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Mitochondria and the Prevention of Death
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jul 16, 2007 09:33 PM
from the wrestling-the-dead-back-to-life dept.
from the wrestling-the-dead-back-to-life dept.
H_Fisher writes "Research into mitochondria — small structures within a cell that have their own DNA — suggests that they may be a cause of cellular death, according to Newsweek. The article The Science of Death: Reviving the Dead reports on people who have recovered from sudden death due to cardiac arrest through the use of medically induced hypothermia. The cooling process may help stop the death of brain and heart cells initiated by the mitochondria once they are deprived of oxygen. The article goes on to probe delicately at the question of where a person's personality 'is' between death and later revival, and describes several ongoing scientific studies of near-death experiences."
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It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah. Do you trot out the same eloquent sensibilities for people who buy a new pair of leather shoes at some point before their last pair wears out? Oh, that's fashion - that's different, I guess. And what sport is it, exactly, that you think I'm practicing? Personally, I eat the birds and other animals that I personally go out looking for and bring home to the kitchen. And for each one I cook, that's one chemical-filled, agro-biz-raised taste-free farm animal I'm NOT eating. Do you eat the worms that are sliced in half while the soy plants for your tofurkey are being cultivated? Do you stand underneath the spinning blades of a nice, Green-friendly power generating windmill and eat the birds and bats that are beaten to death and fall to the ground so that some electrons can make your Wii glow and amuse you? What? I'm being presumptuous about your habits? Huh. It's almost like I don't know you, or something. Sort of like you're spouting a bunch of condescending crap that serves only to illustrate your own ignorance, bigotry, and malice. Which is fine, and you won't see me scolding you about where you can do it. Not to be confused with your take on things. I'm so glad that you're here to serve as thought police and to be the mind-reading arbitor of activities about which you - clearly - know nothing, but about which you none the less have formed a complex, nuanced, fully contemplated opinion. I mean, how else could you arrive at such a compelling, informed, and audience-changing bit of rhetoric? It's freakin' GENIUS, man. Wow. You've worn me out, and now I need to eat some protein. What do you recommend? Chicken? No thanks. Wild pheasant is far, far healthier.
Parent
Re:It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:5, Funny)
the skill is in lighting it without them knowing.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Yes, indeed. Although it does lend a different meaning to the phrase "Hunter-Gatherer".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no. You're trying WAY too hard. I'm using a touch of rhetorical satire to point out that most people who elect to insert feigned outrage into a conversation are usually gigantic, annoying hypocrits.
Parent
Re:It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I don't read "arguments" that begin with "um".
I was so tempted just to reply "I don't read 'arguments' that begin with 'um' *or* 'sorry'" - but I decided that it was only slightly wittier than either of the originals, and witty they were not.
I find it hilarious that an article mentioning (focused on is too strong - despite the title it was about 4 paragraphs) an extremely low level process (ie possible mitochondrial-related rapid apoptosis of neurons after oxygen short-term deprivation as a leading cause of death in cardiac arrest) has resulted in some moronic moral battle between "keep what you kill" and "meat is murder".
Your argument is stupidly off-topic for this article. So, here are two fun trains of thought to get you guys back on track:
1) Your mitochondria, after millions of years, have not realized that we can usually revive the rest of your body after 10 minutes of cardiac arrest. Don't we wish they could figure that out. Maybe we could rise above other base "evolutionary" traits as well and learn to be more ethical to other living beings. Meat is murder!
2) Your mitochondria, after millions of years, are the result of an amazing evolutionary process likely descended from symbiotic prokaryotes that now constitute the major energy-producing components of our bodies. Thanks to said little helpers and many other evolutionary advantages, we can enjoy a higher standard of living, often grow over 6' tall with the plentiful supply of meat and dairy, and even entertain the luxury of pondering ethics and morality on slashdot. Meat, it's what's for dinner!
Pick your pseudo-religious viewpoint, and go at it!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is exactly what's happening. He wrote a snarky paragraph to own a troll, and you're treating it like a thesis.
Re: (Score:3)
Wrong. The fact is that you cause the deaths of animals. If not by eating them, then by consuming products that attribute to their death
You mean "contribute".
Persons A and B walk through a crowd. A bumps into one other person on the way. B bumps into a hundred people on the way. A says to B, "You're just carelessly ramming into people. Stop it and have some respect." B replies, "You bump into people as well; if not deliberately, then by being in the crowd, which contributes to a bump occurring."
Person B is of course a total wanker who, in order to justify wanton harm, uses the fact that person A cannot reduce the harm he causes t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
FYI.
Surely that should be for your information, since you're the one whose error was pointed out.
That is where your logic fails. You make the jump that assuming that being a little wrong makes it ok to be a lot wrong and vice versa.
You seem to have made some error there, because I am arguing (and not assuming) that being a little wrong (doing a small amount of unavoidable harm) does not make it OK to be a lot wrong (do a large amount of avoidable harm on top of that). My opponents are arguing the opposite.
I'm not justifying my eating habits, I don't need to.
This is part of the problem. You make an assumption that because we're talking about something as dear to you as the very food you ea
Re:It's not exactly mysterious. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why exactly am I allowed to own a car while others can't even afford a pair of shoes?
I think the best solution is to take away all personal property and rights, so everyone has the same level. After all, it worked so incredibly well in Cuba, the USSR and the rest of the eastern bloc. I mean, everyone was so happy to be there!
To cite a personal song favorite of mine:
"to grind the mountains to the level of the valleys
to cut the trees to the level of the grass
to asphalt the land in the name of equality"
Never talk about why should anyone be allowed to do X, because that's none of our business. Talk about - and reason - why anyone should NOT be allowed to do X - and "equality" or "morals" have no grounds in that discussion, the only thing you can ever use as an argument is
"Does person A's activity X harm the freedom of others more, than it would harm to forbid A and everyone else this activity?"
Laws in free countries should be a black-list of forbidden activities, not a whitelist, a closed enumeration of what's acceptable and what's not.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I'm not "allowed" to, rather - I pay a lot of money to be able to. Most states have very high licensing fees and taxes that they extract from people who apply to hunt in their states, and which they take during the purchase of everything from ammunition to pocket knives and mosquito repellent sold in sporting goods stores. In my state, the fees collected from the DNR's li
Space Travel (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thanks, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to deconfuse things (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus it's interesting to find a way to override perhaps the most important response shared by cells in the body.
Parent
Re:Just to deconfuse things (Score:5, Informative)
If taken care of, cancer cell populations can easily be kept alive for decades. HeLa cells [jhu.edu] were first cultured from a cervical tumor in a patient named Henrietta Lacks. There must be tons of HeLa cells in labs all over the world; all together they probably weigh hundreds of times as much as Henrietta ever did.
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Obliq quote (Score:2, Funny)
Anakin Skywalker: No.
Palpatine: I thought not. It's not a story the Jedi would tell you. It's a Sith legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life... He had such a knowledge of the dark side he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.
Anakin Skywalker: He could actually save people from death?
Palpatine: The Dark Side of the Force is
Re:Obliq quote (Score:5, Funny)
Move along.
Parent
Brilliant (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Brilliant (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
CRYONICS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
-matthew
Re:CRYONICS (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Ob. Princess Bride (Score:5, Funny)
Inigo: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
easy question (Score:2)
The same place your computer's conciousness goes when you turn it off.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, because when you are sleeping there is still electrical activity in the brain - "a succession of mental states continually re-created in our brains, even during sleep" as the article says.
This is asking the question of where "you" go when the power to your brain is switched off. It seems probable to me that - as neurons and the connections between them are modified, weakened, or strengthened by the signals that pass through them - when power is rest
Re:easy question (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, this isn't an out of hand dismissal. To say that the brain, or consciousness is somehow like a computer is, to me, more of a stretch than espousing an afterlife, or a soul.
Now I know that slashdot isn't likely to agree with me, and normally I'm loath to invoke a god-of-the-gaps, but if and when the time comes that we can fabricate intelligence in a box, we're going to have some serious rethinking of philosophy to do. Until then, I really do think that the burden to produce evidence lies with the mind-is-a-computer crowd, i.e. to me the mind looks a lot more unlike a computer than like it.
My major concern, how do we know that consciousness as we know it doesn't depend on some yet unknown quantum effects or isn't somehow governed by Godel's incompleteness theorem? In other words, is the brain deterministic? If the brain is deterministic then don't concepts of right and wrong go out the window?
Parent
From the article (Score:3, Funny)
--
Looking to trade in for a newer girlfriend? Now there's a place!! [usedgirlfriend.com]
Been there, done that. (Score:5, Interesting)
My point is this: when I was "dead," I never "left my body," I never saw myself and the doctors in the hospital from "above," I never experienced anything. It was like a light-switch was simply flipped. I was just gone. No angels, no bright light, nothing. So. My advice, for what it's worth, is that you should do whatever you need to do. Whatever you need to accomplish. If my experience is any indication, there is no second chance. Do it now. Don't expect anything else after you're gone. When you're gone, you're gone. There appears to be nothing else. And while that may not be what you wanted to hear, that was my reality.
Don't live your life in fear of death, but don't take anything for granted, either. As Warren Zevon said, "enjoy every sandwich."
(Of course, Zevon also said, "I think I made a tactical error by not going to the doctor earlier." So don't do that.)
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I did. 11 years old, skull fracture from little league game (I was pitching, before the hard hat rule (which I was told I instigated)). No pre-knowledge or exposure to such states, or even the concept of mortality -- never a church goer. Genuine OOB perception, howling winds, players gathered around my supine body, sound of my dad calling me back (he was the team's manager). Followed by aphasia, surgery, long recovery.
Nothing has ever been really spookey since. Meh, it's life. Do the next thing.
Parent
Re:Been there, done that. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Been there, done that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I'll hijack this thread to talk about my own information about where the 'personality' is during a clinical death experience. I don't think it 'is' anywhere. It's like asking where windows is when your computer is off. Going through a coma or medical death is like rebooting the part of your brain that generates your personality. If you read about Hindu and Buddhist meditation, and also the experience of serious hallucinogen users, they talk about an experience called 'ego death'. It's where you still perceive everything you normally would, except there is no "I". The subjective perspective completely evaporates. You see yourself as objectively as you would the person sitting next to you, not attached to your desires or fears. Even though you can still perceive your own thoughts and internal body states, you still don't have the sensation of an "I" or a soul who is experiencing it. Your sense of ownership, or things belonging to 'you', including your own body and thoughts, just is gone. It's called the 'unseen seer' in Hinduism, or the invisible eyeball by the transcendentalist Americans of the 1800s.
There is a part of our brain that generates this sense of self, the "I", and it can get shut down just like any other part of the brain, through bodily trauma, meditation, or drugs.
Parent
I'm going to get railed by the mods for this... (Score:4, Interesting)
Dead cannot think:
Psalms 146:4 His breath goes forth, he returns to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.
Ecclesiastes 9:5 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
It also says the soul dies at death:
Ezekiel 18:4 Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinning, it shall die.
Romans 5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.
Therefore the soul cannot think either. Aka no out of body experiences. Please note I'm not discussing heaven etc, just the state of the dead/soul.
Hammer me down mods! [flamesuit="on"]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the cloning paradox where a perfect clone is still different from its original because it did not experience the same experiences.
Well it ain't a perfect clone then, innit?
:P
That's like saying that building an identical computer out of identical parts will never be running the same programs as the one that you cloned. Well, sure it won't, unless you stick in a clone of the old one's hard disk and RAM contents, at which point it WILL. The philosophical problems come in with the fact that a perfect-to-the-neuron-level clone of you WILL be yourself again. And so, if you're still around, will you! Just ask Dudley Bose.
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
> 'is' between death and later revival...
Do they also discuss the color of zero or how wide is up?
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
It is profoundly mysterious (Score:3, Insightful)
It's one of those questions that seem unanswerable. Personally I feel it has something to do with the continuity of brain activity. You interrupt that, and whatever that "spark" is ceases to be, and if the brain is turned back on, it would be a different "you". Which is why I'd never take a transporter ride and think actual working cryonics would be pointless since I would never experience waking back up, it would be a different consciousness, albeit one that thinks everything went just fine. If ever underwent either, I would assume the "me" that woke back up would have some lingering doubts.
One of the many philosophical papers on this: http://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html [benbest.com]
Re:It is profoundly mysterious (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't buy that this happens at night, you can make a good argument that this certainly does happen during a coma, when there is little to no electrical activity in the brain. Alternatively, you can anesthetize certain parts of the brain, and also cause the personality to disappear.
The idea of the 'you' as a fixed, permanent thing, seems to be an idea that traces back to Greek philosophy. They were always looking for unchanging, eternal, fixed, stable 'things'. And it really breaks down when we try to apply that to the self or consciousness. Eastern philosophy seems more advanced in this respect -- it says there are no things, only processes or phenomena that are *always* changing.
Parent
Re:It is profoundly mysterious (Score:4, Informative)
(I read it like this in Richared Dawkin's The God Desulion, but he got it somewhere else again, can't remember where)
The mind, conscience, personality, is perhaps a similar phenomenon. It's not a thing that can be pointed out somewhere in our brain, but it's a recurring pattern of thoughts and actions, emerging from the mechanics of our brain and the experiences therein.
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Re:It is profoundly mysterious (Score:5, Insightful)
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Which is often an indication of bad assumptions.
Which is "you" after the duplication? First we ought to ask, is there a "you" before the duplication?
Look closely. What is this "you"? "Your" body? That's not the same from moment to moment, atoms entering and leaving with every breath. "Your" thoughts? Just as changing and fluid. "Your" memories? But "you" are making new ones and forgetting old ones each day.
Go down to a strea [unreasonable.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't see how else you know who you are if you have no memories you can use to tell you who you are. If you begin to behave entirely differently to the way you normally do people still think you're the same person just behaving weirdly but if you had ( for some reason ) a sudden complete change of memories people who be more
Cryonics and your brain in a robot body (Score:3, Interesting)
Suppose that, one day, we develop the technology required to scan and emulate the human brain with total precision. Now, this means that we can shove your head into the scanner, and presto, some amount of time later, we have a computer running a simulation of your brain. It's pretty clear that your consciousness stays in the same place, especially if anesthesia is not required for the scanning process. Yet there is a copy of your brain running on that computer. From its perspective, does it have the same sort of consciousness that you still do?
Suppose that instead of just scanning your brain to make a copy, we instead put you under, scan your brain, start the simulation running, and kill your old body. We wake up your simulated brain. What happens to your consciousness? Have you achieved a mortality unencumbered by the failure of your biological body by doing this? From the perspective of your simulated brain, did you fall asleep and wake up running on the computer? What about from the perspective of your now dead physical body?
Suppose that instead of scanning your brain, we can replace a portion of your brain with equivalent nanotech. For all purposes, this nanotech behaves exactly as your old neurons behave. The nanotech can be implanted gradually, neuron by neuron, on the fly - as each neuron is replaced and killed, the nanotech neuron takes its place and picks up exactly where the old neuron left off. So, we perform this procedure on you, and ultimately, your brain is replaced with its nanotech equivalent. What happens to your consciousness in this process? Is this sort of gradual process necessary for your consciousness to survive the transition from your old wetware to your new hardware?
Is your consciousness an expression of a dynamical state - perhaps even including state variables we haven't detected yet - in your brain that must be preserved in order to survive any such transition, or do your memories suffice to keep your perception of consciousness continuous, even if most of that dynamical state is temporarily lost?
Trek (Score:3, Funny)
Mitochondria *may* be a cause of cellular death? (Score:4, Interesting)