Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted the one remaining execution for 2026 after a woman named Christa Pike on Wednesday survived two injections of pentobarbital, a situation described as unprecedented.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections has confirmed that Pike, who was due to be executed for a 1995 murder, survived the lethal injections. She was taken to hospital, where she was receiving “life-saving measures,” according to a statement from her legal defense team cited by the BBC.

The pentobarbital injections were administered just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court authorized, without providing an explanation in its ruling, the carrying out of her death sentence in Tennessee, where she was convicted of the 1995 murder of a fellow student. The execution was scheduled for Wednesday morning but was stayed by a federal appeals court just one hour before it was due to take place. Pike is the first woman on whom an execution order has been carried out in the southeastern state in more than two centuries.

At 8:26 p.m. local time, according to witnesses, the contents of both syringes containing the lethal injection chemicals had been injected, but Pike “still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring,” her attorneys stated in a brief filed with a federal court. They added that Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a pulse,” and that the curtains in the execution chamber “have been lowered twice.”

Tennessee Department of Corrections spokeswoman Dorinda Carter told reporters at the scene that she could not immediately provide information about what had happened. It is unclear what will happen next following the two failed execution attempts.

In May, a medical team spent more than an hour unsuccessfully attempting to insert an intravenous line into Tony Carruthers, an inmate at Riverbend maximum-security prison in Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, to administer a lethal dose of sedative. In that case, State Governor Bill Lee ordered the execution to be halted and later granted him a one-year stay of execution.

The Tennessee Supreme Court had rejected a request to stay the execution last week, and the U.S. Supreme Court had done the same on Tuesday. Tennessee Governor Lee, a Republican, had also denied a petition for clemency.

But with about an hour to go before the execution by lethal injection at the Riverbend facility, where witnesses had already gathered, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — which reviews decisions by federal courts in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee — ordered a stay of the execution to consider the defense’s arguments that evidence regarding the abuse Pike suffered during childhood and adolescence had not been presented to the jury during the original trial.

Following the appeals court order, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office stated in a release picked up by a local television station in Jackson, Tennessee, that it would “continue to defend the enforcement of the legally imposed sentence” while that “technical issue” was being resolved. While the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court voted to lift the stay of execution, the three progressive justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — voted against it. In their dissent, they argued that the decision cleared the way for the “State to execute Pike before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts.”

The murder of Colleen Slemmer

Pike was convicted in 1995 of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a vocational training center for young people in Knoxville, eastern Tennessee. According to the case record, Pike and two other youths, including her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, led Slemmer to a secluded spot, tortured and killed her. The boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. The other person testified against both and received parole.

According to the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, Pike told police she believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend away from her and initially only wanted to fight with her, but ended up killing her instead.

The ruling says Pike had told a classmate the day before that she was going to kill Slemmer and admitted to police that she struck, kicked and cut the young woman’s throat. Slemmer tried several times to escape the attack, which lasted more than half an hour. Pike said she had hit Slemmer several times in the head with pieces of asphalt. Slemmer died from the head injuries, court documents say.

Pike’s lawyers have asked that her death sentence be replaced with life without parole, arguing she suffered sexual abuse and mental health problems during childhood and adolescence. The defense says the attorneys who represented Pike at trial failed to present evidence of the abuse she endured to the jury.

They also note that seven people, all men, who were sentenced to death in Tennessee for crimes committed at age 18 have had their sentences commuted. No one else that age has been sentenced to death in the state since Pike, 30 years ago.

The abuse allegations that appellate judges will review

According to the clemency petition, Pike was the victim of sexual violence in childhood and suffered assaults between the ages of two and five by her grandmother’s boyfriend. At 11, a neighbor raped her, and Pike reportedly told her mother, who did not believe her, according to a summary of the petition prepared by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). The neighbor was arrested on charges of indecent acts with a minor but was not jailed. At 17, she was raped again by a stranger, the petition says. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the clemency petition, Pike’s lawyers said her mental health problems prevented her from “stopping herself.” “I was an 18-year-old with a mental illness. It took me many years to even understand the gravity of what I had done. And even longer to accept how many people I affected. I took the life of someone’s daughter, sister, friend. I am now horrified to think I was capable of such a crime,” Pike said in the petition, according to the AP.

According to the DPI, new death sentences for crimes committed by people aged 18 to 20 are rare in the U.S. justice system. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18. Since then, only 58 death sentences have been imposed for crimes committed before age 21. Between 2020 and 2025 those sentences represented 5% of new death sentences.

Colleen ‘is not with me every day, every hour, every minute’

Slemmer’s mother, May Martínez, had opposed halting the execution and said she would travel from Jacksonville, Florida, where she lives, to witness it. She described her daughter as a happy young woman who liked skating and family games.

“[Colleen] is not with me. She is not with me every day, every hour, every minute,” the mother said in an interview this month with a local station, lamenting that attention on the case has focused on Pike and sidelined her daughter. “It’s as if Colleen never existed,” she said, adding that she hoped the execution would bring some peace to the family.

There have been 29 executions in the U.S. so far this year. On Tuesday, 77-year-old Curtis Beasley was executed in Florida for a 1995 murder — the 16th execution in Florida this year. In July, Florida executed two people on the same day, something that had not happened since 1964. In August, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee carried out executions on the same day, which had not happened since 2010.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

Nature has perfected the art of creating living cells over billions of years. A team of researchers is now learning from that process and looking for ways to speed it up. For Massimo Vassalli, chair of bioengineering at the University of Glasgow, the goal is to understand not only how living tissues form, but how they can be recreated in the laboratory.

Vassalli is the scientific coordinator of PRISM-LT, a five-year project funded by the European Union that will run until 2027. The team is developing a 3D bioprinting platform to create complex living tissues, with applications ranging from biomedical research to cultivated meat.

The project’s central idea sounds almost futuristic: engineered living materials, or ELMs. These are composite materials, wholly or partly made of living cells—including microorganisms such as bacteria or fungi—that can grow, respond to, and adapt to their environment. ELMs can self-organize and self-repair in ways conventional static materials cannot.

“Engineered living materials can have additional, dynamic features that we simply cannot replicate with traditional static materials,” Vassalli said.

Building with living cells

ELMs could transform multiple sectors, from healthcare to food production, but turning that potential into reality requires solving a difficult biological problem: how to print living cells into complex structures without killing them or losing control over their development.

The PRISM-LT team tackles this problem by creating living tissues from tiny capsules that contain living cells and a gel-like support material known as “bioink.”

“Instead of printing a continuous stream of bioink, we work with modular living components that are encapsulated,” said Laura Martinelli, PRISM-LT project coordinator and executive director of In Society, a research organization based in Udine, Italy.

“These capsules can be placed precisely by a robotic arm or bioprinted layer by layer to create complex tissue architectures,” Martinelli said. Conventional methods print cells in a continuous flow of material, without the biological guidance microorganisms can provide. In this approach, each capsule is a biological unit that includes both the scaffold and the artificial microorganisms that help steer cells as they develop.

These microorganisms have been genetically modified to act as biological guides. They detect when stem cells—cells that can develop into many different tissue types—begin to differentiate and respond by releasing chemical signals known as “growth factors” that direct them toward the desired tissue type.

The manufacturing process is fast, taking from a few minutes to an hour. The next stage is slower: a maturation period of about three weeks during which stem cells become bone, fat or muscle tissue. The team can currently produce roughly one square centimeter of thin tissue and is working to achieve a one cubic centimeter block.

What makes this especially complicated is that the process requires placing living components that, by nature, are not meant to coexist in the same environment.

“We have to create a symbiotic relationship between two systems not designed to live together, like yeast and stem cells,” Vassalli explained. “The main challenge is to create conditions suitable enough for both the yeast or bacteria and the stem cells while the latter differentiate.”

This curiosity about biological interaction was the project’s starting point. “We began this research because we were curious about that interaction,” Vassalli said. “In essence, that is how evolution happened too. Single-celled organisms interacted and evolved into the natural world as we know it.”

From bone marrow to the dinner table

Researchers are working to recreate two specific types of tissue. One is the interface between bone and adipose tissue found in bone marrow for biomedical research. The other is muscle-and-fat structures that reproduce the fat marbling that gives natural meat its texture and flavor—a quality long impossible to achieve in cultivated or lab-grown meat.

The platform will also be used to create miniature tissue models that mimic the structure of human organs, which could be used in drug testing and contribute to personalized medicine.

“The project aims to create a platform that allows the design of different tissues for very different purposes, but using the same principles,” Martinelli said.

In health care, the goal is to create three-dimensional bone marrow models to study drugs aimed at treating diseases that affect it, such as leukemia.

For food, achieving the right distribution of adipose tissue is essential for consumer acceptance of the product. “Thanks to our bioprinting technology, we can achieve the right texture in alternative meats, which gives us the opportunity to commercialize them,” Martinelli said.

Bringing this technology to the public will take time. “We are still far from real-world applications,” she said. “We focus on principles and mechanisms to see what is viable. However, we are already considering future challenges.”

Consumer perception is one such challenge. When developing cultivated meat, researchers chose to work with yeast rather than bacteria. “It would be hard to explain to consumers that meat was made using bacteria,” Martinelli noted.

Beyond the lab: the regulatory frontier

Scientific progress is only part of the challenge. Introducing genetically modified living materials into medicine or food production will also require a new regulatory approach.

Because ELMs combine living cells and, in some cases, genetically modified microorganisms, they do not fit neatly into existing regulatory frameworks, which are designed for conventional medicines or standard food products—not for materials that, in a sense, are alive.

In collaboration with the European Innovation Council, the team is already in contact with regulatory authorities, including the European Medicines Agency, to study what rules and authorizations these materials might need in the future.

“We have to adopt a new attitude toward this technology,” Martinelli said. “This collaboration helps us pave the way for the use of ELMs.”

Vassalli adds that ELMs could be “extremely powerful” if applied widely. “When we launched the project, we asked two key questions: is it viable? and is it scalable? Now we can say it is viable.”

Scalability is the next challenge. If the team succeeds, it could be another step toward a future in which living materials sit alongside the conventional materials we already take for granted.

This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU’s research and innovation magazine.

The research presented in this article was partly funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC).

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

Brett Christophers, 55, has spent years studying the strategies of large corporations. He began by examining big investment banks such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. But he soon noticed those names being pushed aside on the agendas of politicians and influencers by investment firms like BlackRock and Blackstone. It was not sudden: for decades they had quietly gained ground, and now control almost every aspect of a citizen’s daily life — the home they live in, the water they wash with, the road or railway they use to get to work, or the hospital they visit for an emergency. That is what Christophers, an economic geographer at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University (Sweden), has been documenting in multiple studies and, more recently, in books such as Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World and Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?.

This interview took place at the Barcelona Institute for Urban Research, where Christophers gave a lecture on housing, and it led to a subsequent conversation in the wake of a wave of public outrage sparked by the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, who at 87 was forcibly evicted from her Madrid home by a real estate investment firm. A deep student of anti-capitalist movements, Christophers says he is nonetheless surprised by the resistance the funds have met among affected neighbors in Spain, and by the broad public rejection of treating people’s homes as financial products. “Housing has always been a financial asset. For many, the main one, if not the only one. But in recent years that balance has been broken.”

Question. Is Maricarmen’s eviction the result of housing becoming just another investment product?

Answer. Yes. The more often the market value of housing takes precedence over its use value, the more likely these situations become. That has been a key trend in recent decades, not only in Spain but worldwide. This case is a particularly striking example of a much broader phenomenon. And although it is especially shocking, the underlying dynamics are already a central component of contemporary urban social life in Spain.

Q. The Spanish government has rolled out a package of measures to prevent new cases like Maricarmen’s. There was talk of banning so-called “vulture funds” from buying homes, although the measure was eventually diluted. Would that ban have been enough?

A. Such a ban could blunt the sharpest edges of the problem, but it would not make it disappear. After all, there are many other types of investors that also engage in harmful practices, as Maricarmen’s case itself shows. The deeper problem is the extreme commodification of housing, together with a state that neither offers a meaningful alternative to the market nor regulates it effectively.

It is important to be honest about the scale of the challenge posed by cases like Maricarmen’s”

Q. But Spain enshrines housing as a constitutional right.

A. In practice it is not, because it is not guaranteed. The proof is that there are people who are homeless. In contemporary capitalism there is a right to buy housing, but not a right to housing. That right has been financialized.

Q. In recent years you have focused on unraveling the strategies of the funds. How have they evolved?

A. Their operation involves a manager investing other people’s money that previously went into stocks or bonds. But from the 1980s and ’90s they began buying real estate and key infrastructure on which society and our daily lives depend: energy, transportation, water, sewage. Since then, they decide who can use that infrastructure and how much they must pay.

Q. That major takeoff happened with the rise of neoliberal governments under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Was that a coincidence?

A. That was crucial. Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is that the public sector should do as little as possible because the private sector is supposedly more effective and efficient and that will make prices fall. But in the U.K., where almost everything has been privatized, prices have risen. And privatizations have only accelerated: 40 years ago those managers administered about $1 trillion globally. Today, more than $100 trillion.

Q. Follow the money: the savings of a teacher or a firefighter in Massachusetts end up invested in an apartment block in Madrid or Barcelona where neighbors are evicted. Are those savers aware of how their capital is being used?

A. It is true that if those investments perform well, the pensions of teachers and firefighters benefit. But I’m sure that teacher would not be very happy to know their gains come from higher rents and the eviction of people in Madrid or Barcelona. They do not know because, between one end and the other, the chain has many links.

Q. And how is the money distributed along that chain?

A. The firefighter or teacher does not receive it. Suppose a Blackstone fund has $1 billion. Of that, perhaps 2% comes from workers’ pensions. The rest comes, for example, from bank executives, who have more wealth, or even sovereign wealth funds, such as Saudi Arabia’s.

Q. You have studied the work of British Marxist geographer and social theorist David Harvey, who argues that modern cities have become vehicles for capital accumulation. Is the influence of the funds widening inequality in major cities?

A. Undoubtedly, inequality is growing and societies are more urban. And these actors act as custodians of the wealth of those who already own wealth. In today’s society, wealth is distributed very unevenly. These managers reproduce and amplify that inequality.

If capitalism ever falls, it will not be because of protests, but because of its internal contradictions”

Q. Maricarmen’s case has reignited protests in Spain. Could it be a catalyst?

A. Perhaps. But housing has already politically mobilized the population in Spain, including young people, for the last 15 years—maybe more than anywhere else in the world—and yet cases as severe as Maricarmen’s continue to occur. That is why I think it is important to be honest about the scale of the challenge.

Q. What role should activism play?

A. Protesting as an explicitly anticapitalist platform is counterproductive because it alienates allies who might sympathize with your concerns and because it is too broad and diffuse a target. Fighting capitalism is like trying to catch the wind. If capitalism ever falls, it will not be because of protests, but because of its internal contradictions as a way of organizing society.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition