Slashdot Mirror
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.
Braiiiiins!
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
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_West%E2%80%93Reanimator
I don't know how I could have messed that up.
Quick, get him CVS commit access to all the BSD projects!
Trolling is a art,
You forgot about mostly dead.
You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.
Schrodinger's cat says hi. Or maybe he doesn't.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that you can be MOSTLY dead as well.
/*obligatory miracle max
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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).
necktie?
You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.
There's no "rather binary". It's either binary or it's not.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I don't know how I could have messed that up.
That's exactly what this guy'll say when he's locked himself inside his underground laboratory to keep out the hordes of flesh eating undead.
Sure there is! It's just like regular binary, except it only uses the numbers "one-ish" and "probably nothing".
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
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.".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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?
"Can I buy some pot from you?"
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.
A corpse is a corpse
of course, of course
and you can't gain consent from a corpse, of course
because a corpse is, of course
by definition dead!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
It would be ok if you had net access.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;