Natural Science Forum / Biology / Biology / November 2004

You can take cells, tissues, and organs from a large number of species
and keep them alive for some substantial length of time in artificial
culture.  However, the more complex the tissue and organ, the greater
the difficulty and the shorter the length of time you can keep things
alive.  You can culture certain types of cells indefinitely.  However,
the conditions required are quite stringent -- sterile conditions,
absolutely pure water to make rather complex culture solutions (simple
Ringer's solution is inadequate).  Hearts can be kept alive for
varying lengths of time -- a frog heart can beat for minutes (easy) to
hours (rather more difficult).  A turtle heart can continue to beat
even for days.  However using vertebrate animals simply for the
purpose you describe is a terrible waste and is considered unethical
by every scientific body and illegal by many jurisdictions.

There is no chance of reviving a heart from a butcher's shop.  You
must get it at the time of slaughter and even then would have a
problem making sure it was fresh enough and handled and dissected
properly to allow it to survive even a short time.  You can do all
sorts of interesting biology with butcher shop specimens.  You can use
the tissue for all sorts of enzyme work -- these often stay active for
some substantial length of time.  Still, you are not likely to get
physiological activity out of cells and tissues.

I wouldn't exactly want one of those on my desk...

Essentially you need to provide correct ionic conditions, energy and
oxygen.

No need for stimulation - the heart comes with its own pacemaker (SAN) -
if it doesn't work anymore, the rest of the myocardial tissue is
probably damaged, too. Also, it's not enough to just drop the heart into
the solution - you need to perfuse the coronary arteries in order to get
the solution to the tissue. For experimental purposes the
"Langendorff preparation" is the way to go: The heart is excised and a
perfusion system is connected to the aorta which is perfused in
"reverse", thus perfusing the coronary arteries which originate from the
aorta. The solution needs to be aerated and kept at body temperature
(lower temperatures work, but the heart rate decreases). You also need
to make sure that any solution which ended up in the left ventricle has
a way to drain.

The original publication of such a preparation is from 1895 (in German):

O. Langendorff
Untersuchungen am "Uberlebenden S"augetierherzen
Archiv f¨ur die Gesamte Physiologie, 61:291, 1895

But you can easily find descriptions in English in later publications
and on the web.

Oh - and keep in mind that a carefully disected and perfused heart will
not keep working for ever: we are talking about a few hours, here.

No way - the organ needs to be absolutely fresh (minutes after the death
of the animal).

Don't do it. The preparation is interesting for scientific purposes but
I don't see a justification for killing an animal just for the aestetic
effect...

cu
    Philipp