Mad Scientist Brings Back Dead With "Deanimation" 501
mattnyc99 writes "Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist (who also figured out how to diagnose lupus correctly) went from watching his infant daughter die to literally reincarnating animals. Inspired by NOVA and funded by DARPA, Roth has developed a serum for major biotech startup Ikaria that successfully accomplished 'suspended animation' — the closest we've ever come to simulating near-death experiences and then coming back to life. From the article: 'We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does — it burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O2 until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related. Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?' " The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism." If you can suspend your inner critic for a time, it's a fun ride.
First Undead Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Undead Post! (Score:5, Funny)
What do veggie zombies say?
Graaaiiins. Grrraaaaaiiinnss. Gggrraaaaaiiiiinnnnssss.
I'll be here all night, thank you.
Re:First Undead Post! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Undead Post! (Score:5, Funny)
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What do arthritic zombies say? Paaaiiinnns!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Reanimator! (Score:5, Funny)
Klatu Verata Nictu!
Re:Reanimator! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's Klaatu you insolent clod!
Re:Reanimator! (Score:5, Funny)
Ia, Ia! Shub-Niggurath!
Re:Reanimator! (Score:4, Funny)
Early Cryogenics & Ethical Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, isn't Ikaria the worst name to pick [wikipedia.org]? "Hey, our company hopes to aim too high and fail hard." They should have gone with Promethea [wikipedia.org] in my opinion.
Re:Early Cryogenics & Ethical Problems (Score:5, Informative)
In TFA it mentions that
It's called Ikaria, after the island with regenerative sulfur springs mentioned by Herodotus.
Re:Early Cryogenics & Ethical Problems (Score:5, Funny)
Before I listened to that, I thought that this was pretty cut and dried ethically (dead bodies are dead bodies, do what you want) but you see how it negatively affects other people who misplace hope in this process.
A corpse is a corpse
of course, of course
and you can't gain consent from a corpse, of course
because a corpse is, of course
by definition dead!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Chained to a rock for all eternity while vultures devour your liver doesn't sound so great either...
Re:Early Cryogenics & Ethical Problems (Score:5, Funny)
It would be ok if you had net access.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Dunno, wasn't some philosophical dude saying that we have two "life powers", each competing for trying to have us stay alive or die?
It's rather easy to see in what way we tries to stay alive, avoiding dangers and such, but the other one makes itself remembered in enjoying the calm when not much happens, sleeping, will to just give up if you're like freezing to near death and such.
Sometimes life is a pain and in those cases the neutral "nothing" is nicer (though sometime the (emotional) pain is nice to becau
Re:Early Cryogenics & Ethical Problems (Score:5, Interesting)
DARPA! (Score:5, Interesting)
Whoa boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:4, Interesting)
The issue I have here is that bringing someone back from suspended animation where they were alive to begin with ...
Here's a better question: When do you think anyone in their right mind will ok that procedure? Think about it, you're taking a perfectly alive human being and ... putting them at risk of death? For the purposes of? I know someone will compare this to the risk of life we took putting someone on the moon but I see little to no merit in this procedure.
If you think they're going to run into federal problems, that's only the start of it. This is probably going to be a always-20-years-away technology although it does make for entertainment.
Space travel etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm posting on Slashdot. Done.
Re:Space travel etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
You overestimate how much society changes.
Given the ENORMOUS gulf between 1900 and 2000, you could reanimate a person who died in 1908, and it would take them very little effort at all to adjust to 21st century life.
Do you think if you were frozen now, you'd have trouble being resurrected in 2028? I think not. You'd love it.
Humans are like that: adaptable.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say you could resurrect an ancient Sumerian person with little or no difficulties.
The situation would be no different to bringing a Papuan to New York city. They might not like it much, but they'd adjust pretty quickly.
Re:Space travel etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
Try the enormous gulf just between 1995 and today.
Go back another 10 years
There were huge similar sweeping changes for each decade all the way back to roughly the 1870s or so when the effects of the industrial revolution started directly affecting people's lives and livelihoods. And here's a hint: the degree of change is accelerating still, we'll probably see some of the most interesting times we can imagine, old Chinese curses not withstanding.
Re:Space travel etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
So what? Those things are just that: things. There are people living today who lived through all of those advances and didn't go into shock over them, why would you think someone getting caught up to all of it at once couldn't handle it?
The things that people from 1955 would be most freaked out about now would be things like gay marriage, lowered blood alcohol levels in drunk driving laws, and having a black President-elect. Societal changes would be much more shocking. And even then, they would adjust, because as the GP pointed out, that's what humans do.
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I'd like to believe you, but all of the intolerance - cf. McCain's 2008 campaign - and religious hostility we _still_ have kind of tells me that, socially, we _can't_ adapt. Not all of us, anyway.
All predicted in Star Trek (Score:3, Insightful)
You could have been frozen in the 70's and been prepared for all of that by watching Star Trek.
Computers -- Kirk and Spock *spoke* to their computers. 99% of us still have to type. Hell, Spock even holds up 3.5 floppies on the show and refers to them as "tapes"
Cell Phones -- "Scotty beam me up" Kirk used a cell phone nearly every episode. Many models even flip open the same way and are the same exact size as the original communicator. Spock even had that wacky Bluetooth headset in his ear often.
In fact, if
Re:Space travel etc. (Score:5, Funny)
You might adapt, but some grouchy old person might refuse to.
Re:Space travel etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
Pretty sure horses still need to be shod and wooden fences built and gates fixed and bricks laid and mail delivered and snow shoveled and old ladies helped up the stairs (not exactly a job) and trash removed and books sorted and heavy things carried around. Not all jobs are "technical".
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, the paperless office hasn't really worked out so far, so I doubt the shitjobless society will work out anytime soon either. Maybe if you cryo until 12947 and by some miracle we havn't killed ourselves off yet.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
old ladies helped up the stairs (not exactly a job)
Extend it to administering their medicine and changing their diapers and the like and it's a common job. Not particularly glamorous or well-paying, but with an aging population, ever more in demand.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Space travel???? Forget that! Next thing you know, you wake up in 2491 dressed in horribly colored spandex being followed around by some little phallically shaped robot that sounds like Bugs Bunny. NO THANK YOU!!!!
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To be honest if I had terminal cancer why would I want to be frozen and then wake up to find out that all my family and friends are dead? Seriously how could someone adjust to that? Having no close family or friends?
If it were only 10 or 20 years you might still have plenty of family and friends. People do tend to go about their own lives and things would be allot different for your socially.
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It might also be useful for someone like Donald Trump who could use it to hibernate till the economy gets better and medical science can fix his hair.
I am just saying. It could be useful to some.
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. It'll be a standard procedure in 5 years. "Ok, so what the anesthetist is going to do is stop your heart. Then we'll cut two small incisions in your chest and I'll insert this tiny camera.. [blah blah blah, rest of the standard keyhole surgery speech] .. and once we're all finished, the anesthetist will start your heart again."
This stuff isn't that revolutionary.. it's just a neat trick to stop you getting brain damage when you're not getting enough oxygen.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You didn't read the article did ya? I understand, it was horrid. The point of this work is that apparently if you give people certain toxins, it stops cells from doing stuff that requires oxygen. Later, when they get oxygen, these processes start back up again. The reason I mentioned the brain is that, without the heart, the brain will be starved of oxygen.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I also had what they call a "hot" gall bladder which had to be removed, and they were ab
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Interesting)
You are correct that there is no good reason to do this for fun, but if the choice is death or entering a potentially risky state of suspended animation, I will choose the later.
Keep in mind that the majority of the research is for exactly that purpose.
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Funny)
fun is always a good reason to do anything. Except for things that aren't fun. For example I breed weasels. Through selective breeding favouring weakness and mutations which yield no survival benefit in the wild I have created an army of blind, five legged weasels the size of turnips. They will only eat or procreate when encouraged with electric cattle prods. With my mutant weasel army I will rule the world! More importantly it's a blast. I've never felt so alive.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> I've never felt so alive.
Take the serum and we can solve that for you.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Here's a better question: When do you think anyone in their ... putting them at
> right mind will ok that procedure? Think about it, you're
> taking a perfectly alive human being and
> risk of death? For the purposes of? I know someone will
> compare this to the risk of life we took putting someone on
> the moon but I see little to no merit in this procedure.
You are not being very imaginative.
Imagine a sick patient, in need of a long and complex heart
operation. Imagine that the risk of compli
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a better question: When do you think anyone in their right mind will ok that procedure?
You'd never ok that procedure any more than you would ok having CPR performed. (Though you might leave an advanced directive to prevent it in certain situations.) Its likely something that would be done should you have cardiac arrest in a medical setting (or with fast enough EMS response if it becomes a field treatment.)
Its also likely something that would be done in order to facilitate transfer of a patient who will die quickly without specialized care unavailable at a given facility. For example, you get whacked on the head in an assault an sustain an epidural hematoma (big assed bleeding inside your skull outside your brain that can kill you rapidly by compressing your brain and causing your brainstem to be squeezed out the base of your skull). I diagnose that at my small community ER and plan to transfer you to the big tertiary care center 50 miles away. However as we await the helicopter you suddenly begin to show signs of brainstem herniation. At that point you are dead in minutes without a neurosurgeon. So I place you in suspended animation and we ship you to the surgeon who evacuates your hematoma and then you are reanimated.
Pretty nifty. Though your HMO will probably deny payment because its 'experimental' or only allowed for epidurals on the right side of your head, not the left.
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When do you think anyone in their right mind will ok that procedure?
You agreed as part of the Vista EULA.
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Think about it, you're taking a perfectly alive human being and ... putting them at risk of death? For the purposes of?
The great thing about us going into another dark ages is the abundance of semi-retarded, meth-addicted, only-half-living creatures that would be willing to do a crazy medical experiment in exchange for more smack.
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Funny)
Well thanks for totally ruining our fun. Next you'll be telling us snacks are bad for us and we can't play slayers and vampires anymore with those colored sticks with string on them from that construction site nearby. They make great stakes you know! What's wrong with having a little fun, serious-face? You're almost as bad as that guy with the bright orange hat outside that's been swearing for the last hour.
Re:Whoa boy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Semantics, agreed.
Of course, in true Slashdottian hyperbole, were this serum to be completely viable, I could see some kind of auto-release nano-canisters being injected into the bloodstream of soldiers, so that in the event of explosive death, an instant release of the substance could assure that all the pieces quickly 'go to sleep' and await pickup/cleanup by the wandering red cross medical roombas for delivery to the reconstruction/reanimation tent.
That would be pretty close to dying and being brought back methinks.
Might make a good extreme sport as well!
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I'd opt for a triangle myself. Perhaps 30/60/90.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there any memory checksums in the human brain or will the whole system screw up if some parts is accidently lost? :D
Hum, Redundant Array of Independent Brains ...
*goes back to planing*
Near death != death (Score:3, Insightful)
You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot about mostly dead.
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, your friend here is only mostly dead. Had he been all dead there would have been only one thing to do -- go through his pockets for spare change.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
LIAR!!!!!
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Funny)
Schrodinger's cat says hi. Or maybe he doesn't.
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Funny)
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Insightful)
Either you're dead or you're not--Tell that to someone who's brain dead. Or someone who's suffered a stroke that effects their brain stem, or people that suffer from being "locked in". Tell that to someone who 'died' on the operating table during heart surgery but 'came back'. What exactly constitutes being "alive" verus dead? Are self-replicating proteins "alive"? Because last I looked, prions are not alive though they can kill you (mad cow disease). And this isn't even discussing non-literal definitions of dead or alive -- such as being emotionally dead (suicidal thoughts anyone?), concepts of heaven and hell, etc.
There is indeed quite a spectrum between dead and alive; Life has never been easy to classify and put into boxes, because the curious thing about it is you never observe the same thing twice looking at it.
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"because the curious thing about it is you never observe the same thing twice looking at it."
Instead of looking at it from when life ends, perhaps you should look at it as when death begins.
Warm and dead (Score:5, Interesting)
As an EMT volunteer we're told that a person isn't dead until they're warm and dead. Many people have been declared cold and dead, stored in the morgue, then scared the living crap out of the attendant complaining that it's bloody cold in there!
Vik :v)
Re:Near death != death (Score:4, Interesting)
For example the wood frog [google.com] can allow itself to freeze solid for the winter and will thaw out in spring with no ill affects despite the fact it hasn't had a heartbeat or any sign of brain activity for months. By your tests the frog is dead during the winter and alive again in the spring.
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Funny)
You're either dead or you're not. It's rather binary. There's no continuum.
There's no "rather binary". It's either binary or it's not.
Re:Near death != death (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Near death != death (Score:4, Insightful)
The people quoting The Princess Bride above do have a point: you can't draw a line and say "everyone on this side is dead, everyone on the other side is alive". Consider bacterial endospores: no significant chemical reactions are taking place inside the spore, and by most objective measures, they're "dead". But place one in the correct environment, and it will convert to an unambiguously-alive bacterium.
Humans are far more complicated, with even more ways to blur the boundary between "alive" and "dead".
Death is not a state. It's a prognosis. (Score:5, Interesting)
You're either dead or you're not.
Define death.
As the cryonicists say, "Death is not a state. It's a prognosis." It's a claim that the organism will not be restored from its current state to a level of function that is considered alive.
Last time I looked (which was a while ago) trauma centers were regularly reviving victims who drowned in cold water and had been "dead" for half an hour. Surgeons were taking advantage of this by precooling patients who needed surgery that would leave the brain without blood flow for similar times. And research labs had perfused a dog with suitable protective substances, stopped its heart, cooled its body to freezing temperatures, left it that way for some time, then revived it. (And this guy has improved on that using H2S.)
Were the drowning victims "dead"? Was the dog?
There are people who are long since frozen - in full body or brain only - in the hope that they can some day be repaired (or built into a fresh body). If that is successful, are those people now "dead"? Or are they just resting at liquid nitrogen temperatures?
Holy moly! (Score:5, Funny)
Quick, get him CVS commit access to all the BSD projects!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Too late. I think Microsoft already hired him to do a service pack for Vista.
Sign me up! (Score:2, Funny)
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Me and Frostilicus go way back.
Burning the life at both ends. (Score:3, Insightful)
"We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?'"
And what kind of "life" would it be?
Re:Burning the life at both ends. (Score:4, Funny)
One where you could sleep over the economic crisis.
Or get to live to eventually play Duke Nukem Forever.
Re:Burning the life at both ends. (Score:5, Informative)
The kind of life where you could be transported from the battlefield, with its limited facilities, to a large, fully equipped hospital to patch you up, then woken up. There is a reason Darpa is funding him. Many soldiers die of reasons that they would easily survive in a hospital, with access to an unlimited supply of the best doctors. (unlimited because you can simply wait in that state until the doctor has helped other patients before you.)
Re:Burning the life at both ends. (Score:5, Insightful)
A useful kind.
Doing surgery is like trying to fix a car while it's running. If this idea works, you could simply stop the engine for awhile, making many surgical procedures (heart bypass, for example) far, far, far simpler (and thus far less likely to get screwed up) and likely opening up a bunch of currently-impossible things, like spreading a long, complex procedure over multiple days, allowing the doctors to rest, which would help prevent mistakes caused by sleep deprivation.
And of course, there's the sci-fi stuff like sleeper ships (as even at relativistic speeds, you're talking stupid lengths of time for interstellar travel.) or the old standby "Life is boring. Wake me up when X happens.".
hey totally lost me... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you'll excuse my French: bullshit!
This needed for long space travel but warp / hype (Score:4, Funny)
This needed for long space travel but warp / hyper drives are better.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
This needed for long space travel but warp / hyper drives are better.
Sorry to rain on your party but we are never going to have a warp or hyper drive. They were designed around the scheduling of TV advertisements, not the laws of physics.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Most every space science fiction has a period where people went out in "sleeper ships" to colonize the galaxy.. and then the warp drives come along and overtake the sleeper ships. It's a common theme.
I imagine the following for us:
* All those exoplanet astronomers eventually discover a rocky planet around an nearby star.. say, 20 light years away.
* They manage to confirm the atmosphere is oxygen/nitrogen, and can guess that the atmospheric pressure is similar to Earth.
* Some smart cookie figures out how to
Re:If even special relativity holds, no warp drive (Score:3, Interesting)
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The whole point of warp drive is that you're not traveling faster than light. You're getting from A to B faster than light would travel to go from A to B but you're not *moving* faster than light, you're warping space. This, of course, is impossible.. but that's not the point.
Wormholes are easier to understand. You connect two points in space.. now the distance required to travel is very short (it's zero if the wormhole has no "inside"). Did you travel faster than the speed of light? Why, yes, you trav
Hatian witch doctors have been doing this for year (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugu [wikipedia.org] search zombie
Aging is a disease (Score:5, Insightful)
that will be cured.
And no, overpopulation won't be a problem becasue humans, like all biological creatures will only expand to meet the amount of food that is available.
The rest will starve.
Re:Aging is a disease (Score:5, Funny)
The rest will starve.
Until the hungry ones realize the others taste good with ketchup.
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Reincarnating? (Score:4, Funny)
Esquire is running a a jaw-dropping profile of MacArthur genius Marc Roth in their annual Best and Brightest roundup, detailing how this gonzo DNA scientist ... went from watching his infant daughter die to literally reincarnating animals.
I think they meant literally reanimating animals, but if I'm wrong, this guy's experiments would be interesting indeed.
Not Dead... (Score:4, Funny)
Great so now (Score:5, Funny)
we can finally unfreeze Walt Disney, and bring Elvis back to life. Maybe we could bring back George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to advise Barrack Obama? :)
Ah for the good old days when only Jesus could raise the dead.
Fascinating! Pass the Sulphur Dioxide (Score:3, Interesting)
What interests me here is his claim that we don't know much about life. And I guess there's a large element of truth here.
If you take a person who has just died, and look at any one of their billions of cells, you will find that they are ALL still "alive"; consuming oxygen, things moving around in them; proteins being formed... until the oxygen runs out.
So, you are in the curious state of being dead, while almost all of your cells are still clinically alive. It's quite fascinating really.
From these facts, we can reliable assert that human life is not dependent on cellular activity. There is a lot more to it than that.
Additionally, we now know that resuscitating humans who are "dead" (cold water near drowning, heart attack etc.) re-introduces oxygen, and it's the ocygen which actually kills you.
At what point does oxygen become the thing which kills you during a resus' event?
Are there ways to "immunize" a "dead" person so that re-animation is possible without brain death or cellular suicide due to rapid infusion of O2?
If we learn to re-animate people by immunizing them prior to resus', at what point after traditional "death" is a body no longer able to be revived? What does that say about the "time of death" or even how to declare someone "dead"?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When most nerve cells in the brain die, they release their chemicals into the space surrounding the cells. A lot of them are toxic to other brain cells, which cause the other brain cells to die. And then more, and then more.
Fairly recently a drug was developed to stop this chemical cascade, and it works well. It could be combined with this treatment to further limit brain damage caused by lack of oxygen.
Whoa (Score:5, Funny)
But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?
"Can I buy some pot from you?"
Re:Herbert West - Reanimator (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_West%E2%80%93Reanimator [wikipedia.org]
I don't know how I could have messed that up.
Re:Herbert West - Reanimator (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know how I could have messed that up.
That's exactly what this guy'll say when he's locked himself inside his underground laboratory to keep out the hordes of flesh eating undead.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Only in the USA and UK. Everywhere else, you'd be too hot to call it living.
37 deg C = 98.6 deg F. IOW, normal human body temperature. Or did I just do a whooosh?
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I think I just wooshed all over myself.
That should have been:
"Except in the USA and UK, where you'd be freezing to death."
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GP self-wooshed.
Wooshturbation?
Re:37 degrees? (Score:4, Informative)