/sci/ - Science & Math

Sup /sci/.
I'm looking for medicine/healthcare and biology theoretical expertise. Life support, intensive care and transplant/xenograft knowledge is what i'm looking for.

See, even when an organ donor dies( when rescucitation fails after a few tries or when no one can bother due to the patient being old), what do we do? put the body on ice, cut out the viable parts, and put the rest in a landfill or graveyard.

I assume most people don't die of massive multi-organ-failure? Why don't we salvage what we can for experimental use or just-in-case storage? Put them on partenteral nutrition with some adequate perservative drugs, or why? perhaps even tube feed them, or if someone was pretty much almost entirely dead, cut out the viable parts and graft them to another living dead?(or why not even animal?) If nothing else, atleast medical students would have something sortof living to get their random surgery skills up and going on. But the potential would be more than that, we could test stem cell and other therapy, what if someone initiates some previously unknown regenerative pathway and grows a bucket full of kidneys, two kilometers worth of spare blood vessels or a dozen of hearts or whatnot?

I do know people donate their bodies to medicine all the time, but are any preservation experiments done where the still living tissue is the subject of experiment, or are everyone so dull they only care about conservated brains nowdays?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128315.700-rat-cyborg-gets-digital-cerebellum.html?full=true
&print=true
>" But once the artificial cerebellum was connected, the rat behaved as a normal animal would, learning to connect the sound with the need to blink."

>"specific, well-organised brain parts such as the hippocampus or the visual cortex will have synthetic correlates before the end of the century."

This shit right here, neuroprostethics, is babbys first step towards immortal machine bodies.