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Human Suspended Animation / Hibernation

rynner2

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Race to be first to ‘hibernate’ human beings
John Harlow in Los Angeles

TURNING science fiction into science fact, American doctors are preparing to chill volunteers into a state of suspended animation that could keep them asleep for months.

Medical teams in Los Angeles, Boston and Pittsburgh are racing to become the first to test out new theories of “induced hibernation” which could save lives and also help to send man towards the stars.

Hasan Alam, a surgeon at Massachusetts general hospital and consultant to the US army, is poised to start the first human trials before the end of the year.

Last week he said that he wanted to equip ambulances with a clear saline solution called plasma expander that would be injected into seriously injured victims at the scene of a car accident.

The plasma would rapidly send body temperature from 37C to 10C, slowing the metabolism, delaying the onset of shock and limiting damage from wounds.

Alam has experimented on eight-stone Yorkshire pigs, stopping the heart and electrical activity in the brain for up to two hours before slowly replacing the plasma with warm blood and reviving the animals with no apparent long-term effects.

The plasma could also be tested on soldiers: many survive an initial injury only to die waiting for treatment.

Alam, a trauma specialist, is primarily thinking about the time-critical dash to hospital. But researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh are more ambitious. “You start with 20 minutes and then find the limits – days, weeks, months, we do not yet know,” said a UCLA medical school researcher.

Although it is 20 years since Nasa abandoned work on induced hibernation as a way of helping astronauts to survive long space missions, research began again at the European Space Agency in 2004. Funding has flowed in the United States since October, when Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, 35, strayed from a Japanese office barbecue, fell down a snowy mountain and broke his hip.

He lapsed into a frozen coma, which lasted 24 days until his apparently lifeless body was found and revived in a Kobe hospital. He is now known in Japanese newspapers as the “Bear Man”.

“We don’t know how he survived so long, but his body was preserved in ice for nearly a month and now he is back to normal,” a Kobe doctor said. “If we can understand why, we can save many lives in the future.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 845294.ece
 
Does this mean cryogenics could work? Or is it the other way around?
 
Doesn't cryogenics freeze the recently dead? I think this new thing freezes the still alive.
 
I've a few collegues at work who would be useful in this study. They seem to go into hibernation from 9 to 5 every day.
 
gncxx said:
Doesn't cryogenics freeze the recently dead? I think this new thing freezes the still alive.

Ah, of course.

Still, there's a useful warning: be very careful at barbecues.
 
It doesn't actually freeze them, if I'm following this right it just lowers body temperature to a point where metabolism slows right down. Profound cooling is already used in some types of surgery effectively stopping metabolism, for a short time.

If you actually freeze, unless you've got some very weird body chemistry that prevents cell damage, you're as dead a a pork chop.
 
I think there's a great difference, and on all sorts of levels, between attempting to revive a "corpsicle" and awakening a "cryogenic sleeper."
 
There are folktales out of New England claiming that the pioneer settlers used to bury Grandma and Grandpa in ice and show all Winter and then thaw 'em out in the Spring.

Probably saved on Christmas presents.
 
This report claims a US university team has successfully induced the first deliberate / artificial suspended animation state in a human subject. The team has been given special permission by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to undertake an extended trial project.

NOTE: Patients have been chilled and revived before - usually as a result of exposure to cold conditions. This news item concerns achieving the same (previously accidental or uncontrolled) effects with a proactive procedure.
SCIENTISTS PLACE HUMANS IN “SUSPENDED ANIMATION” FOR FIRST TIME

THEY COOL YOUR BODY — AND REPLACE YOUR BLOOD WITH AN ICE-COLD SALT SOLUTION.

A team of doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have placed humans in “suspended animation” for the first time as part of a trial that could enable health professionals to fix traumatic injuries such as a gunshot or stab wound that would otherwise end in death, according to a New Scientist exclusive.

Suspended animation — or “emergency preservation resuscitation,” in medical parlance — involves rapidly cooling a patient’s body down to ten to 15 degrees Celsius (50 to 59 Fahrenheit) by replacing their blood with an ice-cold salt solution.

This slows down brain activity enough to buy the surgeons time — a couple of hours — to conduct life-saving surgeries. That’s because oxygen is no longer being carried to the brain, thereby stopping energy production. Without cooling, even five minutes without brain functions can cause irreversible damage.

After the operation, the patient’s body is warmed up again and the heart is restarted.
The team got permission by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to carry out the trial even without the patient’s consent, as there is no alternative treatment available.

A cautionary note: the team has yet to announce the results of the trial — or if any of the patients even survived the ordeal. Lead researcher Samuel Tisherman told New Scientist that he’s hoping to announce the results by the end of 2020.

“Once we can prove it works here, we can expand the utility of this technique to help patients survive that otherwise would not,” Tisherman said.
SOURCE: https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-humans-suspended-animation
 
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