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Mad Scientist Brings Back Dead With "Deanimation"
mattnyc99 writes "Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist (who also figured out how to diagnose lupus correctly) went from watching his infant daughter die to literally reincarnating animals. Inspired by NOVA and funded by DARPA, Roth has developed a serum for major biotech startup Ikaria that successfully accomplished 'suspended animation' — the closest we've ever come to simulating near-death experiences and then coming back to life. From the article: 'We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does — it burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O2 until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related. Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?' " The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism." If you can suspend your inner critic for a time, it's a fun ride.
This reminds me of a This American Life episode I listened to (and you can too by clicking on Full Episode here). Basically it explores a very bad chapter of early cryogenics. Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
Also, isn't Ikaria the worst name to pick? "Hey, our company hopes to aim too high and fail hard." They should have gone with Promethea in my opinion.
My work here is dung.
I think this article will open up a can of worms on Slashdot. The issue I have here is that bringing someone back from suspended animation where they were alive to begin with is not the same as 'reviving the dead'. I think nature has been doing this in hibernating animals for millions of years. If someone could freeze a medically dead person and then make him alive again with his memories, personality etc. intact, (i.e. not cloning, which is already feasible) then they can claim they have revived the dead. Other than that, it is just playing with semantics.
You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.
My blog
"We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?'"
And what kind of "life" would it be?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
...when he wrote "It's a weird thing about scientists--you would think that they would love science fiction. But they don't."
If you'll excuse my French: bullshit!
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
that will be cured.
And no, overpopulation won't be a problem becasue humans, like all biological creatures will only expand to meet the amount of food that is available.
The rest will starve.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, this could be useful in space travel, barring we develop hyperdrives. Sci fi have been playing around with sleeper ship concepts for decades. It might also be useful for people who have terminal cancer for example, who might want to opt to be frozen in the hope of a cure being developed during the interim (though there will be the problem of reintegrating into society after even just a few years). A more plausible use maybe is to put into suspended animation a critically injured person until he can be transported to a hospital and treated to minimise cell damage (assuming the serum does less damage).
Most every space science fiction has a period where people went out in "sleeper ships" to colonize the galaxy.. and then the warp drives come along and overtake the sleeper ships. It's a common theme.
I imagine the following for us:
* All those exoplanet astronomers eventually discover a rocky planet around an nearby star.. say, 20 light years away.
* They manage to confirm the atmosphere is oxygen/nitrogen, and can guess that the atmospheric pressure is similar to Earth.
* Some smart cookie figures out how to image the surface of the planet and sees trees and rivers and, ya know, squirrels.
* A Von Braun figure declares that we *must* go populate this planet and puts together enough international funding to send a ship.
The ship would be nuclear powered. It would have about 30,000 people on it in suspended animation. 30 engineers would remain awake to monitor the systems and keep the ship on course. After 10 years of service, they'd go into suspended animation and wake their successors (actually, it'd be staggered replacement). If it takes 400 years to get there, so what? That's just 40 shifts. 1,200 engineers out of 30,000 colonists.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The whole point of warp drive is that you're not traveling faster than light. You're getting from A to B faster than light would travel to go from A to B but you're not *moving* faster than light, you're warping space. This, of course, is impossible.. but that's not the point.
Wormholes are easier to understand. You connect two points in space.. now the distance required to travel is very short (it's zero if the wormhole has no "inside"). Did you travel faster than the speed of light? Why, yes, you traveled from A to B faster than light could before the wormhole was opened, but no, you didn't change your velocity to a value higher than c.
If you have an inside to your wormhole then you could go inside it, then change one of the end points to be somewhere else. Say you can only create a wormhole where the two end points are millimeters apart, but the inside of the wormhole is many meters, enough to fit all the equipment you need to manipulate the wormhole. Now you can move the A end of the wormhole so that it is closer to the B end, then move the B end so it is further away from the A end, then move the A end again. You're inch worming your way through space.. if you can inch fast enough, you can inch faster than light can travel the same distance. Are you moving faster than light? No, you're not moving at all! This is Peter F. Hamilton's "continuous wormhole drive".
All of these things require new physics.. there's a couple of proposals that require only slightly exotic absurdities, but it's all theoretical and, comical, right now.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Please take zombies SERIOUSLY! Like this guy and his anti-zombie/lancer gun
You could have been frozen in the 70's and been prepared for all of that by watching Star Trek.
Computers -- Kirk and Spock *spoke* to their computers. 99% of us still have to type. Hell, Spock even holds up 3.5 floppies on the show and refers to them as "tapes"
Cell Phones -- "Scotty beam me up" Kirk used a cell phone nearly every episode. Many models even flip open the same way and are the same exact size as the original communicator. Spock even had that wacky Bluetooth headset in his ear often.
In fact, if you were frozen in the 70's you'd be disappointed by the LACK OF PROGRESS. Where the frack are our flying cars, jetpacks, transporters, warp drive, colonies on Mars, and all that other crap we were supposed to have by the year 2000?
Sheesh!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.