When we die and subsequently stop breathing, our brain and nerve cells die within a few minutes due to the lack of oxygen.
Once a person dies though, his or her body enters the so-called “twilight of death.”
After the brain and nerve cells the heart, liver, kidneys and pancreas come to die (in about an hour), and then the skin, tendons, heart valves and cornea are next. But they will last about a day. The white blood cells even keep going for almost three days before finally shutting down.
In some sense, some parts of your body live an itsy-bitsy tad of a bit longer than yourself as a whole.
But that’s not the scary thing about the twilight of death.
In a matter of days (sometimes even hours) after the individual is declared dead, gene transcription — the first step of gene expression, where a segment of DNA is copied into RNA — starts to take place. And the consequences are beyond horrible.
For years, researchers have observed that recipients of donor organs (such as livers) often exhibit increased risk of cancer following a transplant, and nowadays some researchers really think that there could be a deep link between “twilight of death” gene transcription and this increased cancer risk.
In a blind panic, some cells try to survive the death of their host, and attempt to repair themselves in a last attempt to remain in “life mode.”
And it is in that “state of mind” that the early seeds of cells-going-berserk are born, before an actual cancer surfaces much later in the recipient of the donor organ.
As if the demise of the organ donor has sublimated into the cancer of the recipient, as the last echo of its previous owner, willing to revive once again —
And ready to grow.
SOURCES: The footnoted sites. For the image: William Fairland, The body of a man lying down with the trunk dissected: two figures showing the lungs after breathing out (above) and after breathing in (below, simulated by inflating the lungs), from Francis Sibson, Medical Anatomy (London, John Churchill, 1869): Plate 17, 1866, coloured lithograph. Wellcome Collection (no. 642390i). Digital image courtesy of Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).