Still Kicking: Hundreds of Genes Still Active Up to Two Days After Death

It has become easier than ever to be declared dead. Even if your brain is still generating brain waves, even if your heart is still beating, and even if blood is still coursing through your arteries and veins, in some situations, you can be declared dead. Fortunately for most us, only about 1 percent of us will ever be declared dead under "minimal death" rules. Unfortunately for that 1 percent, they are at risk of vivisection, their bodies being cut up to provide organs for transplant before they are quite ready to leave them.

The Line Between Life and Death Blurred by the Need for Organs to Transplant

Humans have never been entirely sure when it is that other humans die. The ancient Greeks used to cut off a finger before sending a body off for cremation. If the owner of the finger flinched, that was a cut sign death had not occurred. In the 1500's, executed prisoners were used for teaching anatomy lessons to medical students. Not infrequently the anatomy professor would show a still-beating heart to his students. In the 1800's, people would not be declared dead before the doctor tried to revive them with smelling salts. And in the twentieth century, if the doctor could not hear the beating of the heart through a stethoscope, the patient was declared dead.

All of that changed in 1954 when doctors performed the first organ transplant. Except for kidneys, of which we usually have a spare, doctors can't perform transplants until the original owner of the organ is finished using it, until death. However, at death, the organ is deprived of oxygen and its condition rapidly deteriorates.

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A group of doctors known as the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death came up with the clever idea of using "brain death" as a criterion for declaring a patient dead. In many cases, the patient might be in a deep coma, but the rest of the body was still viable, just waiting to be "harvested." First, the patient is taken off life support. Then the patient just needed to show no reflexes and no responses to the doctor with no movements. Then, instead of pulling the plug, the patient is reconnected to a ventilator to keep the organs alive until they can be removed.

The problem with this approach is that it shows that the brain stem is dead, but it does not prove that the neocortex, which enables people to be conscious, is dead. It's entirely possible that thousands of organs have been snatched from living people. "Death lite" had been created for the transplant industry.

RNA Indicates that Life Continues Far Longer Than Previously Realized

Scientists have known for some time that up to 500 different genes in mice and zebrafish remain active for up to 48 hours after death. These genes, which are chains of DNA, are known to be directing the creation of RNA to make proteins that could heal damaged tissues. But what about gene activity after death in humans?

Human DNA and RNA Remain Active for Up to Twelve Hours After "Death"

Scientific studies have also found that human genes involved in making the heart beat and in healing wounds were active for up to 12 hours after death from trauma, heart attack, or suffocation.

This fact suggests that most organs for transplant are harvested while their donors are on some level still alive. It also suggests that organs most organs for transplant have to be harvested while their donors are on some level still alive. And this fact may explain why so many recipients of liver transplants develop cancer.

There are hundreds of genes that "wake up" after we stop breathing for the last time. Most of these genes were active when we a fetus inside our mother's womb. Some of these genes are associated with cancer. For many years, researchers assumed that the reason so many transplant recipients get cancer has something to do with the immunosuppressant drugs they take to prevent rejection of the transplanted organ. At least in the case of transplanted livers, it may have more to do with the transplanted organ itself. Genes in liver cells that had been "turned off" before birth are "turned on" during death, and attempt to recreate new life in the recipient, unfortunately in the form of cancer.

What are the implications of these findings? Does this mean that transplantation is a form of vivisection? Is it unethical to take organs out of a human body before all of its genes are quiet?

The discovery of gene activity after clinical death has not led to any widespread call for a moratorium on transplants. Doctors are confident that the act of harvesting organs for transplant does not result in pain to the donor. And unlike an earlier era in which people occasionally actually did arise from their coffins, or scratch and claw to get out, in modern medical care everything that can be done to extend life has been done before the donor is declared clinically dead.

For organ donors, donation is the only way that any part of them can continue live on physically after their brain has died. In another human being, the organ continues life and function. Left in the body, it only decays.

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Even while some genes are "turned on," carbon dioxide quickly builds up in the silent bloodstream. The absence of oxygen causes cells to burst open, releasing enzymes that digest not only them but their intact cellular neighbors. While human cells die, bacteria cells are very much alive. They quickly multiply to consume the dead tissue, starting just minutes after death.

In about half an hour, the force of gravity causes blood to collect at the lowest point of the body. The rest of the body turns pale. Without the ability to make energy to pump calcium ions out of their cells and into the bloodstream, muscle cells stiffen to cause rigor mortis. 

In about three days, probiotic and other bacteria in the gut cause an incredible stench as they break down proteins into sulfurous gases. In about two weeks, without embalming or refrigeration, these gases bloat the body so that it pops, something like a balloon. Within a year, without funeral preparation, in most climates, nothing is left but bone.

The only alternative to this process is continuing life through transplant. The line between life and death has been made fuzzier to make the acquisition of transplantable organs easier, but in most cases there was no possibility of a return to normal life.