What is physical death? Take a moment and think about that.

Over the ages, throughout history, what has been the primary, agreed upon sign that somebody is dead?

OK, now let's have a look at a couple headlines:

Pig organ transplants inch closer with testing in the dead

Testing pig heart transplants in donated bodies (This is the video embedded in above story).

Genetically modified pig heart transplanted into deceased recipient, researchers say

On the face of it, this might seem a big macabre to some, but generally acceptable and even a good use of dead bodies, right?

Except they weren't fucking dead! They were brain dead. Their hearts were still beating, blood still flowing through their veins, lungs still processing oxygen.

There's so much here to unpack, but for me, the first thing that comes to mind is that it appears that the medical community is trying to redefine death for purposes of experimentation. That in itself is beyond disturbing.

Secondly, there's the obvious misleading language in the headlines from two major news sources.

If the experts are successful in redefining death so that dead people can still have beating hearts, where does that take us?

Here are a couple quotes that indicate where this is headed, which appears to be longer experimentation on 'dead' bodies, and this type of experimentation becoming more important, more common, and going on for years.

They serve as an important sort of stepping stone,” said Klassen, who wonders if researchers next might consider tracking the organs for a week or so in a donated body rather than just three days.

And presumably after a week, a month. Why not a year?

The next two quotes are from the video:

This is not a one and done situation. This is going to be years of learning...

The reason to do this ... one is, you never learn from one procedure, and two, by giving us a more controlled setting, we can study this in much more detail and in much more depth than would be otherwise possible in a human because you can't keep subjecting a live human to repeated procedures at all hours of the day.

Holy shit. I don't know where to start with that second quote.

more controlled setting = a body that is still full of life but can't put up any resistance

you can't keep subjecting a live human to repeated procedures at all hours of the day = they are poking and prodding and cutting up this person all hours of the day. Also, again, they're talking about this person as if they're physically dead.

Finally, another ethical question. How did they stop the heart beating? They stopped the experiment after three days, meaning they killed the heart. You can't do that with a brain dead person. You can't stop their heart. You can pump them full of morphine and let them die naturally, but you can't purposefully kill them, but the inference here is that that's what they did.

This is scary shit and it's being slid into our lives without discussion.