Bringing the dead back to life is such a prevalent theme in science fiction, but can it be done with actual science? Nenad Sestan of Yale's Neuroscience department explored the possibility of bringing dead brains back to life in his experiments, as Matthew Shaer details for the New York Times:
When I met with Sestan this spring, at his lab in New Haven, he took great care to stress that he was far from the only scientist to have noticed the phenomenon. “Lots of people knew this,” he said. “Lots and lots.” And yet he seems to have been one of the few to take these findings and push them forward: If you could restore activity to individual post-mortem brain cells, he reasoned to himself, what was to stop you from restoring activity to entire slices of post-mortem brain?
In the course of his research, Sestan, an expert in developmental neurobiology, regularly ordered slices of animal and human brain tissue from various brain banks, which shipped the specimens to Yale in coolers full of ice. Sometimes the tissue arrived within three or four hours of the donor’s death. Sometimes it took more than a day. Still, Sestan and his team were able to culture, or grow, active cells from that tissue — tissue that was, for all practical purposes, entirely dead. In the right circumstances, they could actually keep the cells alive for several weeks at a stretch.
Sestan's research does not actually focus on the revival of dead beings, but on the research of cellular restoration, as he told Shaer:
If the path to cellular restoration really did lie in the perfusion of a whole brain, his experiment would be entering entirely unexplored territory. “It’s kind of amazing, considering everything that came later, but that was the origin,” Sestan told me. “We didn’t want to restart life, you know?”
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