In Roald Dahl’s William and Mary, the dead William’s brain, optic nerve and the eye are kept ‘alive’ in solution — the eye can ‘see’ and the brain can know what the eye is seeing. When he lived, William was a wife-abuser and now Mary took revenge by smoking a cigarette in the eye. The short story opens a scientific question: when is one really dead?

Until the 1960s, a person died when the heart stopped beating, but then came ‘Cardiopulmonary resuscitation’— CPR, which means that a still heart was not cessation of life. Now, scientists are taking it much further. Work is on to show that hours after ‘death’, brain functions can be revived. “Under appropriate conditions, certain molecular and cellular functions in the large mammalian brain may retain at least partial capacity for restoration after a prolonged post-mortem interval,” says a scientific paper on ‘Restoration of brain circulation’.

The brain stops functioning minutes after it stops receiving oxygen through blood pumped from the heart. But who is to say that if it starts receiving oxygen again after, say, a few hours, the cells will not come alive? In other words, it is possible to “treat” death. Yale University professor, Stephen Latham, who was part of a research that was able to revive brain functions of dead pigs, using a blood-infusing device that they call OrganEx, has told MIT Technology Review, that the line between life and death isn’t as clear as we once thought, and “death takes longer than we thought and at least some of the processes can be reversed.”

The brain surviving long periods of oxygen deprivation is a big breakthrough, which opens possibilities of reviving dead people with all organs intact — such as those who drowned.