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Suspended Animation Tests Successful
chrisb33 writes "Wired News reports that suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out with pigs. From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems).'" The pig that was the subject of the article was kept in suspended animation for two hours, and Duggan and his team have successfully suspended hundreds of pigs for an hour at a time. It's still a far cry from a spaceship filled with sleep pods, but would be just the ticket for doctors who need to buy extra time to save lives.
50*F is 10*C, still not frozen (and who the hell uses Fahrenheit in a medical setting?!). There have been tests with cooled-down mammals including dogs and baboons since the 1950's. I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier.
Some people may think that this may end up being a way to deal with any sort of terminal illness. I don't think it is. And it has nothing to do with the technology.
The real problems are financial and political. Suppose you get yourself "frozen". At that point, are you legally alive or dead? In order to be able to pay for the perhaps hundreds of years you might be in storage, you'll have to have a sizable chunk of change set aside. Your heirs (or, more likely, their descendants) will almost certainly attempt to gain control over it, and so the question of whether or not you're legally alive will have to be answered. I wouldn't put good odds on the ruling coming out in your favor.
But suppose it does. Now the question becomes how you ensure that the organization that freezes you will survive for the amount of time it takes for a cure to your terminal illness to be found. The odds of that happening are not good. How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now? Damn few.
And on top of that, there's the problem of the political stability of the country the organization in question is based in, not to mention the world at large.
The bottom line is that getting yourself frozen in the face of a terminal illness is a very low-probability shot in the dark. But any chance of survival is better than no chance, so I'd take the risk if it were me.
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"Extra time" is usually needed when the patient is in critical condition. Critical patients, by definition, don't survive 'rough handling'.
Please help metamoderate.
Actually, from a philisophical perspective, there are some ethical problems. Mostly these would have to do with the possibility of horrible pain that we can't be sure of, and sometimes problems of the soul/individual (if you feel adamant about such things.)
It would also have an interesting effect on the legal status of death. Is a frozen person alive? If not, what can people do while they are dead? If so, how long can you claim someone is alive before you have to just thaw a corpse and let life move on? Seems to me if they are considered dead, bad things can happen to their rights since they aren't alive to be mistreated... But if they are considered alive, I can only imagine what kind of twisted tax evasion or money laundering will occurs...
I'm curious as to just how far we can go with this. We can keep a pig alive for an hour or two; how much longer? An hour or two is great for saving gunshot patients and the like, but we need at least a few months to make it matter for space travel. What limits are there on the current method? Why wouldn't this work for years on end?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Suspending someone in animation has at least one application: the military. I don't know how complicated the process is, but if you can suspend a wounded soldier in a forward area and ship him back to a proper hospital for treatment, then two hours would be an eternity. Of course, suspended animation won't keep a guy alive if he were blown in half, but the forward MASH could do some quick stabilization, freeze him, and send him back for delicate neurosurgery to remove shrapnel from his brain, for example, to minimize damage.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans
...or...
...or...
...or (I triple dare you)...
Let's see how it would make Wired sound if we changed the original sentence to apply to some more popular and better armed belief systems:
Long the domain of Christian nut-jobs, cosmologists report that the age of the universe is an overestimate and now believe it to be closer to the Biblical six thousand years.
Long the domain of Muslim nut-jobs, researchers at the Royal Madrassa Institute announced hard evidence that martyrs instantly ascend to heaven.
Long the domain of Mormon nut-jobs, archaeologists have rediscovered the golden plates that Joseph Smith claimed were given to him by the angel Moroni.
Long the domain of Scientology nut-jobs, paleontologists have reported a heretofore undiscovered volcano in Hawaii showing traces of ancient alien visitors.
Would Wired have the balls to print any of the above sentences? I doubt it. Too scared of being boycotted, firebombed, or sued. So are these cowards getting a few cheap laughs at the expense of our beliefs about the soul and life after death because they know there aren't enough of us nut-jobs to fight back? At least our beliefs are slowly coming closer to realization, unlike the anti-scientific belief systems portrayed above. Why are we the nutjobs then?
What, you're into tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs unless you outnumber them by a comfortable margin, is that the true extent of your commitment to civil liberties? Screw you Wired bigots. And the inevitable flood of Slashdot bigots who will think it's fun to bully people who have never done them or anybody else any harm whatsoever.
To clarify: I'm not saying Wired should be sued, bombed, or censored. They have a right to say what they like. Just like I have the right to say they're low-lifes for going out of their way for no particular reason to insult me and other people who share my beliefs.
I'm missing something here. What are the ethical problems? It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections, and therefore the only way for me to preserve my soul at this time is to preserve my physical brain. In accordance with my belief, I spend my own money on a life insurance policy and name a cryonics company as the beneficiary. Of my own free will I enter into a contract with this cryonics company whereby they agree to place me in suspended animation as soon as possible after I am prounounced dead. Some people want to be cremated, some want to be buried, I want to be frozen. Explain to me the ethical problem here.
Oh, you must mean the ethical problem of society being full of reactionary sanctimonous busy-bodies who think they know what's best for me. I agree, this is a big ethical problem, and thank you for agreeing that they should get off our backs and let us do as we like with our bodies and our estates.
From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs...
Bold words from Wired, the official newsletter of transhumanist nut-jobs.
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
From another, colder (no pun intended) perspective:
Would it be worth all the money and hassle (from the point of view of the military) just to save one guy? Unless, as the GP had said, his 'return trip' was just returning him to the front. IANAD, but all those procedures seem like they would take a long time, and time is invaluable on the battlefield. Also as someone else mentioned, is the issue of tissue rejection, and other such worries. Yes, this is saving a life, and to you and me this is worth it. But from a purely pragmatic point of view, this turns into a lengthly and expensive rigmarole. And the alternative is just a $.30 stamp and some paper on which is written "Sorry, your son/daughter/father/mother/sister/brother/etc was KIA today. Blown clean in two. Here's your Purple Heart."
Of course, this is an extreme example. But it is food for thought.
You might be right. But a key point to maintaining soldier morale is making sure they think everything will be done to save them if they are injured.
If you start withholding care that could save their buddies, they'll quickly realize that the care will be withheld from them too - and they're less likely to fight so well.
Soldiers can be pretty pragmatic too...
Umm... I think they were talking about the ethical issues of doing the clinical trials on humans, not the actual precedure once it's been proven. If somebody comes into the trauma room with gunshot wounds, do you do everything to save him, or do you try this risky new procedure that's never been tried on a human before, hoping to buy more time for the surgery? Ethical delimma. Cross your fingers and hope the guy doesn't come out with the cognitive abilities of a domesticated farm animal.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Just change the definition of death by adding the word "irreversably" before ceased, and you'll be fine.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Well, it's worth asking how you could distinguish a "living" frozen person and a "dead" one - in the sense that, if I were to die and be frozen say 6 hours later, it's almost beyond argument that there would be no hope of reviving me. Would there be any good way of checking the status of a frozen person to determine whether they'd experienced catastrophic brain damage prior to death?
Let's put this in perspective:
The average soldier could be anyone in your family, including you. They could also be one of your friends as well. That being said, the average soldier is just as human as you are.
At what point does a soldier's life suddenly become worth less than your own? I believe you're missing the point that their lives are just as important as yours; unless, of course, you want to inject another line of logic: They're fighting for your country and you aren't. If your country runs out of soldiers they're in some tough straits, wether they lost them via combat attrition, and/or lack of recruits because people like yourself who can't envision that the use of violence is ever necessary.
Sometimes I wonder if our military's ability to squash/kill/blow up just about anything has a harmful backlash: People who are so sheltered from the reality that the soldier keeps them safe and somehow they see the destruction wreaked on others and think it evil. Perhaps, if a government were corrupt, or otherwise undeserving of loyalty, I could agree... questionable as some decisions have been, I still support my government and would die to defend my home.
Disclaimer: Discharged from the US Navy July 11th after a 6-year stint.
Nah. They're fighting for my government. Not always the same thing.
Last time any other nation was a real military threat to my country was 1814 or 1865, depending on whether you want to argue that the pro-slavery terrorists who styled themselves the "Confederacy" were or were not "another nation". The Mexican-American war was a war of agression; neither Japan nor Germany posed a threat of invading the U.S. in WWII (and Hawaii was not part of the U.S. - understand how there came to be a naval base at Pearl Harbor and you'll see that the Pacific theatre was a straight-up battle between colonial powers); and the mass murderers behind 9/11, while very bad people against whom strong action must be taken, are criminals, not a military threat who are going to invade the U.S.
(BTW, I'm not saying the Nazis weren't brutal sadistic thugs, or that the Japanese colonialism of the early 20th century wasn't more brutal than the American colonialism of that period. This doesn't change the fact that neither was a threat to send troops over here to invade and occupy the U.S.)
Yet my government keeps finding all kinds of things to send American soldiers overseas to kill and die over - mostly involving protecting the interests of its richest and most powerful citizens and corporations.
Governments can always create more soldiers via conscription. If they lose officers, they're in a tough place, but cannon fodder is relatively cheap.
Again, the former and the latter are completely unrelated. The government can go screw itself; but if Canada tries to invade us, my rifle will be out and ready.
Sorry that you got ripped off of a few years of your life by the con men who convinced you that serving them was the same as serving your country; glad you made it out in one piece.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood