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Suspended Animation Tests Successful 392

Posted by CowboyNeal from the rip-van-winkle dept.
chrisb33 writes "Wired News reports that suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out with pigs. From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems).'" The pig that was the subject of the article was kept in suspended animation for two hours, and Duggan and his team have successfully suspended hundreds of pigs for an hour at a time. It's still a far cry from a spaceship filled with sleep pods, but would be just the ticket for doctors who need to buy extra time to save lives.
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Suspended Animation Tests Successful More

Suspended Animation Tests Successful

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  • Welcome (Score:5, Funny)

    by gregbains ( 890793 ) <greg_bains@hoCOB ... m minus language> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:31PM (#15715774) Homepage Journal
    Welcome.... To the wold of 2 hours later

    • Re:Welcome (Score:5, Funny)

      by iconeternal ( 889316 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:37PM (#15715800)
      it's like a tivo for the future. wanna know who wins the golf tournament, but don't want to sit around and wait for it? go into a state of suspended animation!

    • Re:Welcome (Score:5, Insightful)

      by darkmeridian ( 119044 ) <william.chuang@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:54PM (#15715894) Homepage
      Suspending someone in animation has at least one application: the military. I don't know how complicated the process is, but if you can suspend a wounded soldier in a forward area and ship him back to a proper hospital for treatment, then two hours would be an eternity. Of course, suspended animation won't keep a guy alive if he were blown in half, but the forward MASH could do some quick stabilization, freeze him, and send him back for delicate neurosurgery to remove shrapnel from his brain, for example, to minimize damage.

      • Blown in half (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Sithech ( 858269 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:46PM (#15716119)
        Actually, suspended animation is exactly what WOULD save a guy who was blown in half. It buys you time do do as complex a surgical procedure as you want, over as long a time as it takes to put the key bits back together again. You get a bloodless field to work in and can do microsurgical anastamoses to your hearts content.

        So blown-in-half guy gets aorta and cava put back together; bone grafting and wiring or rodding his spinal column and an anastamosis of the spinal cord or cord amputation; clean up the damage to the kidneys and pancreas; do splenectomy if needed; multiple gut anastamoses and/or resections; and layered closures of the whole body wall. Nothing we don't do now - we just don't have time to do it.

        • Re:Blown in half (Score:3, Insightful)

          by LindseyJ ( 983603 )
          From another, colder (no pun intended) perspective:

          Would it be worth all the money and hassle (from the point of view of the military) just to save one guy? Unless, as the GP had said, his 'return trip' was just returning him to the front. IANAD, but all those procedures seem like they would take a long time, and time is invaluable on the battlefield. Also as someone else mentioned, is the issue of tissue rejection, and other such worries. Yes, this is saving a life, and to you and me this is worth it.

          • Re:Blown in half (Score:3, Interesting)

            by someone300 ( 891284 )
            Depends who it is. If it's someone high up with lots of experience then I guess they're more likely to do this to them because the overall cost of finding and training someone to their level might far, far exceed the cost of fixing them back together. If it's just a low level solider then they probably won't. There obviously are going to be people who go "A human life is a human life, whether it's had 40 years training or just joined the army" (including me) but it doesn't mean they'll listen.

          • Re:Blown in half (Score:5, Insightful)

            by hazem ( 472289 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @10:37PM (#15716346) Journal
            You might be right. But a key point to maintaining soldier morale is making sure they think everything will be done to save them if they are injured.

            If you start withholding care that could save their buddies, they'll quickly realize that the care will be withheld from them too - and they're less likely to fight so well.

            Soldiers can be pretty pragmatic too...
          • From my murky memory of history, I seem to remember that armies historically have run out of manpower before they run out of any sort of raw materials. Especially for a modern state, manpower would seem to really be the limiting factor in a war. You need people to make the bullets, and people to fire them. You also need bodies for your post-war economy. So I would think practically speaking that saving a life would be worth any sort of material cost. Wars like the Iraq and Vietnam wars may be a little diffe
        • I meant that a guy blown in half would not have time for even the suspended animation process.

  • old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by iconeternal ( 889316 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:31PM (#15715775)
    I've got four pounds of bacon in my fridge right now.

  • Suspension not the problem... (Score:4, Funny)

    by boobox ( 673856 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:32PM (#15715778)
    When we get to the point of cryogenic suspension being used in space travel, it's not the process I would be worried about. *cough*HAL*cough*

  • Similar Story (Score:5, Informative)

    by scrow ( 620374 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:36PM (#15715794)
    A similar story was posted a while back about U.S. Scientists doing this to dogs [slashdot.org].

    • Auction time! (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A similar story was posted a while back about U.S. Scientists doing this to dogs

      Pigs! I hear pigs, any advance on pigs? Come on, ladies and gentlemen, I'm sure you've frozen more impressive animals than pigs. Dogs! Thank you sirs. Dogs to the group of US scientists in the corner. Dogs are bid. Dogs is the bid. Do I hear any advance on dogs? Dogs going once... Going twice... WALT DISNEY! Sold! Sold to the gentleman with the large ears and his trouserless sailor friend.

  • How? (Score:4, Funny)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:36PM (#15715799) Homepage
    How can you freeze hundereds of pigs for an hour? (And thaw them at the same time?).

    It will make a good business, freezing people so their savings would grow and they could see the future.

    But it also means the meat in your freezer might be technically alive.

    alive!
    • IF this ever becomes reality then I see some very rich people or interest rates going very low in accounts. Would be nice to see the future though

      • Re:How? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bunions ( 970377 )
        I imagine keeping yourself in suspended animation would be neither cheap nor entirely risk-free.

    • Re:How? (Score:3, Funny)

      by wjsroot ( 732775 )
      (And thaw them at the same time?) Easy. Microwave!

    • Re:How? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by davidsyes ( 765062 )
      Well, the meat still cannot locomote. It's worse off than plants still rooted to the ground.

      But, imagine giving criminals (and wrongfully accused/evidence-stacked-against-them) "suspended sentences". You can "suspend them in animation" as well as suspend the verdicts leading to their sentences. Their sentence (punishment rightly or wrongly) AND the sentences (words) could be suspended from a string, or placed on a cryo-ice shelf in their flask.

      Probably the GOOD thing is that the belatedly wrongfully-sentenc
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • If you want ethical problems... (Score:5, Informative)

    by RsG ( 809189 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:39PM (#15715807)
    ...I seem to recall Larry Niven wrote about the possible (mis)uses of suspended animation in his Known Space series of books.

    One of Niven's ideas was of using executed criminals as a source for organ replacement; this led to the eventual application of the death penalty for most crimes. The general idea was that this would be made possible by using suspended animation to keep the organs alive and healthy for long periods after the "donor" had been killed, so that a suitable match might be found. Your new liver might come from someone who died years ago, and whose parts were kept in storage until a matching donor like yourself had need of them.

    Niven also introduced the idea that illegal organ harvesting could also happen; "organleggers" kidnap and disassemble people to provide a black market service. He was writing this in the 60's, and since then there have been signs of both situations (legal and illegal execution as a source of organs) happening in thw world.

    Assuming we could keep body parts alive in suspended animation after the host is dead, we could do exactly what Niven described. The question is, will we?
    • This is the very reason that organ donation by death row inmates is not allowed in the US. If a person is going to be put to death there can be no possibility that it is being done to benefit another person through organ harvesting. As wasteful as it is, it is much better that the person is executed as punishment for their crime and no other reason.

    • Re:If you want ethical problems... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hackstraw ( 262471 ) * on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:49PM (#15716126)

      Not only are ehtical issues having to be addressed, but legal ones as well.

      IANAL, but from the article, "brain activity has ceased", which as I understand it is the legal and medical definition of human death.

      With the recent news like the Kevorkian [cnn.com] issue, what is being alive or dead legally or ethically today?

      • Just change the definition of death by adding the word "irreversably" before ceased, and you'll be fine.
      • The exact procedure of tests to determine brain activity is a little bit more complicated in the medical reality.

        It's not only "EEG is flat ergo the patient is dead, let's pull happily the plug".

        Mostly, a doctor is supposed to run a whole batch of several tests, mostly testing funciton of the brain stem (with the idea that nowaday one needs a functionning brain stem to live. Just as in the past centuries the pulse was tested because a functionning hearth seemed to be a sensible requirement)
        Those test have t

    • Re:If you want ethical problems... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dustman ( 34626 ) <dleary.ttlc@net> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:53PM (#15716152)
      Assuming we could keep body parts alive in suspended animation after the host is dead, we could do exactly what Niven described. The question is, will we?

      Niven explores the ramifications even more: In "A Gift From Earth", a small human colony is ruled by a relatively fascist government, with dissidents ending up in the organ banks. The government's control is threatened when a "care package" from Earth arrives, with the technology for growing organs directly from scratch, which makes the organ banks obsolete.

      In Niven's timeline, this technology came a long time (a few centuries?) after the organ bank concept was perfected. In reality, we will have this technology much more quickly.

    • Technologies present lots of ethical problems, but I'm not worried about this one. Two reasons.

      1) It would never happen. As others point out, we're so worried about the potential problem that we don't allow death row inmates to become organ donors. Why would making organ donation easier and more successful change our already legally established position on the subject?

      2) Research into construction and growth of replacement organs is already well advanced for many organs. The technologies include 3-D tis

  • And now, the movie (Score:4, Funny)

    by krell ( 896769 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:39PM (#15715809) Journal
    This calls for a muppet movie in which Miss Piggy wakes up in 2999 and befriends an alcoholic robot, one-eyed mutant girl, and muffle-voiced walking lobster.
  • Everybody, sing along...

    It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere,
    I'm all alone, more or less,
    Let me fly, far away from here,
    Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun.
  • ... and mostly dead is not the same as completely dead.

    Can you imagine the lack of respect these researchers must recieve in certain circles?

    Also I wish Wired would have elaborated a bit regarding the ethical issues of suspended animation. Saving people from gunshot wounds, the only example listed in the article, seems like a no-brainer to me.
    • That's a Princess Bride quote, by the way...
    • Also I wish Wired would have elaborated a bit regarding the ethical issues of suspended animation.

      Umm... I think they were talking about the ethical issues of doing the clinical trials on humans, not the actual precedure once it's been proven. If somebody comes into the trauma room with gunshot wounds, do you do everything to save him, or do you try this risky new procedure that's never been tried on a human before, hoping to buy more time for the surgery? Ethical delimma. Cross your fingers and hope t

  • Big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by f1r3br4nd ( 16047 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:42PM (#15715831)
    50*F is 10*C, still not frozen (and who the hell uses Fahrenheit in a medical setting?!). There have been tests with cooled-down mammals including dogs and baboons since the 1950's. I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier.

    • Re:Big deal. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ArbitraryConstant ( 763964 )
      "I'll get optimistic when they break the 0*C barrier."

      I don't think a mammal freezes at 0 due to the salt and other impurities.

    • Re:Big deal. (Score:3, Informative)

      by RsG ( 809189 )
      If they do break the 0*C barrier, it'll likely be at the cost of the patient's life. At the point where water freezes, cell's rupture from the ice crystals forming within. I don't know how the hell they could get around that, unless they can somehow dehydrate the body and rehydrate it on revival (freeze dried pork, yum!)

      • Re:Big deal. (Score:5, Informative)

        by f1r3br4nd ( 16047 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:38PM (#15716082)
        Not so. There exist vitrification compounds that prevent ice crystals from forming, and instead the water congeals into an ice-like substance. That's why embryos can be frozen solid and revived, as can certain tissues destined for transplant.

      • Re:Big deal. (Score:4, Informative)

        by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:58PM (#15716181)
        At the point where water freezes, cells rupture from the ice crystals forming within.

        Actually, cell rupture from the result of sharp-edged crystal formation occurs during the post-warming cycle, not during cool down. This is why rescuers prefer to bring avalanche victims back to normal body temp in as much of a controlled process as possible, in order to avoid as much crystal formation as possible. The most common result is frostbite, of course. In addition, after it happens once, you are best advised to not subject the same body part to another incident, as tissue durability in regards to a repeat is lost.

      • Re:Big deal. (Score:2, Redundant)

        by f1r3br4nd ( 16047 )
        Not necesserily. There exist vitrification compounds that prevent ice crystals from forming, and instead the water congeals into an ice-like substance. That's why embryos can be frozen solid and revived, as can certain tissues destined for transplant.
    • Who cares whether it's frozen or not? It's the effect that's important, not the temperature. If they can achieve suspended animation at room temperature, I'm all for that.

  • Long-term suspension is probably science fiction.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kcbrown ( 7426 ) <slashdot@sysexperts.com> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:42PM (#15715833)

    Some people may think that this may end up being a way to deal with any sort of terminal illness. I don't think it is. And it has nothing to do with the technology.

    The real problems are financial and political. Suppose you get yourself "frozen". At that point, are you legally alive or dead? In order to be able to pay for the perhaps hundreds of years you might be in storage, you'll have to have a sizable chunk of change set aside. Your heirs (or, more likely, their descendants) will almost certainly attempt to gain control over it, and so the question of whether or not you're legally alive will have to be answered. I wouldn't put good odds on the ruling coming out in your favor.

    But suppose it does. Now the question becomes how you ensure that the organization that freezes you will survive for the amount of time it takes for a cure to your terminal illness to be found. The odds of that happening are not good. How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now? Damn few.

    And on top of that, there's the problem of the political stability of the country the organization in question is based in, not to mention the world at large.

    The bottom line is that getting yourself frozen in the face of a terminal illness is a very low-probability shot in the dark. But any chance of survival is better than no chance, so I'd take the risk if it were me.

    • I think its a scientific impossibility, not a legal one. You could always just set up a trust and/or foundation for yourself. Foundations can and do survive the initiator by decades without getting eaten up by later generations -- take a look at the Ford Foundation, etc. Granted, you'd have to be super-mega rich to make it work, but hey, the question is whether its possible rather than whether its achievable for the average working stiff.

      >> How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one

    • Long-term suspension is "science fiction" in the sense that space travel was science fiction back in the 1930s. Then in the 1960s we landed on the moon. That's how fast science fiction can become reality.

      How do you really think somebody will have to be suspended before we have the technology to revive them? A hundred years? Two hundred? Those are not likely guesses, from my standpoint. If nanotechnology-based reconstruction will work for this purpose as we "transhumanist nut-jobs" hope, we'll probably
    • I think a lot of the financial issues could be outlined in some sort of legal document. Something like a "living will" perhaps?

    • Re:Long-term suspension is probably science fictio (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How many several-hundred-year-old organizations can one find right now?

      In the USA, almost none. Here in the UK there are loads - schools, hospitals, guilds, universities, civic corporations, etc.

      Just in my own experience, my first-year room at college was built about 600 years ago and my school was founded about a century later.

  • Let the tasteless joking commence (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eudial ( 590661 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:43PM (#15715836)
    Soylent ice cream is people!
  • ...but for the application the summary talks about, I would think it would be harder to cryogenically preserve people with some types of injuries or diseases.
  • The Doctor need to buy time? He can make his own, can't he?

  • Critical patients? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:48PM (#15715861)
    It's still a far cry from a spaceship filled with sleep pods, but would be just the ticket for doctors who need to buy extra time to save lives.

    "Extra time" is usually needed when the patient is in critical condition. Critical patients, by definition, don't survive 'rough handling'.

    • OTOH, what needs to survive? If you've got someone that's barely one step above a cadaver, but could be restored given time, then stopping their heart (and therefor any further hemmorage) and suspending the body to prevent oxygen starvation and cell death might be just the right idea.

      Once you're no longer dealing with a ticking clock, the possibilities for systematic restoration open up; ie, you could make some of the repairs while they're still suspended, and tie them into life support systems before waki

  • limits? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PresidentEnder ( 849024 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (rednenrevyw)> on Thursday July 13, 2006 @08:53PM (#15715884) Journal
    I'm curious as to just how far we can go with this. We can keep a pig alive for an hour or two; how much longer? An hour or two is great for saving gunshot patients and the like, but we need at least a few months to make it matter for space travel. What limits are there on the current method? Why wouldn't this work for years on end?
    • I am not a doctor nor have I really studied this in any way but if I were to simply speculate as a sort of informed lay person I would be it has to do with not being really frozen at all.

      What they are doing here in the article is not freezing the patient just lowering their body temperature to the point where most biological process appear to stop. That is great if you are quickly bleeding to death from an arterial wound it would be nice if we could stop your heart for a while without you going brain dead,
    • This is nothing. There's frogs [nationalgeographic.com] that can stay frozen all winter and then wake up fine in the summer. Me thinks we need to do some gene splicing.

  • Nut-jobs. Real tolerant. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by f1r3br4nd ( 16047 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:02PM (#15715929)
    Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans

    Let's see how it would make Wired sound if we changed the original sentence to apply to some more popular and better armed belief systems:

    Long the domain of Christian nut-jobs, cosmologists report that the age of the universe is an overestimate and now believe it to be closer to the Biblical six thousand years.
    ...or...

    Long the domain of Muslim nut-jobs, researchers at the Royal Madrassa Institute announced hard evidence that martyrs instantly ascend to heaven.
    ...or...

    Long the domain of Mormon nut-jobs, archaeologists have rediscovered the golden plates that Joseph Smith claimed were given to him by the angel Moroni.
    ...or (I triple dare you)...

    Long the domain of Scientology nut-jobs, paleontologists have reported a heretofore undiscovered volcano in Hawaii showing traces of ancient alien visitors.

    Would Wired have the balls to print any of the above sentences? I doubt it. Too scared of being boycotted, firebombed, or sued. So are these cowards getting a few cheap laughs at the expense of our beliefs about the soul and life after death because they know there aren't enough of us nut-jobs to fight back? At least our beliefs are slowly coming closer to realization, unlike the anti-scientific belief systems portrayed above. Why are we the nutjobs then?

    What, you're into tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs unless you outnumber them by a comfortable margin, is that the true extent of your commitment to civil liberties? Screw you Wired bigots. And the inevitable flood of Slashdot bigots who will think it's fun to bully people who have never done them or anybody else any harm whatsoever.

    To clarify: I'm not saying Wired should be sued, bombed, or censored. They have a right to say what they like. Just like I have the right to say they're low-lifes for going out of their way for no particular reason to insult me and other people who share my beliefs.
    • Dude. Who pissed in your heparin drip this morning?

    • Re:Nut-jobs. Real tolerant. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Thursday July 13, 2006 @10:45PM (#15716373) Homepage Journal
      cult (n): a small, unpopular religion.

      religion (n): a large, popular cult.

      That's really all there is to it. If there were large enough numbers of transhumanist nutjobs to gain recognition for their nutty beliefs, those beliefs would cease to be regarded as nutty, and when some transhumanist blowhard got up on TV to talk about his chosen brand of nuttiness, everyone would nod wisely and stroke their chins and say, "Well, of course we must respect the views of those who follow the transhumanist faith ..."

      So get out there and start converting the heathens, brother!

  • What sticky ethical problems? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by f1r3br4nd ( 16047 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:10PM (#15715952)
    I'm missing something here. What are the ethical problems? It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections, and therefore the only way for me to preserve my soul at this time is to preserve my physical brain. In accordance with my belief, I spend my own money on a life insurance policy and name a cryonics company as the beneficiary. Of my own free will I enter into a contract with this cryonics company whereby they agree to place me in suspended animation as soon as possible after I am prounounced dead. Some people want to be cremated, some want to be buried, I want to be frozen. Explain to me the ethical problem here.

    Oh, you must mean the ethical problem of society being full of reactionary sanctimonous busy-bodies who think they know what's best for me. I agree, this is a big ethical problem, and thank you for agreeing that they should get off our backs and let us do as we like with our bodies and our estates.

    • Re:What sticky ethical problems? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by orasio ( 188021 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @11:06PM (#15716490) Homepage
      It is my belief that my soul is encoded in my pattern of neural connections, and therefore the only way for me to preserve my soul at this time is to preserve my physical brain. In accordance with my belief, I spend my own money on a life insurance policy and name a cryonics company as the beneficiary.


      And what proves that you don't cease to exist?
      Maybe a long time after you are frozen, people wake up someone who swears it is you, but I have given it some thought, and I am sure that life is a continuous thing, and that once you are dead, you are dead. And that, even if they can wake up a conscious person, you would be dead.

      The real problem with that way of seeing it, is that the woken-up guy would think that the procedure actually worked, but you would be dead. so there would be no experimental way of finding out if am wrong.

      I am really concerned about that, specially, because I haven't seen anyone with my same view of things.

      Of course, my point is easier to get, when you use the example of star trek style teletransportation, but this case gives me the creeps too.

      • Can you give any actual argument to support that idea? People already experience non-continuity of consciousness with: sleep(arguably), drugs, accidents. People have experienced brain-death and then been revived before. Do you believe those people were essentially replaced by a doppleganger?
    • I didn't read the GP poster, but I did see your comment. With regard to the article and some other posts, here's an ethicaly problematic situation:

      You are in a car accident that severely dammages your internal organs. The doctors think that with current medical knowledge you have a 25% chance of living. They decide that, in your best interests, they should keep you on ice for a year or two to see if treatments get better. Your distraught life (or even worse, estranged but still custodian of your next of

  • transhumanistic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by clem ( 5683 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:12PM (#15715958) Homepage
    From the article: 'Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs...

    Bold words from Wired, the official newsletter of transhumanist nut-jobs.
    • I've been signed up for cryonic suspension for over 15 years, along with my wife and two kids, and I resent being called a "transhumanist nut-job". I am a good husband and father, honest and hard working, and well-respected in my field. It baffles me that in this day and age, the Wired writer (and his editor!) apparently feels free to openly use such an epithet against a group of people whose only sin is unconventional disposal of their bodies after they die. With all the belief systems in this world which
  • The biggest problem with cryogenic freezing, assuming you get past that whole "freezing things destroys living cells" problem, is that you are not legally allowed to freeze someone until they are dead. That means that currently, you cannot begin cryogenic procedures (like the ones described in TFA) until the person has died of natural causes.

    So I guess the idea is that you get cryogenically frozen and then, someday, when society has come up with a cure for death, you will be revived and live long into the future!
  • Yeah, this is old news. Duke Nukem went in years ago.
  • Please don't confuse Suspension which has been tested for many years at "high temps" e.g., cold but frozen with the COMBINATION of Suspension + Freezing which of course if it could work would work for a long time period.

    The problem is really cold makes water into crystals which destroy cells and makes the corpsical very brittle.. Esp. true if they are using liquid nitrog. which is very very cold..

  • Hibernation, not cryonic suspension (Score:5, Informative)

    by gvc ( 167165 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @09:42PM (#15716103)
    Quirks and Quarks had an episode on human hibernation [www.cbc.ca] discussing the known mechanisms and methods within the realm of immediate possibility. It is well established that cold-water near-drowning victims have survived several hours without oxygen. From an ethical point of view the first human subjects would have to be "last hope" interventions, where death would be inevitable if hibernation were not induced.
  • This seems really fascinating in principle. It would be nice to know if they did any brain wave readings (usually a difference between healthy and brain dead people can be readily discerned). Perhaps more subtle changes in brain wave patterns could even be measured. That way we would know atleast one indication of how 'intact' the mind is after recovery. Memory storage and recall are not well understood...how 'hardwired' are we, really? For the /. crowd, is our mind in the non-volatile or the volatile
  • For some reason, the thought of having all my bodily fluids turn to a cold, crystalline form gives me the creeps.

    Cool, all the same.

  • Russians did it in the 40's (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aaden42 ( 198257 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @10:11PM (#15716241) Homepage
    Russian scientists did this kind of work on dogs in the 1940's. There's video of the procedures on archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/Experime1940 [archive.org]

    WARNING: Not for the squeemish...

  • This has already been done in humans, to a degree. Something similar to this is done in treating brain anuerisms when caught early. They redirect the blood and chill it, slowly lowering the body to 70 degrees. Where, all brain function and heart function stop. By controlling this, they can surgically remove the anuerism before it bursts, which they couldn't do when the person is 'awake'. It's not really suspended animation, because the machine is pumping your blood and breathing for your. Unlike these

  • It wasn't the doctor who saved her life... (Score:4, Funny)

    by thenickboy ( 171660 ) on Thursday July 13, 2006 @10:52PM (#15716408)

    But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead

    the thing that brought her back to life was TRUE LOVE...
  • The Disney corporation has transferred all it's copyrights to an employee, who has now entered a state of cyrogenic suspension.

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