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U.S. Scientists Create Zombie Dogs
Alex_Ionescu writes "U.S. scientists have managed to revive dead dogs to life, by using a technique similar to cryogenation, in which the dogs' blood was drained and replaced by a cold, saline liquid. A couple of hours, their blood was replaced, and an electric shock brought them back to life with no brain damage. The technology will be tested on humans within the next year."
Well, one obvious use is for open-heart surgery -- that goes a whole lot easier if you can stop the heart, and heart-lung machines aren't perfect. I think the first human trials will be volunteers who are additionally undergoing major surgery.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Personally I think the fluids would just drain out of whatever wounds you do have.
I think a better application of this technology will be for these multi-hour operations where they want to repair heart defects or do transplants, in which they currently induce hypothermic states.
Yep. And the reason that they don't get brain damaged is because their neurons aren't dying. And their neurons aren't dying because they're not metabolizing, and thus needing oxygen. The brain is in hibernation, just like the rest of the body.
Still, this is ubercreepy. Even the electrical shock at the end bit... sounds like 50s sci-fi. What's next? "The shock required is quite intense, so facilities doing this work will need to affix a lightning rod to their roof and wait for a storm..."?
What a crazy random happenstance!
The Safar Center was doing these experiments successfully in 1996.
I have no idea if they've recently done yet another incrementally longer period of exsanguination, as the article doesn't mention the time or a journal article name or anything.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
It seems to me this is just an artificial way of creating a cold water drowning. People are often revived after long periods without oxygen in near freezing water. Leading to the rescue mantra "your not dead until your warm and dead".
I can't find anything on the web corroborating this story. Even the official site of Safar Center for Resuscitation Research, the institute metioned in TFA has nothing about this.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
You'd have to really know a dog well (and observe its sensory and motor skills, note its emotional stability, and have a sense of its habits) before subjecting it to this sort of process. And then you'd have to pursue the dog's regular activities afterwards and note the changes. Anyone who has lived with a bright, energetic dog can tell you instantly if the animal is "off" in some way. Just like you'd notice it in your child. Now, longer-term issues, who knows. Like, would some degenerative, trauma-induced thing (something Alzheimers-ish) kick in later? No way to know. But no matter how good your brain scans or other imaging techniques may be, these are complex animals, and long-time handler/owner could tell you if you'd dropped a couple of circuits along the way.
Why would you want to freeze someone indefinately? Let's go for a Sci-Fi answer since we're dealing with a near-Sci-Fi topic. Let's say that you've got the aging examples of some really prize breedings from a particular bloodline (I'm talking dogs here). And then, something ugly not unlike hoof-and-mouth, or bird flu starts turning in a species-specific pandemic. If I were a breeder that had been perfecting a bloodline for 50 years, I'd seriously consider taking a couple of those dogs and letting them have A Big Nap.
For a lot of breeders, they love the individual dogs, but their truly beloved "pet" is the bloodline out of which they spring. Generations (of human lives) go into creating something as unique as a specialized dog (or bull, or chicken), so ways to put them on ice for later revival once a viral or other threat has been understood (or a vaccine developed) could be very compelling.
I'd say all the same things about humans, but I'd be very Politically Incorrect at that point, so of course I won't.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Now, for all of you who do not believe in a soul, just pretend. When the body of a human goes through this process, when does the soul leave the body? What if it's already gone by the time the body is reanimated? Does it get yanked back from the nether regions, or does it stay - creating a soul-less human? I'm not trying to start a religious flamewar. I'm just asking a question. Is the soul tied to the flesh, and to what degree? Would this procedure have an effect on the soul?
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I've been involved in cryobiology since I did my Masters in it. back in 2001 Pretty cool stuff. Heh. (Thanks, I'll be here all night!)
/., I might help us get the second half of the equation.
Anyways...
I'm really fascinated by the metaphysical meanings of all this. Imagine that we froze a dog and brought it back to life (Hey, we just DID that, didn't we? Or pretty close, at least). Dog comes back, everything is hunky-dorey, he wags his tails, just like he used to, eats the same food as before, and still doesn't know not to pee on the carpet.
Understand that at LN2 temp, -197C, the only appreciable reaction is due to cosmic rays. We're talking EONS here. If it's that cold, it's dead. Dead, dead, dead. Not living anymore. This sets the stage for my philosophical question.
Imagine that we freeze a human. Human's just as dead as the dog. We reanimate him/her/it, and then... two possibilities. 1) Same thing as with the dog, human comes back, harty and hale. 2) Body comes back, but the brain refuses.
Isn't this a proof for the (non) existence of the soul? If the human comes back to life, that means the soul never left. Now, unless you're going to start some twisted, "Yeah, but god KNEW this one was coming back to life so he didn't take his soul... Hey, look 4800 year-old dinosaurs!" argument, you pretty much have to admit that the soul doesn't exist, or at least doesn't go away when you die. Because, let's admit it, frozen at -197C is just as dead as being blown to smythereens or having your heart stopped by the last (ultimate?) Big Mac you ate.
If the human DOESN'T come back, that pretty much proves that there is something special inside only humans that we lose the moment when we die, i.e. the soul.
So I'm really excited to see the first half of the data is in. Dogs live after death. They have no souls, at least not in the way we imagine them. Now, if only I'd work a little harder instead of reading
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Here is a video of what it looks like happening to a goldfish.
;-)
OK, not quite the same but similar and I find it somehow entertaining
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
On Sunday morning I was playing tennis with an older man I met in an online league. He was turning around to pick up a ball and he suffered a major heart attack and collapsed. His heart stopped for about 10 minutes on the tennis court while a girl from the court next to us performed CPR. He's in a coma in an ICU right now. The doctors said that stabilizing his heart is a primary concern right now, but that in the coming days discerning any damage done to his brain due to oxygen loss will become a primary concern.
One of the things the doctor told us was that they were going to actually induce hypothermia in him while he is in the ICU. Recent studies have provided evidence that doing so may limit the brain damage caused by the loss of oxygen to the brain. Of course, in his case, it was extremely important (and fortunate) that CPR was started soon after his heart stopped, thus limiting the loss of oxygen to his brain.
Hopefully studies like this will lead to more treatments which help people recover from heart failure.
Necromancy originally meant something like "divining by use of the dead" such as summoning the spirit of an ancestor to ask about an important matter. Necro (Death) + Mancy (Divination). I guess though seances would qualify under this definition.
Reanimating the dead was placed into this category much later, though beliefs about this practice....
As a completely off-topic side-note, William Butler Yeates (the Nobel Prize-winning poet) was kicked out of the Theosophical society for experiments in necromancy. He was trying to summon the spirits of dead flowers.
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This is definitely a sensationalized story, but I also found this link buried on the US national institute of health website that contains an abstract of (at least a very similar) experiment.= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12771628&dopt=Abstrac t
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
And I think that meets most any test for being medically unethical. I'm sure there's people willing to do it for a ton of money, but that doesn't make it right.
The FDA has to approve any medical studies conducted in the US. There's absolutely no way they'd approve a study of perfectly healthy people that are subjected to a test where there's a large unknown factor of whether they'd die, suffer permanent brain damage, etc. Replacing someones blood with saline, then taking them to "clinical death" for three hours is something that would only be tried if the patient was going to die anyway given current treatment and this procedure might save their life.
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The problem with the bends is that small nitrogen bubbles form in the blood. This is not an issue of breathing per se but rather general issues with presurized gasses and water.
I personally think that this idea might have merit, but it might require more than just blood replacement to work for deep sea rescues. For example, the lungs are still full of air, right? What effect does the pressure have on this? Do you still ge tthe bends unless you remove all the air from the lungs? How difficult is this do to well enough?
Or maybe another way might be to cover the face with a rubber mask, place the body in normal-pressure water, and then encapsulate this in another iron pod. Such a pod might be fairly easily be built small (just needs to be big enough to fit your largest crew member).
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Ice crystals perforating cells was an issue in the past... has this been address? (No, I didn't RTFO yet, I thought someone would mention it).
How do they know that the dogs have no brain damage? Do they have some sort of doggy IQ test to judge their before and after performance? With humans there are many sophisticated tests for various cognitive functions, but for dogs..? "Well, zombie-Fido scored 100 on the stick-fetching test, so he's obviously in perfect condition..."?
Aren't there legal issues to be worked out here? If you induce a person into clinical death, couldn't that be considered a crime under many defintions?
at the University of Pittsburgh' Safar Center for Resuscitation Research web site.
They provide a little more information on their suspended animation page.
A)I was not a trauma patient.
B)All medicine, indeed all of life, is a question of probabilities and trying to stack them in your favor. We do not have, and thus cannot rely on, foreknowledge.
Get used to this idea.
The most common and "safest" traditional procedures may, in the right circumstances, kill you. That's the way it is.
No one can be sure, ever, that they'll actually benefit more from a trial procedure (or any other) than from a traditional approach, that's why it's a trial procedure, and why trial procedures are necessary. Probability is an empirical science and someone has to go first.
KFG
certainly in human brins, most of the damage when blood flow stops is from the proces of sedimentation, whereby blood cells clump together in the tiny blood vesels, clogging them up and making recovery impossible. CPR keps blood flowing through the brain, thus preventing sedimentation.
Draining blood and replacing it with saline also could prevent sedimentation, but I don't think it would be easy to get right.
Not zombie dogs, but the electrical shock bit...
The paddles you see shocking heart attack victims back to life.
They even have Automatic External Defibrillators (AED) in most major airports, many public schools, even malls have them. The AED shocks the heart back into sync and are easy to use -- the instructions are on the box
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Yep. And the reason that they don't get brain damaged is because their neurons aren't dying. And their neurons aren't dying because they're not metabolizing, and thus needing oxygen. The brain is in hibernation, just like the rest of the body.
So is there a temperature limit for metabolizing?
Cell death is of two kinds - apoptosis or necrosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death (when the lysosomes break), whereas necrosis is due to cell damage - and in this case, lack of oxygen. Cells that die due to necrosis show a lower level of ATP - so it makes sense that the cell was trying to metabolize the remaining oxygen and ran out.
From here, you can see that the increase in Ca2+ ions leads to chain of events that eventually leads to necrosis. Ca2+ ions over a certain threshold inhibits the energy and respiratory processes. I guess the question is, what is stopping the neuron from trying to metabolize?
What I'm assuming is that it takes longer for the blood in the body to cool down, during which time the neurons can continue metabolizing. But when the temperature is suddenly lowered to 7C, metabolysis stops? But we couldn't just quickly lower the temperature of the body to 7C because it would take > 5 min for the blood to cool.
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I found that pretty sick to watch as well.
And in fact, there is no educational value in it at all as far as I can see. The goldfish is given an electric shock and its body reacts to it vigorously, but the video is cut off right after that initial reaction to the shock.
For all I know, the fish is dead and remains that way.
Don't be stupid.
Dogs will "eat their own shit," if you feed them food they can't digest... so their crap is still "food."
Okay, the fate of the goldfish may be unclear. Is it really revived, or did the electric shock simply cause its muscles to twitch uncontrollably?
But this.. this is just seriously fucked up. And these are the same people who did all that ipod battery stuff. Go figure.
My dog (beagle) would do this. I just chalked it up to her trying to mask her scent. Same with eating feces.
This site, I don't know how authoratative it is, seems to affirm this assumption. http://www.manuelsweb.com/poop_rolling.htm
Blood cells can be based around copper instead of iron - It works just fine for oxygen transfer. So, green blood is a scientific possibility.
At the risk of offending the anti-afterlife believers and continuing the threads on heaven, hell, souls and the afterlife in general...
I'd agree with the poster about someone going through this procedure and not having any memory of it since there's no brain activity to store anything.
But let's say there is some sort of energy that isn't measureable by the tools we have now that you could call a "soul" (tm). Maybe it's bound to the body until cellular decay occurs.
Besides, what ever happened with those studies where researchers put notes up on ceilings of operating rooms to see if there were any NDE's that actually found themselves floating up to the ceiling to see what was written on these notes?
At the end of the article they describe the same work with dogs that the current story is describing (at Pittsburgh).
Interior, large hospital emergency room
...which one do you recommend?
We hear beeping sounds of monitoring devices; voices from the nearby nurse's station. The lighting is yellowish flourescent in the hallway for a sad, depressing atmosphere. It's a public hospital, so no one thought to have an interior designer make happy colors. The interior of the room is bright with white flouresent light.
POV: facing LAUREN, just inside doorway. She's just been crying and is still wearing her street clothes.
POV: LAUREN, looking into room.
ANDY has just been wheeled into the room with a major gun shot wound to the chest. The wound is covered by a washcloth and shows some blood, but not a lot. He's behind a curtain setup so only his lower body is clearly visible.
A NURSE (Asian female, early 30's) is facing away from us and is adjusting a piece of equipment.
A DOCTOR (White female, 40's) is facing away from us and illuminated behind the curtain. She's dictating into a tape recorder between probing ANDY's injuries: "Bleeding from perforation of the left thoracic cavity 8cm from center of sternum." Pause. "Fracture of the fourth thoracic rib." Pause. "Wound track and cavity visible. Left lung perforated approx. 4 cm from inner side." Long pause. "Laceration of the circumflex coronary artery. Fragment not found." Pauses tape. (To NURSE) "Get me the chest x-ray please." Starts tape and continues indistinctly.
Fade to black.
Fade back in. More people are in the room. An X-RAY TECHNICIAN (Black male, 30's) is wheeling out the x-ray machine. It's digital, so the results appear on a CRT monitor in the room. The DOCTOR and SURGEON (white male, 50 and graying) discuss the x-ray and gesture to parts of it. They are ignoring LAUREN, who is still standing in the doorway. Finally, DOCTOR comes over to LAUREN and removes her bloody gloves.
DOCTOR: Are you Mrs. Watters?
LAUREN: Yes.
DOCTOR: I'm going to explain what happened and what your options are.
LAUREN: (Bravely) ok.
Blood begins to drip onto the floor, which LAUREN doesn't notice but we do (center of frame between DOCTOR and LAUREN). NURSE puts absorbent towels onto the small pool that's forming.
DOCTOR: Your husband was shot in his chest area fairly close to his heart. The bleeding is serious and we're trying to stop it. The biggest problem is that the heart was injured and we can't repair it completely without stopping it.
NURSE comes up to both of them and stands there.
LAUREN: What does that mean?
DOCTOR: (ignoring her question) You have three options. The first option is for us to try open heart surgery. That is risky and means we have to stop the heart and use a heart-lung machine. The second option is for us to do what's called a "saline evacuation," which means we essentially put the body on ice for a couple of hours while we try to repair the heart. That's the most risky by far. The last option is for us to end treatment now.
LAUREN:
DOCTOR: I'm afraid I can't tell you that.
LAUREN: (Confused) Why not? I have no idea which one I should do.
DOCTOR: Liability reasons. (To NURSE) Come get me when she chooses.
DOCTOR leaves the room, giving the impression of indifference to ANDY's condition and LAUREN's confusion.
NURSE: Ok Mrs. Watters, you need to decide what to do now.
LAUREN: (Confused) Well what did she mean by "put him on ice?"
NURSE: It's where we take out all his blood and replace it with icewater.
LAUREN: (Dumbfounded). Doesn't that mean he would die?
NURSE: Not exactly. It's a technique they did a few years ago to save wounded army people. The heart stops but everything stays preserved and then you can restart the heart after surgery.
LAUREN: Surgery?
NURSE: To repair whatever damage there is. Your husband has a cut in his heart and they can't do anything about it as long as the heart's beating