For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about what we do (and don’t) know about what happens as we die.
When an organism dies, it almost never dies all at once. Living cells tend to stay living, and under the right circumstances can persist for a very long time. So what does the experience of organismal death look like, from the perspective of an individual cell? Does the cell receive and respond to stress signals that something is deeply awry? Does it run off the rails, engage in a flurry of futile last-ditch attempts at self-preservation, attempt to strike off on its own in a solo existence, or simply keep plugging along obliviously until it shuts down or is subsumed by decay?
Recently a group of scientists gathered at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. for a two-day workshop to share ideas and discoveries around key open questions (both biological and philosophical) that arise around the so-called “twilight of death.” They identified a list of pertinent questions — ranging from *What are the underlying mechanisms of slow (prolonged) and fast (traumatic) death? *to What is death of a multicellular organism when some of its individual cells are still alive? — and discussed how their own research and others’ recent findings might offer answers, or hint at further mysteries to be investigated.