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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.
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.