Slashdot Mirror
Natural Gas to Offer Breakthrough in Suspended Animation?
Kingcanute writes "The BBC is reporting that American scientists are claiming that sewer gas may be successful at inducing suspended animation. The results were achieved using mice but further studies are needed" From the article: "The problem with hypothermia is it's not that easy to cool down the human body so if we can find another method to inhibit metabolism that would be very useful"
So, this is pretty interesting, but this smells like (LOL, H2S.... get it?) incomplete science in that they appear to have gone to the press without first, doing the real experiments that would tell them more about what is going on here. Simply looking at core body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure will not tell you the status of organ function, nor will it tell you anything about potential organ system damage. Dr. Chris Pomfrett's letter is right on where he questions: "My big question about this work is: is it reducing brain metabolism or simply having a toxic effect on the brain stem?", but he only gets part of it right in his suggestion to perform an electroencephalogram (EEG) as well.
Additional tests can not simply be EEG combined with standard histology as you need to know something about how the tissues are responding in metabolic space, especially as how they are introducing a new small molecular species to the mix. EEG is only going to tell you the global overall status of the tissues, but it too will be altered in ways that may or may not be informative. I would suggest looking at early immediate gene expression profiles for apoptotic pathways and performing experiments designed to actually look at and document the metabolic profiles of these cells/tissues.
I am thinking specifically of some of the techniques we have developed (pictures of some tissues using these techniques can be seen here), but there are many, many other traditional biochemical and metabolic assays that could have been performed for these studies like HPLC, MassSPEC etc...etc....etc....
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"Natural Gas" is usually interpreted to mean something other that just any gas that occurs in nature, like hydrogen sulfide.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
No sir, you're "incredibly stupid" by not reading the full article.
Had you bothered to read it instead of simply going by the short quote, you'd understand that the article has nothing to do with 'cryogenics'.
The quote is from a larger statement where they're referring to inducing hypothermia in patients undergoing cardiac surgery or with severe trauma, where it helped stabilize the metabolism of the victims, which resulted in better outcome on the treatment.
The article itself is aimed at medical uses such as the ones described above. This research has *nothing* to do with space travel, but is geared at preserving organ function in critically ill patients, where hypothermia is regularly induced to slow down organ deterioration.
Now go back to your cave.
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
Ha! I got a chuckle when I read this:
You guys may not remember this, but the original Buck Rogers story from the comic strips was that Buck was exploring a cave when he was exposed to gases that put him to sleep. When he woke up and emerged from the cave he was in the 25th century.
Breakfast served all day!
I understand your point. However, from the article, this research was presented at a conference of the American Physiological Society. Does that affect the situation? Anouncing research at a scientific conference hardly seems like 'going to the press'.
Also, I tend to be more wary of what the media is implying. The only portion of this that is actually attributed to the original researchers is quantitative data. The two scientists mentioned by name don't necissarily have any involvement with the researchers.
This also reminds me of an incident (about which I only know the barest details) in which, apparently, a paper proposing a method of stem cell research was posted to the Nature website for review (not published as finished work). There followed a bunch of news articles about the "amazing new method", and later news articles about how the "misleading scientist" really hadn't tested the method.
This is a dupe scientific study, not a dupe slashdot post. That post refers to a different instance of a very similar experiment.
Uh, guys, "natural gas" is methane. Not hydrogen sulfide.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
http://www.circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/1 09/25/3106
Well, natural gas is a big choice target for the petroleum industry, not simply a by-product.
:)
And the two are very much related, as most natural gas deposits discovered these days are "polluted" with H2S. Lots of money is spent removing this highly toxic gas from CH4 supplies. See sour gas.
Lastly, it's not surprising that H2S slows heart rate, breathing, etc. This is why it kills dozens of people in the petroleum industry every year
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.