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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.
"presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems" ... there is no problem.
Sticky ethical problems exist only in the minds and eyes of retarded people. Its science, it can save lives, it can bring us to the stars, ethical what?????
As long as the subjects are volunteers, they know and accept the risks involved
People are stupid, i know, but why, oh why, cant we look at the benefits for once?
I imagine keeping yourself in suspended animation would be neither cheap nor entirely risk-free.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
This was my first though, actually: what ethical problems are we dealing with, here? It's not like we're killing anyone or anything... are there passages in holy texts that prohibit this sort of thing? It seems like an advanced sort of exceptionally effective anestesia, which hasn't, for the most part, inccured the wrath of those protesting lack of ethics in science.
There's testing on medicinal practices like this going on all the time; if the people aren't being tricked into it, and if it's being thoroughly tested, as I'm sure it is, and if it will save lives, as I'd guess it would, what's the problem?
No, Mr. Green. Communism is just a red herring.
Illegal organ harvesting from executed criminals is quite common in China. Some speculate that this is the reason China has been so insistant on keeping thee death penalty for many non-violent offenses.
Living people age. Stored organs don't.
Also, you can never rule out the possibility that under those conditions a prisoner might kill himself. The solution used in the known space books is actually pretty ingenious, and an ethical nightmare.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
"I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier."
I don't think a mammal freezes at 0 due to the salt and other impurities.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Well, the meat still cannot locomote. It's worse off than plants still rooted to the ground.
But, imagine giving criminals (and wrongfully accused/evidence-stacked-against-them) "suspended sentences". You can "suspend them in animation" as well as suspend the verdicts leading to their sentences. Their sentence (punishment rightly or wrongly) AND the sentences (words) could be suspended from a string, or placed on a cryo-ice shelf in their flask.
Probably the GOOD thing is that the belatedly wrongfully-sentenced could be exonerated with maybe a little frostbite and some time lost.
But, would such a sentence count for "time served with good behavior"? I suspect that those in suspended in animation or those in suspended animation cannot "exhibit good behavior" while in a frozen state. They cannot "behave" in any manner when they are immobilized in a flask.
Imagine, tho, no conjugal visits, not even for a "quick-pick-me-up" or a "quick-warm-me-up". Sex after a 150-year hiatus might be a heart-stopper, or even a heart-breaker.
And, imagine if the suspended are placed in chambers in which loudspeakers proclaim, in reeducation manner, "you will be good, you will be good, you will be good..." I guess the only way to find out is to freeze some objective scientists for about 2 years and wake them up and debrief them. Ask them if they remember hearing anything, feeling their toes or ass tickled, their skin pinched, their being put in a multi-axial spin/gymball for 2 weeks, being subjected to swift temperature changes/gradients... and if the flask is in a giant rubber ball with self-sustaining apparati, whether or not they remember being used as pool balls on a huge parking lot...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
so any long-term freezer jockey will have to be pulled out and thawed every 50 to 100 years to allow his body to repair [radiation] damage, so as to prevent radiation sickness and possible cancers.
That is, unless the aforementioned nanotech advances happen and make it possible to fix radiation burns before thawing and find and repair/kill cancerous cells.
People frozen with current technology aren't likely to be revived just by thawing and restarting, without MAJOR repair on the cellular and molecular level. For starters, the brain tends to develop big cracks (though I hear they've gotten that mitigated recently).
Expectation is that reanimation of current patients will consist of constructing a new body, extracting the structure and memories of the old brain, and installing it in the new one.
Most cryonics patients opt for head-only, rather than whole-body, to improve preservation of the brain and its information during the cool-down process. (Also because it's much less expensive, since one dewar can hold a lot more heads than whole bodies). So even if reanimation and repair of the terminally diseased and preservation-damaged bodies become available, these "cool headed" folks will need new bodies anyhow.
Suspension technology is constantly improving, so those going in later will be in better shape. And there are some patients around who were frozen under pretty primitive conditions. Thus we figure cryonics will be a roughly first-in last-out operation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, suspended animation is exactly what WOULD save a guy who was blown in half. It buys you time do do as complex a surgical procedure as you want, over as long a time as it takes to put the key bits back together again. You get a bloodless field to work in and can do microsurgical anastamoses to your hearts content.
So blown-in-half guy gets aorta and cava put back together; bone grafting and wiring or rodding his spinal column and an anastamosis of the spinal cord or cord amputation; clean up the damage to the kidneys and pancreas; do splenectomy if needed; multiple gut anastamoses and/or resections; and layered closures of the whole body wall. Nothing we don't do now - we just don't have time to do it.
Not only are ehtical issues having to be addressed, but legal ones as well.
IANAL, but from the article, "brain activity has ceased", which as I understand it is the legal and medical definition of human death.
With the recent news like the Kevorkian issue, what is being alive or dead legally or ethically today?
Assuming we could keep body parts alive in suspended animation after the host is dead, we could do exactly what Niven described. The question is, will we?
Niven explores the ramifications even more: In "A Gift From Earth", a small human colony is ruled by a relatively fascist government, with dissidents ending up in the organ banks. The government's control is threatened when a "care package" from Earth arrives, with the technology for growing organs directly from scratch, which makes the organ banks obsolete.
In Niven's timeline, this technology came a long time (a few centuries?) after the organ bank concept was perfected. In reality, we will have this technology much more quickly.
Russian scientists did this kind of work on dogs in the 1940's. There's video of the procedures on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940
WARNING: Not for the squeemish...
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.
And what proves that you don't cease to exist?
Maybe a long time after you are frozen, people wake up someone who swears it is you, but I have given it some thought, and I am sure that life is a continuous thing, and that once you are dead, you are dead. And that, even if they can wake up a conscious person, you would be dead.
The real problem with that way of seeing it, is that the woken-up guy would think that the procedure actually worked, but you would be dead. so there would be no experimental way of finding out if am wrong.
I am really concerned about that, specially, because I haven't seen anyone with my same view of things.
Of course, my point is easier to get, when you use the example of star trek style teletransportation, but this case gives me the creeps too.
Can you give any actual argument to support that idea? People already experience non-continuity of consciousness with: sleep(arguably), drugs, accidents. People have experienced brain-death and then been revived before. Do you believe those people were essentially replaced by a doppleganger?
There is no hard identity, only fuzzy identity. There is that which is more, and less, 'you'. When you were 4 years old, were you 'you'? How about when you were drunk and can't even remember what 'you' did? Emotionally or physically traumatised people can change their personalities out of all recognition, do they remain with the same identity?
For those of us who are still quite young, how well do you identify with the mind which will inhabit your body at age 70? Will it share your tastes, your desires, your values? If you are lucky, it will remember you, and not curse you for smoking, not taking care of your joints, or whatever the complaint of the day might be.
If you are suspended and later resumed, or copied and re-implemented in a new medium, you are as much 'you' as you decide to be. If there are two of you, that isn't a problem either, except for pragmatic issues you both will have to thrash out, such as division of the previous legal identity (which is a hard identity) and creation of two new ones.
The exact procedure of tests to determine brain activity is a little bit more complicated in the medical reality.
/trying/ to drive respiration after unplug-ing is enough).
It's not only "EEG is flat ergo the patient is dead, let's pull happily the plug".
Mostly, a doctor is supposed to run a whole batch of several tests, mostly testing funciton of the brain stem (with the idea that nowaday one needs a functionning brain stem to live. Just as in the past centuries the pulse was tested because a functionning hearth seemed to be a sensible requirement)
Those test have to be repeated. They should be done at least twice by 2 different doctors.
Some part of the tests consider simple reflex loops (head-eye motion). But other tests require to see if there are sign that, once the machine is unplugged, spontaneous respiration may be able restart. (Not a spontaneous repiration after unplugging per se. Reflexes
Another important part is to exclude causes that may transitionnaly mimic brain death but that are reversible (hypothermia, drugs, etc... may be reversible once temperature is back to normal, once drug has been cleared, etc...). That's also one of the reasons why the test should be done at least 2 times.
Translated to some Sci-Fi suspended animation state, the person inside ISN'T considered dead, EVEN if the EEG is flat.
Under current definition of legal death in most juridictions, the death will be considered only AFTER the person is put OUT OF suspended state (must satisfy both the condition to see if anything can restart spontaneously and the necessity to clear any condition that mimic brain death). Until then, when the person is still in suspended animation, you can neither see the spontaneity (still plugged to the sleep pod) nor did your clear the cause that mimics brain death (suspended animation *will* mimic it, so you must first exclude it before asserting death).
Therefor, there's no legal issues with the suspended animation. The person is clearly still alive. The question will only come out when one tries to revive and get the person out of the sleeping pod. And then again the current juridiction is clear.
In fact the legal definition could be abused the other way around. Because the person in the sleeping pod is legally alive, this could be used to keep a government head (a king or dictator) in power "ad eternam" even if he's terminally ill. The politician won't be able to govern anymore. But his bureaucracy/administration may keep working "in his name". Add some cult of personnality and some "waiting for when the king wakes-up again" notions and you certainly found a key problem.
Imagine Ariel Sharon being kept indefinitly in suspended animation (and we're not far from it. He's kept in vegetative state and was still officially in his position until the successor got named, although probably, given the massive stroke series he endured, his brain is fried).
Or imagine Stalin being put in suspended animation and his bureaucracy continuing to perpetrate the terror in his name, until he wakes up again...
Quite spooky.
Note: I did graduate medicine in _Switzerland_ so some subtleties may vary in your specific juridiction. But the main idea seem to be valid most of the time.
More info in wikipedia
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