system that looks like those heart-helping things in emergency hospitals. It has been mixed with many chemicals that help cells become healthy again.

The OrganEx system had the pigs vital cellular functions like the heart and liver revived, and blood circulation restored and oxygenated. Involuntary movements in the head and neck were also observed.

The finding that the pigs could be revived also caused some problems, though. Death became something that people were not sure of its definition anymore, as the dead pigs became living again.

The OrganEx-treated organs were very similar to normal functioning organs. Zvonimir Vrselja, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine, said, “Under the microscope, it was difficult to tell the difference between a healthy organ and one which had been treated with OrganEx technology after death.”

Interestingly, more dead pigs were put on another system called ECMO, which helps oxygenate blood, but it didn’t work. The pigs just got stiff with rigor mortis, unlike the OrganEx pigs.

Rigor mortis is when body muscles become stiff because of a chemical change in their myofibrils. It is usually used to know how long ago the body died and if the body had been moved somehow after death.

Scientists now also believe that death happens over time instead of at an instant.

Nathan Emmerich, a bioethicist from Australian National University, said, “What research like this suggests is that death does not occur at a particular time.” The reason people die is because the things keeping organs alive slowly start to get damaged, and the OrganEx system repaired the damage.