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Pipedot has picked up on this remarkable New Scientist article: "Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death."
From the article:
Doctors will try to save the lives of 10 patients with knife or gunshot wounds by placing them in suspended animation, buying time to fix their injuries. ... The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. ... At lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half an hour after they have stopped breathing. ... The technique was first demonstrated in pigs in 2002.
The surgeon leading the trial (who apparently prefers to avoid the term "suspended animation") says he "eventually hopes to extend the technique to other conditions." I'm not surprised. Isn't the potential here enormous?
And the ethical issues are interesting in their own right. These are discussed towards the end of the article, and in this separate (self-contradictory) opinion piece (which appeared in print under the headline "Opt out is a cop-out").
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday April 02 2014, @08:41AM
I had always intended, if this submission were accepted, to come and comment with a couple of additional points.
One was an apology to the surgeon leading the trial, for going against his preference. I can understand his wish to avoid sci-fi connotations, but I consider his term "emergency preservation and resuscitation" to be far less meaningful/useful than "suspended animation [wikipedia.org]". It's also more than twice as long.
I also want to mention giving the credit to Pipedot. I normally go through my RSS feeds many times a day. When I came across this story on Pipedot, I considered it sufficiently important to immediately stop what I was doing and come and post it here. When I resumed going through my feeds, it actually turned out that some site called "Slashdot" was the first with this story!
(Score: 2) by dotdotdot on Wednesday April 02 2014, @09:36PM
I originally submitted the story to Pipedot and talked myself out of cross-submitting it here. I'm glad you did since the comments and discussion were unique on each site. I hope both sites succeed differently so they will grow even more distinct.