A U.S.company is on the brink of bringing back the dead. But is it a good idea?

“Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive... It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!”

Dr Frankenstein’s famous line from the 1931 classic, “Frankenstein,”is so often quoted and parodied that it has become a bit of a cliché. While the line doesn’t appear in the original Mary Shelley text, the message is the same. Bad things happen when humans play God. Victor Frankenstein suffered for his curiosity; his experiments were a transgression on the natural order and he lost everyone he loved for his crime.

A modern take on reanimating the dead belongs to popular fare like “Walking Dead,”“Z Nation,”and “ReAnimator.”We all know the story — a well-intentioned scientist invents a cure for a debilitating/life-threatening disease. Humans who receive the treatment become mindless zombies who go on to infect the rest of the populace. It’s always a joyful romp for the surviving humans who usually devour each other before the zombies even get a chance. Still, the message is the same — science is dangerous and we should be careful mucking around with that which we don’t understand.

Fans of the genre might just get the chance to see this scenario play out in real life.

Philadelphia-based Bioquark, a biotech company that specializes in regenerative therapies, has won approval to conduct experiments on “living cadavers”in an attempt to bring them out of heretofore irreversible comas. “Living cadaver”is a doctor’s way of describing a patient whose brain function has ceased, but the rest of the body remains viable. The central nervous system of these patients no longer works and the bodies are kept alive on life support.

Despite eerie similarities, this isn’t the first step towards the zombie apocalypse (we hope), but rather the first step in the “eventual reversal of death,”according to Bioquark CEO Ira Pastor.

“In addition to the “reversing death” theme that has everyone excited, this type of regeneration work revives some ethical arguments.”

After severe damage to the brain stem, the central nervous system in humans no longer functions and has no way of repairing itself. The heart, lungs, and all the whirring and buzzing that your body usually does on its own no longer occur. This person is dead, albeit with living organs, ideal for transplantation. Pastor points out that while we lack the ability to recover CNS function, there are “a range of non-human organisms [that] can repair, regenerate, and remodel substantial portions of their brain and brain stem even after critical, life-threatening trauma.”

Using stem cells taken from the patient and a range of neurological stimulation techniques, Pastor and his team will attempt to mimic what is already possible in nature.

But don’t get too excited just yet. The project is still in its early stages, currently seeking 20 “volunteers”to participate in the study. Early developments are expected to be small, but significant.

“We hope to see results within the first two-to-three months,”states Pastor on Bioquark’s ReAnima website. “A positive initial result being a functional, regenerative event upwards at the intersection of the upper spinal cord (the highest part still “alive”in a living cadaver subject) and the lowest region of the brain stem.”

Of course, many folks are asking “What comes next?”after complete reanimation. While a full recovery in such patients is indeed a long term vision of ours and a possibility that we foresee with continued work along this path, it is not the core focus or primary end point of this first study — but it is, of course, a bridge to that eventuality,”Pastor told Penthouse.

This research is not without its critics — the prospect of bringing back the dead has some Christian authors and commentators worried. Documentarian Tom Hornhas been researching and writing about transhumanism (the belief that technology will allow humans to transcend their natural limitations) for 20 years. He is particularly concerned with Pastor’s question: “What if the body had a reset button?”

But what if when we hit that button, we lose all of its previously stored information?

If the brain is damaged and the patient is clinically dead — what happens to his soul, if there is such a thing? If we regenerate the damaged brain, will the recovered person be the same as before? What happens to all the thoughts, memories, experiences, and feelings that were stored in the brain before it was damaged? Will they come back? Or will the person on the operating table return as a “changed”individual?

“Sure, immortality or long-lasting life sounds great, but imagine a world where Saddam Hussein or Hitler Is able to live forever.”

“These are the many questions philosophers and theologians have debated since the dawn of time, but in the Bible only mankind is described as having God’s breath breathed into them at the moment of their creation,”Horn said to World News Daily. “For conservative Christians, this should be a major point of debate regarding the ‘ethics’ of bringing people back from the dead.”

Religious beliefs aside, there is a big unknown in regenerating brain activity. There is no certainty that the revived patient will be the same, that his brain will work the way it did before the injury.

One view is that we are a brain in a box — 100 billion neurons and trillions of connections buzzing inside our skulls. Neuroscientists call this the “connectome-centric”view and it holds that if we were to remove our brains and somehow keep them alive, what we call our minds — , experiences, opinions, etc. — would all be preserved.

The ReAnima project is banking on this not being the case.

“Based on several factors, Bioquark is placing our bets that the human mind is much more than the ‘connectome’ and that memory will be a recoverable commodity over time,”Pastor says.

He backs this statement by pointing again to nature, where animals with regenerated neurons can remember things previously learned.

In addition to the “reversing death”theme that has everyone excited, this type of regeneration work revives some ethical arguments. Chronic degenerative central nervous system conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, and Multiple Sclerosis as well as acute conditions like severe head trauma and spinal cord injury are all currently incurable conditions that could benefit from regenerative therapies, according

to Pastor.

“In 2016, we have no cures for any of these horrific conditions despite the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on traditional drug development every year.

Instead of modelling the program off of the traditional “single magic bullet”drug mindset that permeates the pharmaceutical industry, we are instead taking a multi-faceted approach combining biologic regenerative tools with other existing medical devices — all of which allows us to mimic what goes on in nature.”

For some, there are other reasons to be excited about this research.

Reversing death could be the first step to eradicating it all together.

From alchemists looking for the elixir of life to recent developments in molecular biology that seek to halt the aging process, the holy grail of immortality has always been a pursuit of humans, desperate to prevent the inevitability of death.

And depending on who you are, this is either very exciting or incredibly worrying. Imagine a technological utopia, where disease no longer kills, aging is halted and death undone. Such is the world as envisioned by Transhumanists, who are unashamedly optimistic about the potential for science and technology to improve our lives.

The obvious risks are there — think again to Doctor Frankenstein: tamper with the laws of nature and play God; you may end up paying a costly price.

Leandro Brun, a member of Australia’s Transhumanism Party, doesn’t hold such reservations.

“I don’t see it as playing God; I see it as a little 4-year-old kid that’s discovering how plants grow or how butterflies or animals move for the very first time &mdash it’s an intellectual discovery.”

Critics of transhumanism are not so optimistic. There are considerations to take into account before diving into the deep end. Who will control this technology? Who decides which deaths to reverse? If the wealthy elite are the only ones with access to life-extending technology — or if they’re able to make themselves stronger or more intelligent — could this lead to even greater inequality between the “haves”and the “have-nots”? Sure, immortality or long-lasting life sounds great, but imagine a world where Saddam Hussein or Hitler were able to live forever. It’s a Pandora’s Box scenario that we must think through carefully — because once opened, there’s no going back.

Brun remains optimistic that collaboration and an open source approach will keep those pesky billionaires in check and provide access to life-enhancing tech for all echelons of the pecking order.

“There’s always going to be people profiteering and using [technology] for less than altruistic means,”he says.

“We need to be responsible citizens and instead of censoring this information or monopolizing technology or an idea, I think that a proven solution is open communication, open source, and open data. As long as the information is out there, someone will go and build it.”

Renowned bioethicist and Professor of Law and Medicine at McGill University, Margaret Somerville, does not share the same hopeful view of life-extending technology. In correspondence with Penthouse, Somerville criticized Transhumanists as being “blind to the risks and harms involved.”She argues that a techno-utopian vision for the world is a danger to humanity.

“…not just at the physical level but also the metaphysical level,”she says, “arm to our values, our sense of personal identity. We are all equal which likewise is not possible if we are designed–the designee is not equal to the designer.”

The potential risk of increasing inequality and the inability of society to cope with “superhumans”outweigh any possible benefits that Transhumanists propose, Somerville argues.

“The dangers…range from injustice — the wealthy have access [that] the poor do not — to prolonging debility, to having institutions not designed for that reality–healthcare systems, retirement funds, young people unable to find work and so on — to having four generations willing and able to be in charge instead of one.”

With research on reversing death already underway, we may have no choice but to face a reality where augmented humans are commonplace. Indeed, military scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Agency or DARPA, have declared genetically-engineered supersoldiers to be the vanguard of the next arms race. Cambridge gerontologist Aubrey de Grey controversially claimed that the first immortal humans have already been born.

At this point, with research already commencing on reversing death, the idea of superhumans, able to live for extended periods — or even forever — is slowly becoming a reality, whether we like it or not.