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Chemical Cocktail Can Keep a Heart Viable 10 Days, Outside the Body
nj_peeps writes "Harvard professor Hemant Thatte has developed a cocktail of 21 chemical compounds that he calls Somah, derived from the Sanskrit for 'ambrosia of rejuvenation.' Using Somah, Thatte and his team have accomplished some amazing feats with pig hearts. They can keep the organ viable for transplant up to 10 days after harvest — far longer than the four-hour limit seen in hospitals today. Not only that, but using low temperatures and Somah, they were able to take a pig heart that was removed post mortem and get it to beat 24 hours later in the lab."
Doctor Livingst... errr...Frankenstein I presume?
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Neato. If this could be applied to human hearts, this could significantly open the options organ recipients have to save their lives. Perhaps even expand what kind of medical procedures that could be done on the human heart that may be limited by how long the heart can be kept viable outside the body.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Maybe I fail at reading this late, but TFA didn't say what was in the stuff. Is this cocktail made of proteins? Inorganic compounds? "21 chemicals" sounds like "11 herbs and spices": marketing speak which doesn't actually say very much.
Also, I couldn't help but notice this:
Why would the gender of the heart donors matter?
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Does this not sound like ringer's solution? Perhaps a tweaked version.
First it's "inconceivable" that Acer will announce anything other than netbook, as their device for ChromeOS.
Now...this...
Science fiction is fraught with mad scientists who discover strange chemicals that can empower the human body or even reanimate the dead. Well, Harvard has come about as close to that scenario as anyone would want them to.
We're nowhere near close, even with the cocktail from TFA. We should strive to be able of calmly taking a body involved in an accident (assuming neural system is almost undamaged), at first mostly to preserve it in appropriate state; repairing it (no rush) and "reanimating" at the end. Heck, why something so simple as decapitation or even total blood loss should be fatal?
As a benchmark, we should strive towards the ability to reconstruct hot chicks only from part of their arm! ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I (heart) science. I think that's all that needs to be said.
as soon as you know it we will we sending ourselves in coffins to our old war buddies by mail pretending to be dead but in fact just smuggling organs.
he who controls the spice controls the universe
With the possibilities this stuff could open up it might just be worth the sudden influx of terrible zombie movies using it as a plot point.
How does this affect bacon?
Because that's what's really important.
Bacon.
As Stephen King once claimed, "I seem monstrous to some, but I have the heart of a child.
I keep it in a jar, on my desk..."
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I think you're confusing it with the other soma.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
is this fluid drinkable?
WhaT ThE FucK IS WronG WitH YoU PeoplE?
Lovely..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They've got me strawberry tart!
The chicken heart was kept alive, in a laboratory in a vat. Special solution: half blood, half sodium-salycilate.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
From the paper it's a modification of something called GALA solution.
Compenent mmol/L g/L
Distilled water, L 1.00
Calcium chloride 1.30 0.191
Potassium chloride 7.00 0.522
Potassium phosphate (monobasic) 0.44 0.060
Magnesium chloride (hexahydrate) 0.50 0.101
Magnesium sulfate (heptahydrate) 0.50 0.123
Sodium chloride 125.00 7.31
Sodium bicarbonate 5.00 0.420
Sodium phosphate (dibasic; heptahydrate) 0.19 0.05
d-Glucose 11.00 1.982
Glutathione (reduced) 1.50 0.461
Ascorbic acid 1.00 0.176
l-Arginine 5.00 1.073
l-Citrulline malate 1.00 0.175
Adenosine 2.00 0.534
Creatine orotate 0.50 0.274
Creatine monohydrate 2.00 0.298
l-Carnosine 10.00 2.26
l-Carnitine 10.00 2.00
Dichloroacetate 0.50 0.075
Insulin 10 mg/mL, mL/L 1.00
pH is adjusted to 7.5 with sodium bicarbonate or Tris-hydroxymethyl aminomethane at desired temperature.
Bunch of salts.
These aren't complex proteinaceous molecules. I am interested in the presence of dichloroacetate because that was the anti-cancer molecule reported
by slashdot just yesterday.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/13/2117203
Now all you hackers planning to preserve human hearts don't you use this formula without citing the good Doctor Thatte.
Please mod me up for my chemical knowhow
Reanimator,
Along with research done by Mark Roth with H2S, this could save lots of people.
So why care for these petty obsessions? Your designer heart still beats with common blood! And what if you could have genetic perfection, Would you change who you are, if you could? (Buying Zydrate from an unlicensed source is illegal)
If it's liquid, it's drinkable. Now, the consequences of drinking it are another matter...
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
I always told everyone Crank 2 was based on factual events.
WhaT ThE FucK IS WronG WitH YoU PeoplE?
What the fuck is wrong with your keyboard?
It may or it may not. But if you state it, other scientists can later choose to run a control to see if it does make a difference.
The reason is probably something tediously prosaic - like female pigs past their peak breeding age are cheaper, or they just happened to have sows in stock for some other experiment.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Soma? Where have I heard that before...
What's with the pushymi-pullyu-case?
Most fluids are drinkable. At the very least once per person.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Every time I hear about medical advances, new operations, transplantation, and get all those images into my head, I am happy that I went into computer science... And lose my appetite for a few hours.
I used to be registered as a potential organ donor. However, I have cancelled it. Normally you think that when you are a patient in the hospital everything that is done is for your benefit. That is no longer necessarily true. If it seems your caregivers might inject you with solutions to care for your organs rather than your life. Where I live the government has specifically authorized this at the behest of the local transplant hospitals.
Perhaps I have a special feeling about this issue. I survived an accident in childhood against overwhelming odds. I todays world I am sure my parents would be overwhelmed with requests to approve slicing up my body should I die.
I didn't see much in the article about when or how the Somah is administered.
This is basically a mix of basic amino acids and other nutrients... Could injecting this or drinking the mix be beneficial to hearts currently in people ?
So, one PHB says to another PHB, "Cocktails anyone?".
Oh my god they've actually done it. Quick, call the number stenciled on the side of the tank!
sig added for the convenience of the slashdot preview filter
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!