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Doctors Claim Suspended Animation Success
Philoneist.com writes to tell us the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that US doctors have developed a process to induce hypothermia in trauma patients, shutting down their bodily functions for up to three hours. The process has been proven about 90% effective in trials with pigs and now the doctors would like the go ahead to test it on humans who would "probably die" under normal care.
Surely if your heart is stopped and your brain dead then your soul leaves your body and you go to heaven (or hell) depending on how good you lived your life.
I expect that it only works on pigs, because they are dirty animals and don't have a soul.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
Well, it is not quite suspended animation as the subjects have been cooled to about 10C (50F), so some biological processes do indeed still occur. However, it is below the temperature for most coherent biological processes to continue to function. Furthermore, it has been known for some time that with certain traumas involving CNS or CNS function, cooling has been an effective means of controlling continued damage related to the CNS. For instance, in many CNS traumas such as stroke (ischemic or haemorrhagic), there are cascade reactions that follow the initial insult. These cascades involve Ca+2 mediated events that often result in or are the result of cellular apoptotic pathways being induced which causes further damage. Cooling of the body in a trauma unit tends to limit such damage for reasons that are not completely understood at the basic science level and the free radicals discussed in the article are not the only possibility for damage as there are many protein pumps whose physiology is dramatically altered by temperature and pH changes.
It's too bad that the NIH budget was cut this year (effectively below the rate of inflation) by the Whitehouse and further cut by Congress who, while managing to take care of their own salaries before going on vacation, could not work in the NIH budget to their schedule. As a result, many labs here in the US this year have had to slash this years budget by 12-20% which has a dramatic effect on the success of bioscience research such as this suspended animation work.
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I have ten peoplethat I'd like to nominate for clinical trials!
Too bad they couldn't figure out a way to do it safely yet, we could use for manned long-duration space travel or just to stick around and get defrosted, Futurama-style.
I wonder how the world will look like in, say, 100 years, but do have the patience (or the stamina) to wait. Maybe Bin Laden will finally have been caught? Maybe Brazil becomes the next world superpower? Who knows?
A story is posted on Slashdot (US)
Of the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Reporting a story in the New Scientist (England)
Of a bunch of scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (US)
Can we add a few more levels of indirection here??
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm sifting through all of the Google hits from my search terms now.
.. 'Er, why do you want to eat my brains?'
This is interesting, but not quite new. I remember hearing about Soviet surgeons cooling down and effectively shutting down patients' bodies to perform open heart surgery without having to use a heart lung machine. (which were very hard to come by in the Soviet Union)
One of the shows creators revealed in some TV guide or other that had the show got an extra series or two, it would have been revealed that John was in fact the result of an experiment by a mysterious group to gain all the knowledge of the universe. They believed that such knowledge was revealed at the moment of death, hence John was killed and brought back again. But the series got axed before any of that could really be explored.
I'll start a company that will freeze people and keep them in safe storage for a defined period of time for a maintenance fee. People could keep money in their savings account and freeze themselves for 10 or 100 years, and wake up to collect their money. It'd feel like a long nights sleep and winning the lottery afterwards.
:)
But they'll have to make sure the money is in the right place, with enough interest to pull them ahead of the rest of the country/world, else its all in vain. Therefore we provide long-term financial services too.
I suggest customers buy lots of real-estate around cities with major natural resources and good weather. Hopefully they wont wake right after WWIII to realize their lands cost nothing.
Invesing in gold is not a bad idea either for the long term.
My freezer can take 2 persons. Who wants to be first??
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Should we suppose that the remaining 10% died a horrible, cold death?
Even assuming the article weren't talking about terminal patients, death from hypothermia is one of the least horrible ways to go. Your higher brain functions stop working, you become very calm and stop feeling cold, and then you go to sleep.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman