Researchers bring back animals from the dead.

[dhinojosa]

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,376140,00.html

Round-Trip Journeys to the Afterworld

By Jörg Blech

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.

A patient is delivered by helicopter to Berlin's Accident Hospital: More seriously wounded patients might survive if they were put into a state of suspended animation before they got transported.

A patient is delivered by helicopter to Berlin's Accident Hospital: More seriously wounded patients might survive if they were put into a state of suspended animation before they got transported.
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."

The same magic forces seem to be at work in the animal research facility of the General Hospital of the City of Vienna. Pigs are suddenly opening their eyes after their hearts were stopped with electric shocks and they lay dead for half an hour. "The miracle," says Wilhelm Behringer, 39, a physician specializing in emergency medicine, "is that the animals return to life without neurological damage."

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. None of the animals feel pain, because the experiments are done under full anesthesia.


Read more at:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,376140,00.html

[niyad]

1. does the name frankenstein ring a bell?

[SidDithers]

36. It's pronounced Fronkensteen!!!! nt

Sid

[AtomicKitten]

2. Dude, didn't these people see Pet Semetary?

Church freaked me out.

[Orrex]

6. That's why I don't go to church.

Oh, you mean the cat...

Here's another commentary on the same subject from a few months back:
http://jabartlett.blogspot.com/2005/06/news-from-frontiers-of-necromancy-jb.html

[belle]

18. My first thought too...

[faithfulcitizen]

34. Yes, that and "Flatliners" -eeek!

[More Than A Feeling]

3. Anyone up for being the first Necronaut?

Think of the questions we could answer, if this becomes viable for humans. "Is there really an afterworld, and if there is, what is it like?" being the main one, but I am sure there are others.

[Theres-a]

35. Necronaut!

Clever!

[Lorien]

4. Well, if we used this technique on fundies it might wake

them up! They would come back from the dead having seen no afterlife, and maybe they'd try spending their time here on earth a little more wisely.

[More Than A Feeling]

5. What if it turned out there was?

Actually, I would be quite surprised if people immediately go to the afterlife when they die. In my view they stay dead until what is colloquially known as "The Final Judgement".

So don't be so sure that if nothing happened, people would stop believing in God.

[Lorien]

7. You're probably right; they'd just keep on believing

in what is, in my mind, only wishful thinking.

[cynatnite]

8. Some christians believe there's nothing at death...

only go to heaven when Jesus returns. :shrug:

I doubt this will change much except some of the wackier christians might want to burn the scientists at the stake for messing around with death.

[dhinojosa]

11. Are you saying we can fuck with them into thinking the rapture came?

Awesome!

[dusty64]

9. Sick sick sick

bastards. This is wrong on so many levels.......

[dhinojosa]

12. I like it!

How is it wrong?

[dusty64]

26. My views on experimentation

on animals probably have much to do with my feeling about this. If someone is dying enroute to a hospital why not try it then. In some cases of heart attack this may be VERY effective when the patient isn't going to make it to the facility anyways. In trauma cases this would probably never work regardless. My gut feelings on this are similar to the ones I felt when I read about the face transplant experiments on animals. It seems very wrong to be doing this, kinda like cloning and messing with things that cross the line. Doing this to a healthy being when it could be tried in the field is just wrong. These are my ethical values and they aren't going to change so anyone sparking a flamewar over animal experimentation is not going to bait me.

[alarcojon]

13. I don't see what is so wrong about it

My initial reaction on reading the headline was something like "Holy shit, we should not be tampering with death." But my interpretation of the article is that this research could save lives by slowing down the rate at which brain death occurs, until proper medical care could be given.

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.

Any speculation about doing this as an experiment to see if there is an afterlife is not supported by any of the research goals. I DO think there is an ethical issue, in that a patient who would probably die otherwise would not likely be in a position to choose to have this done, and it might, just might, be truly life-transforming, and not necessarily in a good way.

As far as putting someone on ice to revive them much later....

Just how long these excursions into the afterworld can be drawn out remains unknown. In any case, no one is likely to be booking trips to faraway galaxies anytime soon. It may be that the records achieved so far -- three hours in dogs and six hours in mice -- already represent the upper limit.

[cynatnite]

14. The potential to save life is much higher than bringing someone back...

I don't have a problem with it at all. It sounds like it works great for people who suffer traumatic blood loss. They haven't cured a disease or mended an injured brain. It's one more method to save lives and one that won't be used for some time given the testing they're doing at this point.

[alarcojon]

15. I also don't have a problem with it

but that doesn't mean there isn't an ethical issue which should be discussed.

[cynatnite]

19. To me the question boils down to what is death...

It does need to be discussed. What I'm wondering about is when they perform this procedure, is it really death? Are the animals clinically dead? Or are their vitals and activity so slow and minute that it could be mistaken for death.

I've heard and read stories about people being mistaken for dead when in fact they weren't. I read some time ago an article about graves from the 19th century and earlier that when they were opened, there was evidence of the people inside coming back and trying to claw their way out.

The question from this will be: When is it death?

[alarcojon]

22. I agree - that is the issue

This line jumps out at me: The pallid canines were dead, at least according to the laws of medicine: no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity.

So maybe the laws of medicine as we know them are wrong? Any honest researcher must consider this possibility.

[Initech]

10. Couldnt this bring zombies to life and spark armageddon?

[The Animator]

16. I think it's brilliant.. think of the surgical applications.

A terminal cancer patient might have a shot at a new life... literally. Put them in suspended animation, and preform a surgery that would be too risky to do on a person with a beating heart, flowing blood, or current running through their brains.

Imagine someone with a failing kindey, or liver, someone with lukemia, these are all fatal if a matching donor cannot be found in time. Putting the recipients in suspended animation, and maybe even cloning new organs for them using their DNA, while they are suspended. I think we should not look at this negatively, this is a medical breakthrough, it can help us live longer healthier lives I'm all for it.

As for an afterlife, for me, the jury is still out on that one. I was once a Catholic, but now I'm an Athiest/Agnostic or something. If there is no afterlife, I'll want to live as long as possible, hell I'd love to be immortal, and if the key to immortality, or near immortality lies research into suspended animation, then I'm all for it. It may be a little unsettling to think about, sometimes advances in science and technology can leave you with a queasy uncertain feeling. Knowledge truly is power, and sometimes its difficult to imagine that mankind is ready to weild this kind of power.

This feeling of unease is not without precident in history, when automobile technology advanced to the point where cars could travel faster than a trotting horse, it was veiwed as unnatural by some, and was met with resistance. There are many other examples, but I'm too tired to get into them. In closing, I would finish this little editorial by quoting from Jurrassic Park.

On one side you have those who feel like Ian Malcom.

"John your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that the never stop to consider whether or not they should."

Then there are those who feel like John Hammond.

"How could we stand in the light of dicovery and not act?"

Despite how the story of Jurrasic Park ends, I'm siding with Hammond on this one. Finaly, as a general rule, if the fundies object to it, it must be a good thing.

[cynatnite]

17. I'm a lot like you when it comes to death...

and the lack of belief in the afterlife. I'm not sure I want to be immortal. I watched enough Highlander to know the drawbacks :)

[Graf Orlok]

20. Holy shit! If they did this to humans...

man, that would be sweet!

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. Ok, ok, I am getting tired of this

Combat Robots, teh koreans are this close to deploying them

Suspended animation, the Geramns are about to do it... ok what is a sci fi writer to do?

[charlie]

24. You think you got troubles?

Imagine what a satirist feels like nowadays.

[shadowknows69]

28. romance novels is your only recourse

;)

[Blue-Jay]

23. Wanted for questioning:

[incapsulated]

25. I don't know. Some people should *stay* dead, ya know? n/t

[Hubert Flottz]

27. GREAT NEWS!!!

Now I won't have to feel guilty about ordering a B L & T with mayo!

[dhinojosa]

32. If anything ever happens well just drown ya, fix ya, and the order some...

delicious ribs.

hehe

[elehhhhna]

29. Cheney: finally, we understand.

[Hubert Flottz]

30. I hope they don't try that shit on Reagan!

Or Hoover!

[JHB]

31. Despite the macabre description, this has been used accidentally for years

The fundamental principle is nothing new: there are numerous cases of people revived after having drowned in a cold lake or something, long after the the lack of air would normally cause extensive brain damage, yet had none, thanks to the body's "shutting down" from the cold. The process was featured in a dramatic scene in the movie "The Abyss".

Yeah, the "back from the dead" bit makes it sound creepy, but remember, life ain't over 'til its OVER. If they bring you back, you weren't dead yet. The whole point of their process is to induce a state of suspension that may be "clinically dead", but clinically dead is (as Billy Crystal put it) "just mostly dead, not all the way dead. 'Mostly dead' means a little bit alive".

Nobody wakes up from "all the way dead".

But then, a headline of "Animals put in state of suspended animation for several hours" just wouldn't be as catchy.

[baby_mouse]

33. Cool!

Immortality for ME, please.

I can always change my mind...