Treating The Dead

Amazing article here:

To Treat the Dead - Newsweek, May 7, 2007 Edition

Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. ... That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death—not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by "reperfusion," the resumption of oxygen supply.

Wow.

This avenue of research should be interesting.
Implications are mind boggling.
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Absolutely. Perhaps the cells can be reprogrammed to NOT die when they are reexposed to oxygen!!!!

Why would the cells die when they were GIVEN oxygen?? It just doesn't make sense (but hey - that's reality, it never makes sense)... your giving it what it's missing, then it dies?

Kind of like an old man on his deathbed, waiting for his granddaughter to see him so that he can die peacefully?

OK...so reperfusion makes the mitochondria think the cell is about to divide when it doesn't need to and thus the mitochondria blow up the cell. Maybe the mitochondria can sense sudden metabolic changes that occur either thru cancer or a sudden increase in blood oxygen.

Originally posted by x08
Why would the cells die when they were GIVEN oxygen?? It just doesn't make sense

Actually oxygen is extremely toxic to living tissue. I know that's counterintuitive to most people but there are entire biochemical pathways devoted to properly undertake respiration and neutralisation of oxygen in the body. The by-product is energy.
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