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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.
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.
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?
Probably less than 1/10000th the number of rabbits that were sacrificed for dinner plates last night alone.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
>Yes, I'm pretty conflicted about animal experimentation myself
When it comes to life saving medicine, I'm not conflicted one bit.
Thumper or...
Me.
I vote me.
--
BMO
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.
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
You forgot about that huge contraption that he had to pull out of his face....
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...
the internal combustion/electric engine "hybrid" was perfected in ww2 in submarines.
They then figured out it could also work for cars 60 years later, and called it a breakthrough in technology.
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
This seems to be the consensus among slashdotters given the consistent downmodding of people who even remotely question, let alone challenge, the ethics of animal experimentation. However, no one seems to address the rational justification for elevating humans to a higher level of worth. I'm not saying that experimentation is outright wrong, but the ethical assessments like these should never be automatic.
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.
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!
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.
>I don't believe it's possible to give a convincing argument for choosing you over a member of something else's species.
You are drowning.
Thumper is drowning.
Who am I to save. Hmm.... let me think about it.
Oh wait, I shouldn't think about it because I should pick you over Thumper. Because only people with absolute lack of empathy would pick Thumper.
Sorry if this annoys you.
--
BMO
They then figured out it could also work for cars 60 years later, and called it a breakthrough in technology.
To be fair, the cost, size, weight, and safety standards are a little more stringent in the private passenger car market. I suspect the breakthroughs involved meeting those requirements.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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.
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.
So you are saying that it is okay to use human babies as fertilizer for your lawn and skin them to make lamp shades?
No, I was saying that I think it's pointless to refuse a treatment because of the methods used to develop it that are no longer in use. The scenario I described was a one-time thing, and the perpetrator would be punished, but the treatment would remain available. I suppose you could refuse the treatment, but I just think it's meaningless.
And yes, for some this includes making use of research obained through immoral means.
What a meaningless sacrifice.
That you do, says a lot about you.
That I have a different opinion than 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.
Individual morals likely never disappear as long as you're human. I don't see where anyone mentioned the fact that everyone else is doing it, either.
The daily proof is that we don't eat our dead.
I thought that was unhealthy, anyway? And who is "we"? I'm sure there are some cultures that do.
I predict you will be shunned.
Eating human sounds rather unappetizing to me, so I'll pass on that. But I find it amusing that a few sentences prior to this you mentioned "everyone else is doing it," and here you basically say, "no one else is doing it!"
Amazing as it may appear to you, some people would indeed refuse such a treatment.
I never said that they couldn't. I just said I thought it was meaningless.
It is what makes them human.
And people who don't are... goblins or something? No True Human would go through with the treatment! Statements such as these always amuse me. They attempt to state as a fact what a human being should act like, and anyone that doesn't follow their made-up rules must be some sort of alien in disguise as a human.
That you can't means you are an animal.
All humans are animals, and I believe you'd be hard-pressed to find a human being that doesn't have any morals whatsoever. Them having different morals than you doesn't mean that they don't have any at all.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
We called them eugenicists.
What? I don't believe that has anything to do with what I said.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Standard procedure for killing test animals is nitrogen. Animal in chamber, nitrogen in chamber, oxygen out of chamber, animal dead. It's painless, and it doesn't cause any damage that might obscure important features.
And you've gone down this road mentally, thought about it, and wrote down that you're not sure if certain humans should be allowed to live versus another species or whether humans are worth sticking up for at all.
It depends on the situation. Deciding whether or not to save a member of another species you love over a human has nothing to do with eugenicists.
I didn't say anything about whether humans are worth sticking up for at all or not. That's a subjective matter.
Don't message me back.
Then don't reply to me in a place where I have the ability to reply to your comments.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This is just in time for the Olympics. Let's see how well Phelps can keep up with microparticle enhanced bubble-head mariners.