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Gunshot Victims To Be Part of "Suspended Animation" Trials
New submitter Budgreen writes: "Knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month. The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. 'If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,' says surgeon Peter Rheeat from the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique. 10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials."
This sounds more like science fiction than anything else to me. But if it works and the technique becomes viable to handle patient with heavy injurie - and assuming the patients can be kept suspended for long periods of time without creating further damages, I wonder if the technique could be adapted for space travel. It would solve a lot of problems related to long-duration interplanetary travel.
The idea is not new. I just wonder if this could be the first step in this direction.
"10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials"
Jesus, I can already picture a scientist charging around a shopping mall with a revolver and a switch-blade yelling "For science!"
Summation 2
Sometimes its small details that make a huge difference and allow old ideas to become reality.
Just think about blood tranfusions. The first attemps to store blood to transfuse it at a later point all failed. A simple stabilisation agent made the procedure possible. I wouldn't expect the New Scientist to produce such details in their publications though.
It would be interesting to see a paper from a medical journal on this topic.
This idea is very old, so I suppose there was a technical hurdle to overcome.
Probably the replacing-all-their-blood-with-saline-without-them-dying part.
No sig today...
The real(?) key to long-term suspended animation (months, years) would probably involve cooling the body to sub-freezing temperatures.
At that point, you need something to keep the ice-crystals from rupturing cells. In certain antarctic fish they have glycoproteins that do this (I think other hibernating animals use glycol or glycogen).
Until we get nuclear fusion(?) it's clear that spaceflight even just within our solar system is going to require some pretty lengthy journeys. On the other hand, if safe long-term suspended animation is attained, there might be a whole bunch of "future" travelers who might decide to jump (one way of course) years, decades, centuries into the future.
I think there was a science fiction book which talked about the (disastrous) effects such a technology had on society.
My question is this voluntary? How is exactly does one opt out if they prefer traditional care? Doesn't seem to be like a recent victim of gross trauma, can exactly make an informed decision.
According to the article at New Scientist:
Maybe it's a bit trickier to replace every milliliter of blood in your body with cold salty water than to lower someone's body temperature.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I seem to recall some horror film plots something like that. Usually it's something along the lines of zombies, but I also seem to recall something along the lines of preserving the lives of those who are supposed to be dead and something bad happening as a result. Combine the two? Uh boy... they are supposed to be dead and when "brought back" are actually spirited by demons or something like that.
I am extremely wary yet curious about the technique. To take a body and remove the blood and store it? I'm okay with doing that to a person officially declared dead especially if it's (1) approved by the living person in advance (2) someone extremely recently dead.
What is it about blood which causes problems which are solved by removing it? What's more, with all that capilary action, how can they be sure they removed it all?
I may get an informed consent form tattooed on my chest. "Dear Mr/Mrs Doctor Person, If I am pretty much dead, feel free to try your experimental zombie procedures. Signed Iwill EatYourBrain
I had something similar done about 10 years ago. It was a bit experimental at the time and they told me I was very probably going to die during surgery and if I did not die I would prob. have brain damage and/or organ failure but without the surgery I would be dead in hours. They cooled down my body and then removed all my blood, there was no saline replacement. I was dead for about 10 minutes and apart from some problems reanimating me it worked out OK (there were some problems,I spent a month afterwards in a medically induced coma and had to have further work done repairing some damage caused during surgery). It was considered a major success at the time.
A bit scary to be told that you have about 30 minutes to live. Last thing I remember is the anesthetist putting a line in and thinking that once he injected the anesthetic I was going to die.
In which the victim's are cut and hacked until almost dead ... then suspended ... repaired ... and the fun begins again.
Combine this with the seriously chilling 'time dilation' drug and the future just seems a little darker.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.