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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.
Is it any coincidence that DARPA is Sanskrit for arrogance in this situation?
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments. - Nietzche
You are correct that there is no good reason to do this for fun, but if the choice is death or entering a potentially risky state of suspended animation, I will choose the later.
Keep in mind that the majority of the research is for exactly that purpose.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
You're either dead or you're not.
Define death.
As the cryonicists say, "Death is not a state. It's a prognosis." It's a claim that the organism will not be restored from its current state to a level of function that is considered alive.
Last time I looked (which was a while ago) trauma centers were regularly reviving victims who drowned in cold water and had been "dead" for half an hour. Surgeons were taking advantage of this by precooling patients who needed surgery that would leave the brain without blood flow for similar times. And research labs had perfused a dog with suitable protective substances, stopped its heart, cooled its body to freezing temperatures, left it that way for some time, then revived it. (And this guy has improved on that using H2S.)
Were the drowning victims "dead"? Was the dog?
There are people who are long since frozen - in full body or brain only - in the hope that they can some day be repaired (or built into a fresh body). If that is successful, are those people now "dead"? Or are they just resting at liquid nitrogen temperatures?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Try the enormous gulf just between 1995 and today.
Go back another 10 years
There were huge similar sweeping changes for each decade all the way back to roughly the 1870s or so when the effects of the industrial revolution started directly affecting people's lives and livelihoods. And here's a hint: the degree of change is accelerating still, we'll probably see some of the most interesting times we can imagine, old Chinese curses not withstanding.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
As an EMT volunteer we're told that a person isn't dead until they're warm and dead. Many people have been declared cold and dead, stored in the morgue, then scared the living crap out of the attendant complaining that it's bloody cold in there!
Vik :v)
What's interesting is that we're talking metabolic suspended animation. It's actually a pretty old idea. I remember reading about it for the first time in "The Star are Ours!" an old Andre Norton scifi novel.