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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.
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!
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.
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.