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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.
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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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 a Christ follower but I have many problems with Christianity and the overall Body of the church. Your questions are some of the more frustrating ones because the average Christian is so holier than thou when they answer it.
I like to ask other Christians:
Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life").
Why they believe one ascends to heaven immediately upon a man saying they are dead.
Why they believe that one who has no brain activity but body life might still be considered alive on this earth.
The answers to all three questions are basically: we shouldn't, we won't, and we will never push our views on non-believers. The Bible is pretty strict about holding other believers accountable for their actions, but we should be leaving the rest of the world alone.
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.
Why they celebrate birthdays and not conception days (they're so adamant at trying to control non-believers definitions of "life").
I think because singing "Happy Fuckday to You" just isn't very family-friendly, when you get down to it.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K