Biggest science news in international media today is that a group of scientists based at the Department of Neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine, managed to restore some of the brain functions of slaughtered pigs several hours after the pigs’ deaths. The results of the study were published today in Nature scientific journal. And while everyone loves a real-life Frankenstein story before bedtime, TCN would not be covering this somewhat grizzly topic if the main author of the study wasn’t a Croatian scientist, Professor Nenad Šestan!
And not only that, but three other authors of the article are easily identifiable as having Croatian heritage, and a quick internet search confirms that they’ve all started their professional careers in Zagreb: Zvonimir Vrselja, Mario Škarica and Mihovil Pletikos. If you’re surprised by the seemingly high number of Croatian neuroscientists at Yale, you really shouldn’t be, as Professor Paško Rakić, one of the leading neuroscientists of his time, has been a member of Yale faculty for over 40 years! (yes, he is 86 now and still working at Yale).
Rakić was instrumental in getting Šestan a position at Yale when he was a young, very successful and ambitious scientist, and his work in the past decade has proven Rakić right, that it was a good idea to give him the opportunity to flourish at one of the world’s leading universities and research facilities.
As for the results published in Nature today, we mentioned that it made the rounds in major international media, so let’s just mention some: NPR, Vox, WaPo, CNN and many, many others. To help put those terrified of the news a bit at ease, the Yale research team is careful to say that none of the brains regained the kind of organized electrical activity associated with consciousness or awareness. However, the results the team lead by a Croatian scientist published showed that a surprising amount of cellular function was either preserved or restored.
