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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.
Welcome.... To the wold of 2 hours later
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?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
Where were you when the voynix came?
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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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.
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.
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...
But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead
the thing that brought her back to life was TRUE LOVE...
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?
I thought you said "girls" and I was like "wtf, is this guy on crack?"
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