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.

Comments

Early Cryogenics & Ethical Problems

[eldavojohn]

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.

Whoa boy...

[Chicken_Kickers]

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.

Re:Whoa boy...

[QuantumG]

Meh. It'll be a standard procedure in 5 years. "Ok, so what the anesthetist is going to do is stop your heart. Then we'll cut two small incisions in your chest and I'll insert this tiny camera.. [blah blah blah, rest of the standard keyhole surgery speech] .. and once we're all finished, the anesthetist will start your heart again."

This stuff isn't that revolutionary.. it's just a neat trick to stop you getting brain damage when you're not getting enough oxygen.

Re:Whoa boy...

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Semantics, agreed.

Of course, in true Slashdottian hyperbole, were this serum to be completely viable, I could see some kind of auto-release nano-canisters being injected into the bloodstream of soldiers, so that in the event of explosive death, an instant release of the substance could assure that all the pieces quickly 'go to sleep' and await pickup/cleanup by the wandering red cross medical roombas for delivery to the reconstruction/reanimation tent.

That would be pretty close to dying and being brought back methinks.

Might make a good extreme sport as well!

Re:Whoa boy...

[NIckGorton]

Here's a better question: When do you think anyone in their right mind will ok that procedure?

You'd never ok that procedure any more than you would ok having CPR performed. (Though you might leave an advanced directive to prevent it in certain situations.) Its likely something that would be done should you have cardiac arrest in a medical setting (or with fast enough EMS response if it becomes a field treatment.)

Its also likely something that would be done in order to facilitate transfer of a patient who will die quickly without specialized care unavailable at a given facility. For example, you get whacked on the head in an assault an sustain an epidural hematoma (big assed bleeding inside your skull outside your brain that can kill you rapidly by compressing your brain and causing your brainstem to be squeezed out the base of your skull). I diagnose that at my small community ER and plan to transfer you to the big tertiary care center 50 miles away. However as we await the helicopter you suddenly begin to show signs of brainstem herniation. At that point you are dead in minutes without a neurosurgeon. So I place you in suspended animation and we ship you to the surgeon who evacuates your hematoma and then you are reanimated.

Pretty nifty. Though your HMO will probably deny payment because its 'experimental' or only allowed for epidurals on the right side of your head, not the left.

Near death != death

[morgan_greywolf]

You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.

Re:Near death != death

[girlintraining]

Either you're dead or you're not--Tell that to someone who's brain dead. Or someone who's suffered a stroke that effects their brain stem, or people that suffer from being "locked in". Tell that to someone who 'died' on the operating table during heart surgery but 'came back'. What exactly constitutes being "alive" verus dead? Are self-replicating proteins "alive"? Because last I looked, prions are not alive though they can kill you (mad cow disease). And this isn't even discussing non-literal definitions of dead or alive -- such as being emotionally dead (suicidal thoughts anyone?), concepts of heaven and hell, etc.

There is indeed quite a spectrum between dead and alive; Life has never been easy to classify and put into boxes, because the curious thing about it is you never observe the same thing twice looking at it.

Re:Near death != death

[Carnildo]

You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.

The people quoting The Princess Bride above do have a point: you can't draw a line and say "everyone on this side is dead, everyone on the other side is alive". Consider bacterial endospores: no significant chemical reactions are taking place inside the spore, and by most objective measures, they're "dead". But place one in the correct environment, and it will convert to an unambiguously-alive bacterium.

Humans are far more complicated, with even more ways to blur the boundary between "alive" and "dead".

Aging is a disease

[geekoid]

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.

Space travel etc.

[Chicken_Kickers]

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).

Re:Space travel etc.

[M0b1u5]

You overestimate how much society changes.

Given the ENORMOUS gulf between 1900 and 2000, you could reanimate a person who died in 1908, and it would take them very little effort at all to adjust to 21st century life.

Do you think if you were frozen now, you'd have trouble being resurrected in 2028? I think not. You'd love it.

Humans are like that: adaptable.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say you could resurrect an ancient Sumerian person with little or no difficulties.

The situation would be no different to bringing a Papuan to New York city. They might not like it much, but they'd adjust pretty quickly.

Re:Space travel etc.

[corbettw]

So what? Those things are just that: things. There are people living today who lived through all of those advances and didn't go into shock over them, why would you think someone getting caught up to all of it at once couldn't handle it?

The things that people from 1955 would be most freaked out about now would be things like gay marriage, lowered blood alcohol levels in drunk driving laws, and having a black President-elect. Societal changes would be much more shocking. And even then, they would adjust, because as the GP pointed out, that's what humans do.

Re:Space travel etc.

[tibman]

Pretty sure horses still need to be shod and wooden fences built and gates fixed and bricks laid and mail delivered and snow shoveled and old ladies helped up the stairs (not exactly a job) and trash removed and books sorted and heavy things carried around. Not all jobs are "technical".

Re:Burning the life at both ends.

[compro01]

A useful kind.

Doing surgery is like trying to fix a car while it's running. If this idea works, you could simply stop the engine for awhile, making many surgical procedures (heart bypass, for example) far, far, far simpler (and thus far less likely to get screwed up) and likely opening up a bunch of currently-impossible things, like spreading a long, complex procedure over multiple days, allowing the doctors to rest, which would help prevent mistakes caused by sleep deprivation.

And of course, there's the sci-fi stuff like sleeper ships (as even at relativistic speeds, you're talking stupid lengths of time for interstellar travel.) or the old standby "Life is boring. Wake me up when X happens.".