Gunshot Victims To Be Part of "Suspended Animation" Trials 357
New submitter Budgreen writes: "Knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month. The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. 'If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,' says surgeon Peter Rheeat from the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique. 10 gunshot and stabbing victims will take part in the trials."
Space travel (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds more like science fiction than anything else to me. But if it works and the technique becomes viable to handle patient with heavy injurie - and assuming the patients can be kept suspended for long periods of time without creating further damages, I wonder if the technique could be adapted for space travel. It would solve a lot of problems related to long-duration interplanetary travel.
The idea is not new. I just wonder if this could be the first step in this direction.
Too bad they won't use glycoproteins (Score:4, Interesting)
The real(?) key to long-term suspended animation (months, years) would probably involve cooling the body to sub-freezing temperatures.
At that point, you need something to keep the ice-crystals from rupturing cells. In certain antarctic fish they have glycoproteins that do this (I think other hibernating animals use glycol or glycogen).
Until we get nuclear fusion(?) it's clear that spaceflight even just within our solar system is going to require some pretty lengthy journeys. On the other hand, if safe long-term suspended animation is attained, there might be a whole bunch of "future" travelers who might decide to jump (one way of course) years, decades, centuries into the future.
I think there was a science fiction book which talked about the (disastrous) effects such a technology had on society.
Re:Too bad they won't use glycoproteins (Score:4, Interesting)
Be that as it may, I'm pretty sure that no sane IRB would sign off on using cryonics and experimental nonhuman proteins on gunshot victims just because Space is Awesome, man! The scope of the study is techniques to provide team trauma surgeon more time to stitch them back up before they bleed out, a short timeframe, and likely one where working on frozen tissue would not make matters easier.
I had something similar done about 10 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I had something similar done about 10 years ago. It was a bit experimental at the time and they told me I was very probably going to die during surgery and if I did not die I would prob. have brain damage and/or organ failure but without the surgery I would be dead in hours. They cooled down my body and then removed all my blood, there was no saline replacement. I was dead for about 10 minutes and apart from some problems reanimating me it worked out OK (there were some problems,I spent a month afterwards in a medically induced coma and had to have further work done repairing some damage caused during surgery). It was considered a major success at the time.
A bit scary to be told that you have about 30 minutes to live. Last thing I remember is the anesthetist putting a line in and thinking that once he injected the anesthetic I was going to die.
Re:Space travel (Score:5, Interesting)
The first successful organ transplant was done in 1883: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]