Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time

Exclusive: Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time

From the URL above: "Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.

Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it “a little surreal” when they first did it. He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result."

I guess it might be better than just outright dying but I can't see doing this until the success rate can be not only determined but also independently confirmed. I use suspended animation in fiction all the time since space travel can be long and resource consuming for deep space flights but for survival from trauma I had not heard of using it for that purpose. I know of instances where people have fallen through the ice and drowned and did not have the expected level of brain damage expected for the amount of time they were without oxygen. That was attributed to the low temperature they experienced.

Sounds to me like cryogenics tech.. that have been around for long time
People are already doing this

originally posted by: Spacespider
Sounds to me like cryogenics tech..

You didn't read the article, it isn't. This is not like freezing Ted Ballgame's head, this is a very temporary process to treat serious trauma, not prolong life long term.

a reply to: machineintelligence

From the article:

“I want to make clear that we’re not trying to send people off to Saturn,” he says. “We’re trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.”
In fact, how long you can extend the time in which someone is in suspended animation isn’t clear. When a person’s cells are warmed up, they can experience reperfusion injuries, in which a series of chemical reactions damage the cell – and the longer they are without oxygen, the more damage occurs.
It may be possible to give people a cocktail of drugs to help minimise these injuries and extend the time in which they are suspended, says Tisherman, “but we haven’t identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet”.

www.newscientist.com...

This is a great medical advancement.
And if these reperfusion injuries can be overcome,maybe we could see this applied to long term space travel at some point in the future.
Not there yet by a long shot,but a step in the right direction.
Once they find a way to prevent the effects of ice crystals on cells-(I think as the ice melts the damage is caused)and if muscle atrophy can be prevented while in this state we could be looking at a viable way of long distance space travel.

a reply to: machineintelligence

If it becomes possible to routinely put people into suspended animation it would open up the door to complex medical procedures such as removing advanced spread tumours from patient's and replacing damaged tissue with cultured tissue over a period of time.

I played with trying to figure out a way of doing just this and as you know the great enemy of placing humans into a deep freeze is cell death, this occurs not just because of the cessation of biological and electro chemical processes but primarily because of fluid crystallization, ice molecule form into ice crystals within the cell and can then rupture the cell wall's, damage the cell cytoblasts including the nucleus and the mitochondria.

So the trick is how to lower the body temperature and metabolism to as close to stasis as possible without causing this damage, in nature there are fish that are adapted to the cold and have a natural anti freeze in there cell's, since they are adapted there metabolic functions are slowed but not stopped by the cold, well we are chemically different and some of these natural anti freeze are toxic to us.

So what about technology, now here is were it get's bit invasive, high frequency sound and vibrational micro oscillations attuned to prevent ice crystal formation, the problem is how do you then get that into deep tissue.

Still if this doctor has succeeded as it is medically a gold mine that will allow people whom are terminally ill to literally be put into hibernation and the progression of there disease halted until it can be cured and also financially since it will also become a state in which complex organ transplants and major operations and even clone body replacement for the ultra wealthy will suddenly become viable.

Think storage bay's full of terminally ill people waiting for cures or complex surgery's, automated ultra precise computerized surgeon's with medical handlers performing operation so complex and long that they could never have been performed on a living subject and the ability to then re-animate or bring those people back out of this death like state.


Now not entirely off thread but on a tangent and a what if that may pose an ethical dilemma that I certainly hope would never stop research into this life saving science if it can ever be perfected.

A question that has plagued me for a long time though, I even considered writing a short story based on it and just may still do so.

People/Being's in this state are to all intent's and purposed actually dead, there life systems are shut off unless it is not true stasis in which case they are only slowed down extremely BUT if they are actually halted/stopped then it is no different to the body being actually dead.

Now from a spiritual perspective this leads to a conundrum, whose soul then wakes up in the body that is thus restored, at death spiritualists would claim that the silver chord - an umbilical like connection that many of them claim to have seen in out of body experience usually connecting to the back of the neck or in some cases to the navel of the stomach - is cut or broken and that even if the body is made liveable again you can not simply reconnect that chord once it has been severed, this has been used to explain some pretty strange cases of so called reincarnation such as a young girl in India whom died and woke up in another similarly aged girl's body whom had been ill and in a comatose state, this happened in India and of course since they believe in reincarnation they took it as proof of that.

But form a quantum perspective it may have many other alternative explanation's, an exchange of information between these two discarnate mind's leading not so much to a soul swap as to an information infusion into the comatose child, of course I am grasping at straws since non of us really know, oh we may believe and so claim that we know but empirical knowing is something else.

Either way the door is open if this work's to long duration space flight (not so quick there as think about it, you have so much radiation exposure in your life time, your DNA self repairs fixing damage over that time as best it can but DNA in a state of complete dormancy would not be able to self repair as radiation and particles impacted and damaged it over time so such a vessel would need nearly complete radiation shielding).

But also remember it is open to abuse, Prison's filled with frozen inmates, population control fanatic's freezing the poor and unemployed in a new spin on that pseudo Nazi trend of class cleansing and also to enable totalitarian states to put unemployed workers off the book's and into storage until there economy's picked up, turning people into a commodity, corporations running the world is already a thing.

I think this is wonderful news. I wish they could have done something like this for Princess Diana.

I have always thought that if someone recently died from injury or drowning etc. and the damage wasn't too catastrophic, being immediately placed on life support might give them a chance to "come back to life" so to speak. I know it's not the same thing but I just love how medical technology is advancing to what was only once dreamed of.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: Spacespider
Sounds to me like cryogenics tech..

You didn't read the article, it isn't. This is not like freezing Ted Ballgame's head, this is a very temporary process to treat serious trauma, not prolong life long term.

Oh this is awkward.

(looking at three severed heads on the coffee table)

a reply to: DBCowboy

Are these old heads or new heads you are trying to bring back to life? Did you dig these up? Did you freeze these heads?

medically induced coma. We've been putting patients into suspended animation for a while now. Put the tech on a truck. It will make paramedics jobs much easier. Erase the time of transport between trauma and hospital. And for gods sake, allow the paramedics to declare death. Weirdest thing, requiring paramedics to attempt to revive dead bodies. I'd like to award the inventor of that ventilator bag that you push on the corpse's mouth with the Nobel. Nobody wants to kiss a corpse.

a reply to: LABTECH767

Okay, well the only thing that wasn't insane was your idea to write a story about this, so I think this is what you should do. I mean we all know India has an excellent record of preserving factual medical cases, despite their state-sanctioned religion.

Paradoxically, the second half of your post is remarkably prescient. This is exactly the sorts of uses suspended animation would be used by slightly-evolved apes: prisoner control. And when they ran out of crimes, they would invent new ones.

But I have bad news: that film has already been made: Planet of the Apes.

The thing that really interested me though, was this idea of the silver cord:

It's also been done in the film Donnie Darko, but I felt that was a sort of dismissive treatment. I've read more that one account of this silver cord connecting the lucid dreamer back to their body. I've never experienced this.

My experience with lucid dreaming is sort of hard to describe. It's largely riding on the crest of that wave between wakefulness and sleep. There are instances in which you fall under, and fully dream, and the others where you ride for a while, before becoming elated and drawing yourself into the conscious, at which you struggle to stay asleep, but it's never the same. The moment you f'd it up, you know it, and you know you won't be able to go back, but doesn't stop you from trying. I've never been able to insert back into the same dream, but I have managed to construct a new one.

This silver cord stuff seems like collective fantasy to me. I would love to be proven(not even proven, but given anecdotal accounts) of being wrong. I just don't see it. I understand we're all seeds, and we bifurcate and separate along our major and minor axes, leaving this single origin from which to attain subsistence, the umbilicus. I think that fundamental knowledge is the origin of the silver thread myth, and not anything actually witnessed. I would be grateful to be disputed.

best,
z

a reply to: Zelun

Right off topic, Never seen any silver chord myself I am drawing on other's claim's there but have experienced something akin to out of body, you may regard it as lucid dreaming, were I was taken from my body, woke mid flight and could see perfectly and in great detail with eye's far better than my physical ones a jungle below me (I am in North West England and while we have plenty of tree's they are - not a jungle), I tried to take control of myself but found that something had hold of me as if by the back of my neck and I could not fight that control, I clearing among felled tree's come into view below me with a few lamp's lit and a maybe a score of shack like building's and found myself descending at speed toward one of those building's, the largest which appeared to be a shack with a lean too both crudely built on it's side, I flew through the roof of the shack and slowed down inside, there were several people (Crude looking fellow's, dirty faces and clothing with sallow skin looking like a mixture of races but mainly like Portuguese or Spanish south american) oblivious to me and whatever held me sitting around on crude chairs and tables that were placed on the lean too's dirt floor and a few wooden beam's holding up the roof to give it some more support, the side of the shack which still had it's floor had been removed making the lean too and shack interior into a single space and a crude bar of sort's was placed to one side of the shack while the shack floor served as a kind of impromptu stage, I am male and at the time was about 13 or 14, there was a young girl whom appeared to be native american no eye brow's maybe 9 to 11 years of age and small wearing a one piece cut like a poncho with a rope around her waist making it into a kind of skirt, it was dun coloured or khaki as we call it here, homespun may be a better description like a potato sack colour but a bit lighter, what happened was traumatic for me and if real for that child so I shall not go into too much detail, I flew against my will fighting all the way into the crown of her head, the top of her head at the back of it and it was instantaneous once I did I became her, I could see, hear and feel everything she did but I had no control over her and her mind remained separate from my own, no sharing of thought's and no understanding of what the crowd of alcohol scum like people were shouting and leering at the kid, she felt giddy or drunk, perhaps drugged and there was a fat man sitting in a chair near to the stage/shack floor on what looked to be the best of the crude tables, he was whiter than the rest with thinning hair a natural tonsure and a huge rolling belly, his shirt was open at the top and he was dripping sweat, he said something to the girl that I did not understand and she lay on her back and pulled the front of her poncho up, he got up unbuckled and as he got onto her I felt it, pain and horror to me, I was so shocked I seized control of her as I think she passed out and pushed him up, there was a look of shock on that guy's face as he looked down at me and then it was like whatever was holding me let go and I found myself moving almost but not quite instantaneously back to my own body half a world away and jumping out of my bed screaming with my hand's in the air "NO!", now yes kid's have strange dream's but believe me this was no dream.

Do we have a soul, YES we do.

Is this playing with people YES it is.

Is your opinion of my opinion valid, absolutely not - except for you and those that agree with you - but hey it's a free world you are master of your own thoughts and I hope it remains' that way.

Sometime's we have strange dream's and there is a difference between this horrible experience that still haunt's me over thirty years later and those real dream's, before I lost my real mum to cancer, she took ill just one week after this, I had a vivid dream of being a young Jewish teenage boy (I am Catholic but see myself as just a christian) in a large apartment on the first floor, the detail's were vivid, there was a woman that was like my mother but she was a Jewish lady and a younger woman whom was my elder sister and she had a small girl with her whom was my niece.
Someone was coming to take us and I was not going to let them harm my family so when he came in his trench coat I ran down the stairs, a flight of stone steps just outside our apartment door (which was plate glass and wrought iron quite ornate) that was on the right side as we came out and spiraled up to the apartment'(s) above us to the right, this stair case had a metal ornate Bannister and I grabbed that as the man came to the bottom of the stairs and jumped at him kicking him in the chest, I think he shot me but I managed to get him in a headlock and was holding onto him until my strength betrayed me and I passed out in the dream and woke in my real world body desperate to not let go of him but unable to hold onto his neck, the odd thing was that I had been winning and he was choking but I got too weak to hold onto him.
Was that a dream or a memory or a warning from someone who had once been as devoted to his mum as I was to mine.
And how did my subconscious create such a perfect recreation of a gestapo man coming to kill some scared Jewish people, of a teenage boy fighting to save his mum and sister and niece.

a reply to: machineintelligence

wow

a reply to: StoutBroux

I was a Navy Search and Rescue swimmer back in the mid 80's. There was a kid who fell through the ice in Lake Michigan and was under for over 40 minutes. He was successfully revived. We were taught that some body wasn't dead until they were warm and dead. We were also taught not to try to warm some body up in the aircraft because we didn't have advanced lifesaving equipment. They had a better chance if we left them alone until we got back to the ship and let the doctors handle it.

By the way, they have been putting people on heart and lung machines and reducing their body temperature for years to do some heart surgeries and organ transplants.