Frans Vinberg, a vision scientist at the University of Utah, Anne Hanneken, a retina surgeon at Scripps Research, and their colleagues were motivated to investigate whether retinal epithelium could also be restored postmortem after Yale University researchers demonstrated in 2019 that basic electrical activity could be restored in pig brains after death.If the donor eyes were retrieved less than 20 minutes after death, they were able to restore electrical activity in the light-sensitive cells known as photoreceptors as well as in the neurons these cells connect to.The retina serves as a window to the brain, therefore if communication can be recovered in the retina after death, it raises the possibility of recovering communication in the brain, according to Hanneken.They believe that by doing this, more people will check the appropriate box on their driver’s license and agree to donate tissue for scientific research.Sources:Abbas, F., Becker, S., Jones, B. W., Mure, L. S., Panda, S., Hanneken, A., & Vinberg, F. (2022)."