A way to preserve Life !!!

Heard of Suspended Animation ?

This is a way to put the human body on hold could safeguard the critically injured or preserve donor organs for transport

From Scientific American

Can this be used for extremely long distance space travel in the Future, to stop people getting OLD ?
Just wondering

[edit on 9-6-2005 by Byrd]

This is a common theme in science fiction novels, but the process hasn't been developed in reality yet, that I know of. In theory, if suspended animation could be perfected, and there was some sort of mechanism to wake up a sleeping person, then I don't see why not. To wake the people up at the end of the journey, there are two ways that I see.

1) Machine/Computer.
2) Rotation of Awake Person. The journey starts with X sleeping people and one awake person. After 6 months (or whatever time interval) the awake person wakes up person #2, and person #2 puts person #1 to sleep. 6 months later, person #2 wakes up #3 and so on. In case of accident, you would probably want more than one person awake at once, and for really long journeys, you would need tons of people to cycle through, because even if someone is awake for only a fraction of the journey, if you are going to another galaxy, say, that fraction would still be longer than a human life. More people would mean the 'awake time' of each individual would be lessened.

I recal a method published a few months ago to reduce metablic rates to 90% (in mice) but no true suspention.

Was there supose to be a linked article to the orginal post?