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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.
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I've got four pounds of bacon in my fridge right now.
When we get to the point of cryogenic suspension being used in space travel, it's not the process I would be worried about. *cough*HAL*cough*
A similar story was posted a while back about U.S. Scientists doing this to dogs.
I just type my sig in the reply form...
How can you freeze hundereds of pigs for an hour? (And thaw them at the same time?).
It will make a good business, freezing people so their savings would grow and they could see the future.
But it also means the meat in your freezer might be technically alive.
alive!
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
...I seem to recall Larry Niven wrote about the possible (mis)uses of suspended animation in his Known Space series of books.
One of Niven's ideas was of using executed criminals as a source for organ replacement; this led to the eventual application of the death penalty for most crimes. The general idea was that this would be made possible by using suspended animation to keep the organs alive and healthy for long periods after the "donor" had been killed, so that a suitable match might be found. Your new liver might come from someone who died years ago, and whose parts were kept in storage until a matching donor like yourself had need of them.
Niven also introduced the idea that illegal organ harvesting could also happen; "organleggers" kidnap and disassemble people to provide a black market service. He was writing this in the 60's, and since then there have been signs of both situations (legal and illegal execution as a source of organs) happening in thw world.
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?
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This calls for a muppet movie in which Miss Piggy wakes up in 2999 and befriends an alcoholic robot, one-eyed mutant girl, and muffle-voiced walking lobster.
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... and mostly dead is not the same as completely dead.
Can you imagine the lack of respect these researchers must recieve in certain circles?
Also I wish Wired would have elaborated a bit regarding the ethical issues of suspended animation. Saving people from gunshot wounds, the only example listed in the article, seems like a no-brainer to me.
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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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.
"Extra time" is usually needed when the patient is in critical condition. Critical patients, by definition, don't survive 'rough handling'.
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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?
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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.
The biggest problem with cryogenic freezing, assuming you get past that whole "freezing things destroys living cells" problem, is that you are not legally allowed to freeze someone until they are dead. That means that currently, you cannot begin cryogenic procedures (like the ones described in TFA) until the person has died of natural causes.
So I guess the idea is that you get cryogenically frozen and then, someday, when society has come up with a cure for death, you will be revived and live long into the future!
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Pigs! I hear pigs, any advance on pigs? Come on, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you've frozen more impressive animals than pigs. Dogs! Thank you sirs. Dogs to the group of US scientists in the corner. Dogs are bid. Dogs is the bid. Do I hear any advance on dogs? Dogs going once... Going twice... WALT DISNEY! Sold! Sold to the gentleman with the large ears and his trouserless sailor friend.
But if they are considered alive, I can only imagine what kind of twisted tax evasion or money laundering will occurs
True.. Let's say you freeze yourself to collect interest while you're frozen, becoming rich after 100 yeras. What if that interest is taxed every year and the person you asked to pay your taxes dies during that 100 years? Then the IRS gets upset at these unpaid taxes, how will they handle that? I imagine a company can be established to take care of your estate, but what if that company fails. Can the IRS unfreeze you to demand payment, garnish your earnings?
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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.
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"The World at the End of Time" by Frederik Pohl
Includes suspended animation, sentient stars, deep (near-C) relativity, and yes... freezer burn.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Quirks and Quarks had an episode on human hibernation discussing the known mechanisms and methods within the realm of immediate possibility. It is well established that cold-water near-drowning victims have survived several hours without oxygen. From an ethical point of view the first human subjects would have to be "last hope" interventions, where death would be inevitable if hibernation were not induced.
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.
In the USA, almost none. Here in the UK there are loads - schools, hospitals, guilds, universities, civic corporations, etc.
Just in my own experience, my first-year room at college was built about 600 years ago and my school was founded about a century later.
Watching something as boring golf on TV puts me in a state very similar to suspended animation anyway
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...
This has already been done in humans, to a degree. Something similar to this is done in treating brain anuerisms when caught early. They redirect the blood and chill it, slowly lowering the body to 70 degrees. Where, all brain function and heart function stop. By controlling this, they can surgically remove the anuerism before it bursts, which they couldn't do when the person is 'awake'. It's not really suspended animation, because the machine is pumping your blood and breathing for your. Unlike these pigs where I presume the stop everything for the hour or two and don't have a machine.
The ethical considerations of this short term procedure are more legal than anything else. Although there is the hipocratic oath in which doctors swear to do no harm where this practially kills people (even though things like surgery actually violate the oath...). In many states, the definition of dead includes when brain activity ceases. So, procedures like what I mentioned above can not be performed on people in those states. Common use of this procedure would change the definition of dead dramatically. Also ethical from a religious perspective. Although most people would say do this if necessary. What happens if a doctor does this without permission to someone who will not even take a blood donation because of their faith? This also had the unfortunate situation of being a 'neat' idea. 'neat' ideas in a hospital setting are dangerous.
And, you all are ignoring the emphasis on the word sticky in the phrase sticky ethical problems. Filling a chest with salty, nutrient rich, viscous fluid just plain sounds perverse....
So, how many people did you kill today, Doc?
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But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead
the thing that brought her back to life was TRUE LOVE...
The Disney corporation has transferred all it's copyrights to an employee, who has now entered a state of cyrogenic suspension.
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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?
Child Care!
If this technology could be refined and then mass-produced to where freezing someone for say 8 hours would be cheaper than day care then I can definitely see a market for that...
"Never miss your child's first steps, first words, or anything they do!" "*Always* be there for your kids!" "Never worry about where your children are at night!" "Freeze and Forget!" "Spend more time alone with your spouse without having to worry about the little ones barging in!"
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Oh, I just can't wait until airlines decide to save money on flights by forcing passengers into suspended animation, under the guise of preventing terrorism, just so they can stack people in boxes as cargo.
Airlines don't worry much about the health effects of passengers when they cut back on fresh air and increased the percentage of stale recirculated air. So I doubt that airlines will care about the health effects of passengers that are forced to undergo suspended animation.
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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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