Suspended animation could soon be reality, trials to begin on 10 human volunteers
68 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Camundongo;44916967]Well, yeah, I wasn't suggesting the British Army were experimenting with suspended animation at dressing stations in the 1980's :v: I was just saying saline can be used as a temporary blood substitute.[/QUOTE] Normal Saline is not preferable for use during situations of extreme blood loss, you'd rather use a hemostatic agent to control the bleeding and if you're going to use IV's you want to use Lactated Ringers or something called Hextend.
[QUOTE=SigmaLambda;44917008]Did they really need a control in this experiment?[/QUOTE]
You can get 'miracles' in medicine where people pull through things they really shouldn't - if one or two of the control group had somehow survived, and you had a similar figure for the treatment, then you would be in the position to say the treatment was ineffective.
And even then you can't just assume the result of a scientific test, no matter how obvious it seems. Why bother running it otherwise?
If I was in the scientists place i'd totally trick the patients into thinking they were frozen for thousands of years
One day they'll wake up in the middle of nowhere somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, and they'll get picked up by a massive starship.
[QUOTE=InvaderNouga;44917066]Normal Saline is not preferable for use during situations of extreme blood loss, you'd rather use a hemostatic agent to control the bleeding and if you're going to use IV's you want to use Lactated Ringers or something called Hextend.[/QUOTE]
He also referred to Hartmann's Solution, so I assume he meant that when he mentioned saline.
Sounds freaky!
One of the subjects should be John Hurt, for nostalgia......yeah not gonna implant an embryo or anything.
I hardly know anything about science, but could this cause some serious brain damage?
[QUOTE=ironman17;44914137]So it's just chilled saltwater? That sounds pretty dangerous if that's ALL it is. If you're going to replace a person's blood with a different substance, it needs to have an oxygen carrier present in the liquid, even if super-slowed functions lower the need for oxygen. Even adding just a small amount of Oxycyte to the concoction would make it suitable for purpose, not just for putting patients on ice, but for putting space-travellers on ice too.[/QUOTE]
i'm pretty sure they know this being medical science profs
[editline]26th May 2014[/editline]
[QUOTE=InfectedPotato;44917577]I hardly know anything about science, but could this cause some serious brain damage?[/QUOTE]
that's what it stops, cooling the brain slows down the oxygen consumption and brain damage
[QUOTE]Due to the extremely time-sensitive and dire nature of the injuries of the test subjects, the FDA has declared that the surgeons will not require informed consent. As a precaution, the team took out advertisements to inform the public of the upcoming study, and even set up a website that would allow people to opt out, if desired. As of yet, nobody has opted out.[/QUOTE]
So this kind of scares me. You call for an ambulance and suddenly it's the year 2600. But seriously I wouldn't like being the guinea pig for this.
Isn't it illegal in the states to do testing on humans if there is a risk of harm?
And I'm wondering if there has been any testing on animals.
[QUOTE=Stiffy360;44917941]Isn't it illegal in the states to do testing on humans if there is a risk of harm?
And I'm wondering if there has been any testing on animals.[/QUOTE]
They tested it on pigs, and from what I understand it will only be done on critically wounded patients who would die without intervention. This procedure could save them.
[editline]26th May 2014[/editline]
[QUOTE=NickNack1234;44917871]So this kind of scares me. You call for an ambulance and suddenly it's the year 2600. But seriously I wouldn't like being the guinea pig for this.[/QUOTE]
I doubt they would keep them longer than a day. Just enough to save their lives.
[editline]26th May 2014[/editline]
I would be forever grateful waking up to the news that I was the first case of suspended animation saving someone.
[QUOTE=Stiffy360;44917941]Isn't it illegal in the states to do testing on humans if there is a risk of harm?
And I'm wondering if there has been any testing on animals.[/QUOTE]
If they've got permission from the "higher ups" then it's fine, look at PolyHeme, an artificial blood replacement that was trialled on people without their consent.
Fuck that. If i'm out cold on my death bed, i'd rather take that opportunity to stay dead then and there rather than be resuscitated to experience it all over again further down the line.
I'm wondering if this could be used for a total blood transfusion to help treat or cure some diseases that are manifested in the blood itself. Such as sucking all of the bad blood out of the host then injecting the saline mixture and re-introducing "good" blood from another donor.
I'm not at all a science/biology person and I know that blood is produced in the marrow so not sure how/if this could even work on diseases/conditions. Just a thought.
Wait, this wouldn't stop cell division and by extension senescence, would it? So it wouldn't be useful for keeping people asleep-but-alive for hundreds of years?
Lame. Wake me up when we can do that. Oh, wait, shit.
[QUOTE=a dumb bear;44914258]It's probably also so that there's no difference in water potential between the solution and their tissues. If they used pure water, then that water would move into the tissues as the water potential is lower in the tissues due to all the dissolved ions, amino acids etc. You don't want that, as it messes up some of the chemical reactions and can cause cells to swell up. So that solution should have a similar concentration to the fluid in the rest of the body to avoid that, I think.
Correct me if I'm wrong someone, I'm only doing AS biology :v:[/QUOTE]
Your biology holds up; we don't want their cells to lyse. Take it from an AP English student :v:
The similarities between this and the experiments BioTime performed using HexTend (Developed by Paul Segall, not coincidentally a cryonicist, who deanimated in 2003) are pretty striking. Unfortunately I can't find the original article from the journalist who watched the experiments (And described them as being essentially the same as these) and talked about how suspended animation was right around the corner, and the implications that would have for this or the other.
Frankly, I'm more interested in people taking a serious look at cryonics rather than waiting for the next breakthrough in low-temperature hypothermia.
so we finally developing cryostatic chambers for our future generation of spaceships and cryosleep labs.
For some reason this reminds me of that one Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where they discovered a very old ship that had people in suspended animation. It turns out they were in suspended animation because they had terminal illnesses and were supposed to be woken up years later when technology was good enough to cure those diseases.
For some reason this reminds me of that.
[QUOTE=Daemon;44918567]Fuck that. If i'm out cold on my death bed, i'd rather take that opportunity to stay dead then and there rather than be resuscitated to experience it all over again further down the line.[/QUOTE]
Honestly, this sounds more applicable to trauma patients, than medical. Probably because a trauma 1 ER tried something similar to this. But not on this level/extreme. They would put trauma patients on ice, lowering their body temperature to reduce the body's need for oxygen. They had mixed data I believe.
So... We could do this to important people with cancer so they can be reanimated once there's a cure?
[QUOTE=MatheusMCardoso;44919927]So... We could do this to important people with cancer so they can be reanimated once there's a cure?[/QUOTE]
No, only to people with boneitis.
I thought suspended animation would never even see the light of day while I'm alive.
If there's ever a long term application, I wonder how long they could leave the person on ice for. Imagine waking up in 20 years. Seeing where technology would be at that time.
Shit's scary though. Hopes out to the people getting this done to them, it'd be tragic to have anything happen to them.
This is pretty incredible and I don't think there's very many people who wouldn't want this done. Still, doctors have an obligation to make sure their patients want the care they are providing IMO. I don't know how I feel about that lack of informed consent. Even if it's an incredibly small portion of people, it's still their undeniable right to refuse medical care IMO. The opt-out site should be enough, but I think they should be doing more to inform people of it since they can't very well opt out if the procedure is necessary.
[QUOTE=Ducksink;44917193]If I was in the scientists place i'd totally trick the patients into thinking they were frozen for thousands of years[/QUOTE]
"WELCOME TO THE WOORLD OF TOMOROW!, bathrooms over there."
But srously this is really cool and really a great step forward however how would they ever get consent to do this in an actual emergency situation, I mean you really are killing someone to save them
[editline]27th May 2014[/editline]
[QUOTE=Flazer210;44919983]I thought suspended animation would never even see the light of day while I'm alive.
Imagine waking up in 20 years. Seeing where technology would be at that time.
Shit's scary though. Hopes out to the people getting this done to them, it'd be tragic to have anything happen to them.[/QUOTE]
Dont get your hopes up, this only lasts a few hours at best, enough time to clamp a torn artery or preform an emergency bypass, this won't be for long term and cryonics has not made any breakthroughs in defrosting people sotheres not much to go by at this point, cryonics and this aren't the same
[QUOTE=PaperBurrito;44913954]Whoa, that's fucking scary.
I assume they use saline solution because it doesn't freeze, to prevent ice crystals from forming?[/QUOTE]
Everything freezes
[editline]30th May 2014[/editline]
But yeah you really wouldn't want ice crystals from what I've heard.
This is like, 2.4 miles away from me.
[QUOTE=SigmaLambda;44917008]Did they really need a control in this experiment?[/QUOTE]
The lab guys forgot their lunch
[quote]"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," Doctor Samuel Tisherman[/quote]
That is [I]exactly why you should call it suspended animation[/I]
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