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Scientists Keep Rabbits Alive With Oxygen Microparticle Injections
ananyo writes "Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals' blood. Oxygenating the blood by bypassing the lungs in this way could save the lives of people with impaired breathing or obstructed airways (abstract). In the past, doctors have tried to treat low levels of oxygen in the blood, or hypoxaemia, and related conditions such as cyanosis, by injecting free oxygen gas directly into the bloodstream. But oxygen injected in this way can accumulate into larger bubbles and form potentially lethal blockages."
And with this...we're one step closer to the zombie apocalypse.
Ok, that's what they were pumping into Neo's backbone... Right?
Gently reply
I wonder if the researchers chocked the mice with their bare hands.... Poor mice. R.I.P.
they had to use a carburetor.
That's a way to make use of "new" technology.
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I can see this as a major help in organ transplants like lung and heart. Also there's a potential for cystic fibrosis since it bypasses the lungs.
This sure is better than having someone perform an emergency tracheotomy with a steak knife on you.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
So what? I have a pet rabbit that I can keep alive with regular oxygen particles.
And I don't even have to inject them or anything. They just go into the holes in his face.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
...they were experimenting with Rabbits.
I wonder how many rabbits they sacrificed to doing this.
From the summary, it sounds like the rabbit died after 15 minutes.
Thats interesting, I wonder if they had to take precautions against shock.
Good-bye
CO2 must also be removed. that's probably what ultimately killed the rabbits.
Besides overloading the red blood cells with CO2 and preventing the removal from the cells, it also screws up the PH of the blood really quick. I assume that with this process it could get bad enough to lead to shock.
Now what would be really cool would be if they could come up with a sold-state exchanger for CO2 to O2. Something like a fuel cell in reverse - create a chemical exchange from an electrical power. Implant that into a body and it could run on batteries instead of breathing. But I don't think that technology in that form currently exists. They have "rebreathers" but those are huge space-suit-size affairs and operate on a far more involved process.
But I bet someone's working on it right now. Probably several someones.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
But will Lance Armstrong submit to a blood test for oxygen microparticles?
Fair comment. I wonder how many PETA vegans who develop fibrosis in the lungs will turn down any potential treatment to keep them alive developed from this. That is what the lung transplant girl from Ottawa recently in the news suffered from. I was acquainted with someone who passed away from this. And there were an inordinate amount of workers at a plant in Missouri that made flavouring for microwave popcorn that developed fibrosis in the lungs too. Essentially your lungs get hard like scar tissue and can't flex, and you basically suffocate because you can't draw in enough air. That has to be just as shitty.
On another note, there are a lot of scifi stories where people are immersed in liquid which is super oxygenated in order to combat G-force. I wonder if this new discovery could be used in conjunction with a potential solution to high G-load.
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Thats something sci-fi pulled out of the US Air Force books actually. Also Canadian Air Force books. It was originally thought up as a concept in canada to combat the massive g-forces the avro arrow could generate. It turned out it wasn't needed. Its been tested extensively by the US since(and there was some testing done in canada as well) but never used for any regular procedures afaik. It has also seen some testing for under water purposes, deep diving(Similar problems to massive g-forces and ridiculous altitudes)
I've actually tried it myself at a marine research facility. Its extremely fucked and you can choke to death while being fully oxygenated(if you're a wuss, essentially). Also excess fluid left in the lungs can cause infections etc to set in.
Doing something dangerous enough to have a paramedic crew standing next to you when you start it is a bit of a head trip too.
Once you're in there tho... its not even slightly comfortable. It feels like your chest is being heavily pressed on and you have this constant drowning feeling that takes a bit to get over. Overall, I'd say thats probably the main reason it hasn't been used much. On paper the whole deal is fantastic. In reality, not so much.
A liquid breathing technology is important at depth because pressurized gasses are inefficient at transferring oxygen in to the blood. A liquid oxygen source allows for submarine escapes that don't involve screaming to prevent your lungs from bursting and more volumetric density. Suppressing the urge to breath might be as simple as breathing closed circuit helium or Perfluorocarbon. Possibly using cryogenic rebreather technology to condense out the liquid co2 from the blood and then separate it based on density.
Past attempts at liquid breathing have been frustrated by the mechanical difficulty of using lungs to circulate a fluid more viscous than air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
With an IV based infusion, this circulation becomes irrelevant.
GIVE THESE RABBITS AIR
Why, why, why are these stories always "save peoples lives" angled? How cool would it be to dive with this stuff running in your veins? I bet the liquid is incompressible too. I wonder what the ratio of volume of the liquid versus how much oxygen contained within it is.
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
I'm all for science and testing, but damn. Imagine feeling like you are choking to death for 15 minutes...
Your mom never complained.
Nothing new/useful to see here. Move along, move along. Feel free to Google "ECMO" as you're heading out the door....
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
I suspect that he has tried and it has only resulted in several restraining orders.
Yeah, about the CO2 thing...you know that visceral panic you feel when you can't breathe? It's not triggered by lack of oxygen, but rather by excess CO2. I'm sure dying from asphyxiation is unpleasant enough, but having the experience dragged out to fifteen minutes (or more, once the methods are improved) must be horrific.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Why 15 minutes? Weren't they confident they could keep the bunnies alive indefinitely?
What happens after 15 minutes? How are the microparticles cleared from the body after the oxygen in them is used up? How fast can they be absorbed and does is it too slow for the rate at which the body uses oxygen. (I suspect that's the root of the time limit.
"Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals' blood.
Star Trek;s TriOX compound. Remember when Spock and Kirk fight during Spock's Pon'far on Vulcan in the original series?
This is something that could save a lot of lives. I am perfectly fine with it. Now, if you are taking about cosmetics research (the one that has the most demand for rabbits), I agree. It is cruel.
Well, sorry Mrs. Smith. There might have been a technique that couuld have saved your boy; but we couldn't kill the rabbit. Would you like to pet the rabbit? So there's Mrs. Smith at her son's funeral petting the rabbit, and that makes up for it.
It's shells of lipid (fat) around gaseous oxygen, so it should be compressible.
You think waterboarding is torture? Wait until some goon figures out how to use this technique to allow them to keep their victim alive as they experience their own suffocation. Over. and. Over.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
I wonder how many PETA vegans who develop fibrosis in the lungs will turn down any potential treatment to keep them alive developed from this.
If someone somehow found a cure for cancer by sacrificing a million human babies, and no more babies would need to be killed afterwards in order to treat people, would you refuse the treatment? That would be pointless. The ones who died are already dead, and refusing the treatment will not bring them back.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I knew a guy who knew a guy who worked at a lab that was working on an automated colon resection machine. Basically, the idea is that if you had colon cancer or something, they'd shove this thing up your butt, it'd grab onto your colon in two separate places, cut, remove the diseased section, and join the two ends together, all in a continuous action.
They used canines to test it out. Supposedly once a week he'd see a big cart being pushed down the hallways for waste disposal. The cart was covered, but there'd be paws hanging out.
Of course, this could all be a horrible joke. But there you go.
Yes, the rabbits were the subject of the experiment. The mice were being choked to pass the time. It's just what these researchers do.
Suffocating rabbits to death for experimentation is cruel and inhumane
If they are conscious then thats pretty cruel to them, but I cant see a reason they wouldn't be anaesthetised.
They dont feel anything or suffer if they are KO.
Something like 15 million chickens are killed daily worldwide for food, how is the deaths of a few rabbits any worse?
You see no problem with pumping a human being full of a non-blood liqued at a rapid rate?
The human in question would either explode OR the blood will become ever more diluted until all you got is the new liqued which isn't blood. And you need blood to survive, even if you are not a vampire.
The article makes this pretty damn clear, it is not for surgery, it is for emergencies. There already exist perfectly fine methods for putting oxygen into blood, they are used routinely during surgery. But they are bulky and slow, so they can't be used on the scene of an accident or in an emergency room.
This method is for keeping a patient alive until surgeons can save him. It is to stretch the window between incident and surgery to give emergency services more time. You would be suprised how advanced medicine is in saving people and how hard it is to get that advanced care available fast enough to work in an accident that could happen anywhere EVEN outside a hospital! Amazing I know but people do insist on getting accidents more then a minute away from a emergency room.
If it could be allowed legally, it might become possible for ambulance crew to give patients a shot of this stuff and make sure their brain has oxygen enough to survive until proper life support systems can take over.
But you CANNOT just pump a human being full of non-blood and expect them to survive.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So you are saying that it is okay to use human babies as fertilizer for your lawn and skin them to make lamp shades? After all, they are already dead.
Morality isn't about efficiency, it is about saying "I won't do this because I think it is wrong". And yes, for some this includes making use of research obained through immoral means. Most human beings just get this and don't need to have it explained. That you do, says a lot about you.
For most, "everyone else is doing it" is thankfully not good enough or we all be living in a world like Somalia and other hell holes where individual morals have disappeared. The daily proof is that we don't eat our dead. It is often perfectly fine meat, why throw it away? Even vegan's couldn't protest. Just try suggesting it however as a efficient and perfectly sensible course of action. I predict you will be shunned. Well, more so then you are already.
There are things you do and things you don't do. Amazing as it may appear to you, some people would indeed refuse such a treatment. It is what makes them human. Being human is not about walking upright or having opposable thumbs, it is about being able to make decisions beyond instinct for survival. That you can't means you are an animal. No less then an animal, most animals don't eat their own.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You're not the only one, but you're probably in the minority here.
I bet you believe humans are the only ones who kill for pleasure. At least this is for science.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Holy Shit! This sounds like the plot (fore-story) to an AquaMan movie.
A lot of /. readers are emotionally stunted young men, I wouldn't expect most of them to have any morals beyond their own immediate instinctive needs. It is not how things work.
A decision as to how to live and die only comes when dead becomes a reality. Like people who decide to stop treatment of a fatal disease because they want to live the remainder of their live with some dignity rather then have a tiny hope with misery of dangerous medication. But you cannot judge this, until you have faced death.
In some games and lots of movies and books, this is explored, from sophies choice, to Lawrence Oates self-sacrifice. What would YOU do? The current zombie game "The walking dead" gives you such choices, who do you save? There is a site that shows all the choices people made in the first episode. Of course, such a game is not real. But I wonder if the choices made are influenced by the players history. Will a person from a civil war, a parent, someone who lost someone dear, a young man, a woman who had an abortion for convenience, etc etc, make different choices NOT for gameplay reasons but because the choice fits with their world view?
Hard research because there is a LOT of prejudice at work in just the previous sentence. Not just the abortion one, even presuming a young man is a different type then the rest says a LOT. Not sure what it says, it is just a lot.
But when you are young you tend to think in "Me, me me" terms. It is as you experience more (and that happens as you age) that you develop a more rounded view of life. Including perhaps one day, the choice as to how the end of your life should be. But statements as "It is better to die a free man then to live as a slave" are only truly understood by people who had to make the choice. Do you take every option to survive or do you say "no, this line, I will not cross". Ultimately, if you are faced with such a choice, it defines you. Just not for very long. But often moral choices such as that come down to, "could I live with myself if I did this?". For some the answer will be yes, for some the answer will be no.
But I wouldn't expect to find a many non- "me me me" responses on a site aimed at emotionally stunted young men. Or one aimed at young women either for that matter. And that is good. No reason for the young to think about how they are going to die, clutching at every straw, taking your own life or refusing to extend it at all costs. That is something for the old and terminally ill, let the rest believe they are going to live forever and that hanging on as long as possible is the only thing that matters.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Let me get this straight: you've been inhaling an oxygen-saturated liquid? For how long?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Sometimes when they lengthen the lives of rats or cure them of cancer I think it must be nice to be a lab rat. Certainly much better than being a lab rabbit apparently.
There is far more truth in saying that the modern automatic transmission was "perfected" in the Model T Ford. It's epicyclic gearbox is very similar but it's not quite the same, so even then it would be almost as stupid a statement as the one above. Submarine and Toyota engines have a lot of differences even if there is a connecting idea. Deisel Locomotives are probably closer.
you have this constant drowning feeling that takes a bit to get over.
I nominate this for understatement of the year.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
man, there's some mods that really need an injection of sense-of-humour particles...
If you are using oxygen then you are not in suspended animation and you will age. Also good luck accumulating a thousand years of CO2 in your blood.
These guys should get a grant to retrofit an old castle... and HR should start recruiting for a devoted amoral hunchback for the job title of "Egor."
Further, HR should employ a voice coach to ensure that all researchers are able to pull off an appropriately disturbing maniac laugh. It's important.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apEZpYnN_1g
No really.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The person who killed them would be punished. However, the treatment is already there, so what's the point? Throw out a perfectly good cure for cancer and pretend it doesn't exist? The person who came up with the treatment could not profit off of it, so it's utterly pointless to refuse it. And I believe most humans don't like to die, so I believe they would take the treatment.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I am not sure if this test requires suffering. But I would be fine with animals suffering if they are used for real research. The tests have to be performed on *someone*. I would rather it be animals than some uneducated african suffering during clinical tests.
What happens when it's you?
I dont want it to be a human, that is exactly why I am suggesting rabbits as alternatives.
Why is your life worth more than that of a rabbit?
Because I human. Humans have evolved to value a human life more than a rabbits life. Human are naturally social creatures, we connect with fellow human beings. We feel empathy towards the suffering/joy of a fellow human. We are not naturally empathetic to rabbits, it offer no evolutionary advantage. We have also killed rabbits for food for quite a long time. So to summarize, as a human, I value a fellow human's, and my own life (because of the survival instinct I guess) more than a rabbit.
Is a murderer's life worth more than that of a rabbit? Why?
Yes, see above reasons. Murderer is still human.
What if YOU were one of those rabbits? When did you choose to be born a human, and how?
If I were a rabbit, I wouldnt be answering these silly questions. I would look at strange humans, and wonder what they are upto. Then suffer and die.
everyone has to refuse the treatment otherwise it sends a signal that doing that again is OK.
I think that's silly. For one thing, the one who came up with the cure would be punished. Second of all, could you really say you'd be willing to throw out a perfectly good cure for cancer meaninglessly?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It was 30 minutes when I did it. I was lucky enough to get a shot at it while they were doing some broader range testing to see about potential emergency medical uses. Short answer: It will likely never be used.
Well, it DOES suck for the first few minutes, and anyone that can last more than a few minutes with it without having already had experience in situations that cause similar breathing forces(IE Fighter pilots and deep divers) is relatively rare.
I did not have this experience and was one of two out of 30 that didn't get yanked back out of the procedure almost immediately. I did have some volunteer fire department training with oxygen tanks and like one scuba lesson under my belt. I believe most of the volunteers they had were in a similar boat. The other guy that pulled it off was an actual fire fighter.
However, I should mention, that after the first like 3 ish minutes of near-agony its not that terrible. You get used to it and relax a bit. You still feel like you're being crushed(I guess an extra 30kg of what is essentially water in your lungs will do that) but as you get used to it it feels more like a heavy weight, as though you just put on 100lbs in 2 minutes.
Occasionally the instinct of "What the fuck, I'm not supposed to have water in my lungs, I'm drowning" starts to resurface again and your heart rate goes back up and you start to panic reflexively but that happened to me twice at around the 8 and 15 minute mark and then I was good for a solid 15, told them I could keep going, and they stopped it because they said they had what they needed.
At first it was just me trying to NOT think about what I was doing and then after a little bit I just used the excitement about the tech to basically psych myself back up and get comfortable with it. At least, as comfortable as I think anyone could ever get with that. In reality: Breathing water like a fucking fish, even if its engineered water, and not really water, is really fucking cool, and I'm still glad to have gotten the chance to do it.
As a side note: That has to be the best chest/core workout anyone could ever do. I could barely move for days afterwards. My back was sore, my diaphragm was fucking killing me, it was nuts. It didn't feel like that extreme of a workout while it was happening though. I can't imagine the kind of cardio system you'd have if you did that on a regular basis. Assuming some side-effect of having that much fluid in your lungs for long-ish periods of time didn't completely destroy your lungs.
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that cyanosis can be caused by any number of things, not just poison.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Out of interest, I recall reading somewhere that a similar concept was being considered for essentially "washing" the lungs for dangerous foreign contaminants that are otherwise very difficult to get out. Unfortunately, my Google skills seem to be weak today and I can't find anything about it. As one of the rare few who has actually had some experience with the "breathing liquid" thing, do you know anything about that?
(of course, I imagine it would be an extraordinarily uncomfortable medical procedure, and so your average Joe with lung problems (hence, needing the procedure) is likely going to need to be knocked out first)
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This is just in time for the Olympics. Let's see how well Phelps can keep up with microparticle enhanced bubble-head mariners.
If a rabbit could choose humans or rabbits, which would it likely choose?
It has been attempted in at least one extreme case here at the Health Science center that I know about. Its a zipper job at the moment however. They crack you open and essentially detach the lung, rinse it out, reattach and stitch you back up. Its been attempted successfully in the one case I know of here, someone inhaled a pea and it was causing infection but was difficult to dislodge without surgery for some reason(I think maybe it had some sort of fibers growing around it in the lung?). It was a last ditch before they basically removed the chunk of lung the pea was lodged in
They used some of this sort of fluid so that they didn't damage the lung further from what I recall. It only made the local news I think so it'll be pretty hard to find on the web. Its a pretty fringe case where its useful. I don't know if it could be used for any sort of "cleaning" of harmful contaminants, though it seems likely to me that something of the sort could be accomplished. I'll tell you one thing, I breathed better after I recovered from it than I had since I was quite young. That could partly have been due to the extreme workout my cardio system got though.
From what I could get out of them(which wasn't much) when I was doing it they were testing it as an emergency process to keep someone alive in the event that their lungs were collapsed/collapsing etc. This is both harsher and more gentle than current methods. It can be used to flush blood out of someones lungs and get them oxygenated at the same time while surgeons repair rips, tears, and stop the bleeding etc, plus, you know, the benefit of them actually living long enough to make it to a surgeon.
Traditional respirators cause even more blood to pour in and are at best a stop-gap that only helps because they'd die even faster without any oxygen. The liquid would actually be a bit of a treatment for the problem, life expectancy could extend a LOT for some cases and theoretically could often push someone into "Getting their asses onto a surgeons table" range, plus give the surgeon more time to actually fix the injuries, drastically increasing survival rates for those sorts of injuries.
The worry was someone waking up during and having their lungs full of fluid might send them over the edge and cause a heart attack immediately, basically killing them outright and making the surviving due to the fluid a moot point. The worry was extremely well-founded as it turns out.
They wouldn't say exactly how the system would work to do this etc, but that was the general idea. The fluid is actually perfectly safe for your internal organs to be exposed to for short periods of time, so it leaking out of your punctured lungs isn't a huge problem.
Given that 28 out of 30 lasted less than 2 minutes before their vitals went so wild that they yanked the plug... I don't think we'll be seeing this application any time soon. Maybe once they come up with some better drugs to keep someone under while injured. Morphine et al just dull pain, this is an entirely different sensation.
I doubt the results were even ever published since they were pretty much a total disaster.
Any sort of use of this stuff for medicine is going to require some heavy drugs along with it unless they figure out a drug to shut off the "I'm drowning" feeling. It takes a very large amount of will power to keep it down. They did give me something beforehand but I never did find out what it was. It could be that the thing they were testing was the shit they gave me instead of the procedure itself. It was a private testing company, though they were using government facilities.
Hmm, that reminds me, I could be violating some sort of NDA... whoops. I know I signed something, but as to what it all entailed I was a bit too excited about the prospect of breathing water to bother with that.
Oh well, its not like I know anything that could actually hurt whatever company it was(I can't even recall who, lol)
You'd say anything to avoid the micro-particle injections wouldn't you?
They just put em in a nitrogen atmosphere. No CO2 buildup, so no pain. Feels like normal respiration, except unless oxygen is provided in some way, you just pass out and die.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Cyanosis is not cyanide poisoning. and is in fact not even related. the "cyan" part of the word does not come from the word cyanide, it comes from kyanos which is the greek word for blue. and cyanosis in fact is the medical term for your skin turning blue or purple due to lack of oxygen. So yes, this is a treatment for cyanosis.
Did the try weed? Enough of the good stuff and you wont give a shit what you are breathing.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
>Rabbits with blocked windpipes
How did those rabbit get blocked windpipes???
They were forced to have the blocked windpipes, to then be able to use this treatment...
For once I would love humanity to get a taste of their own medicine....
experiment on your own species...for f*ck sakes!
Who made you the decider that the human race was better then all other living beings
and could use those species to their own ends!!!
I would love for an superior intellectual alien race to come down and start doing to us ..
all in the same name of their medicine, what we have been doing to all these poor living creatures...
To test all these supposed "needed" medicines....ie- special shampoo for scalp treatments being dripped into
the eyes of the creature...to see if it will be tearless...
because we are so vain we need another dandruff shampoo
like the 1001 shampoos out there just aren't enough....
I have given up on humanity's goodness a long time ago....except for one culture....
Once humanity is brave enough to experiment on their own kind, and allow progress to actually
hold its value at their own kind's cost....then I will accept it again in my heart as being worth saving...
Man do I understand why it rained for 40 days and 40 nights....