Now You're Dead, Now You're Not...

[Amadeus]

I don't like to copy and paste big articles, so the bits below were taken from Spiegel International and the whole article is well worth reading, as I think that this is truly ground-breaking and re-defining the rules of medicine and biology:

 

Round-Trip Journeys to the Afterworld

 

Researchers allow pigs and dogs to bleed to death, fill their bodies with cold saline solution, and then bring the dead animals back to life a few hours later. The ability to switch living beings off and then on again could revolutionize medicine -- especially treatment of bleeding victims or heart-attack patients.

 

First the heart begins to beat, and then the pig starts breathing. Finally, it stands up and looks curiously at the man in the lab coat standing outside its cage.

 

"This animal was dead for several hours," says Hasan Alam, 39, a surgeon at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. "But we brought it back. And now it's here again."

 

......

 

In the last few years, the two research groups have sent a hundred pigs on round-trip journeys into the afterworld, using variations on the same trick in each case. The physicians flood the animals' bodies with several liters of a saline solution that's been cooled to about two degrees C (36° F). This puts the animals into a mysterious state of suspended animation that prevents the cells of their lifeless bodies from dying off.

 

.....

 

"It may sound futuristic, but we now have the ability to deliberately bring the body to a standstill," explains Hasan Alam (....) "We are preparing initial clinical trials with human beings"....

 

....

 

The candidates Professor Alam envisions for these trips to death and back are people who are admitted to emergency rooms with the most serious of gunshot wounds or injuries from accidents. Although their wounds may be relatively easy to suture, "surgeons need time," says Alam. He says that 19 of such patients out of 20 bleed to death before emergency doctors can finish their work.

 

But, as Alam and his associates hope, deliberately placing the dying bodies into a state of suspended animation can provide precious time needed to bring the victims to the hospital and perform surgery.

 

This is the scenario they envision: Instead of following the usual procedure of pumping banked blood into a trauma patient, emergency physicians allow the patient to bleed to death within minutes while recapturing the patient's blood. At the same time, the patient is quickly filled up with a cold saline solution. Only when his wounds have been sutured is the patient revived by returning his own warm blood to his veins and arteries.

 

The Boston group plans to try this procedure in human subjects within the next 12 to 18 months. Hasan Alam believes the relevant ethics commission will approve his request, because the first of these experiments would be performed on injured patients who normally couldn't be saved with conventional emergency medicine.

 

....

 

All of this seems incompatible with the rules of biology. Until now it was considered incontrovertible that the brain will (function correctly) if it's deprived of oxygen for only a few minutes (four to five minutes in human beings). Heart cells and other tissue are also irreversibly destroyed if the oxygen supply drops below a critical level.

 

But it seems the shock of cold temperature can interrupt these processes...

 

You can see this as mankind playing god, science fiction come true, or simply as an amazing medical breaktrough - the pure fact that we can now stop and restart life (without neurological damage) is both, absolutely amazing and somehow scary..

 

Now, where's my copy of "Flatliners"? I can smell a remake....

[Lonan3]

Fascinating, and rather scary stuff. Although they say there's no sign of neurological damage attached to the experiments so far, it will be interesting to see whether this is the case when humans are subjected to the treatment, and whether potential personality disorders may be a problem afterwards.

If it is successful, of course, then the medical benefits may not be the only outcome - it may just be the first step towards far-space exploration in a condition of 'suspended animation.'

[Gladys]

Yep, it is scary but fascinating.

 

This is consistent with a number of rescue stories where someone has drowned under ice or in ice cold water and have been sucessfully revived hours later. The thinking in the reports was that the cold slowed down the cell deterioration caused by death allowing resuscitation without any brain damage etc.