Reanimating the Dead

Thought we'd keep it going a little longer. Right, So we've talked about monsters some on the podcast, but we actually wanted to get into yet another monster related but very scientific topic, this time the resurrection of the dead, because we all love Frankenstein here, right, frank uh it is. I am unapologetic about the fact that is one of my favorite novels. Some of the some of the like romantic Gothic elements are kind of hokey and all that, but it's but it's a great story, Yeah it is.

And the pros is beautiful and and and it's very much about our our you know, seeking out our creator and asking them why we're here. And and also it's just about the dangers of science and the and the dangers associated that if we try to take on the responsibility of creating things ourselves, and then if we are not willing to carry that responsibility after creation, the terrible,

terrible things that happen afterwards. Right. So, in fact, you could look at it not just as a sort of like uh, anti science scare pamphlet, but it's something about taking responsibility for what you've done, because I got to do the nurture after you create the nature, right, which we advocate all the time on this show, responsible science. Right.

But to bring it back to science and technology, what's at the core of the premise of Frankenstein bringing back dead flesh, reanimation of a corpse, or if pieces of corpses stitched together, which maybe one's just as good as the other. Is this actually doable in real life? Is this a research area that people have looked into, and could we one day resurrect the dead with science? Well, to go back to the the story that that serves as the inspiration for this this podcast, you know Mary

Shelley had talked about with her with her peers. You know, this was all part of trying to create a really good ghost story, and that's the story behind the writing of Frankenstein. This was a group of of creative types like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and everyone trying to I'll do each other with with spooky stories. And one

of the spooky yes is Werewolf bar mitzvah Um. The The story goes that she and the others were talking about all sorts of topics like the occult, as well as recent discoveries and science like galvanic responses, which you know, the character Victor Frankenstein in the novel has studied. Whether or not that comes into play with the creature creation

is kind of a matter of interpretation. Yeah. In the movies, it's almost always showing, uh that Victor Frankenstein animates his creature with the help of lightning or electricity in one form or another. The novel doesn't actually say that, though

he is interested in electricity. I think it's a good guess that that's involved in the novel, even though it never explicitly says so, because there's a a passage where it says Victor studies it in the university, and there's another one where he's inspired by he's looking at the window during a storm and he sees a bolt of lightning obliterate and oak tree, and he's like, oh the power, right, and and the galvanic response was something that was uh

still fairly like those those fresh science I mean, that was something that was discovered in the late eighteenth century by Luigi Galvani, who discovered that passing an electric current through muscles would cause the muscles to twitch, even if those muscles were no longer, say, attached to a living thing anymore, like frog legs. Um, that's the that's the

kind of traditional yeah, the typical example. Yeah, the one that there are illustrations that you can see of the electrodes being touched to uh, dismembered frog leg and it's twitching. So that kind of created the the illusion of reanimation, right, You suddenly have a lifelike movement from something that is lifeless, which kind of brings around the question of, well, if this is an illusion of of life, is there any

way to to regain permanency. Is there a way to make that comeback and actually become real life, not a not just the simulation of life? All right, Well, I think we should transition from the fiction to the facts has anybody in history actually tried to reanimate dead tissue? Is this an experiment that's been performed before? Oh yeah, all the time, actually constantly really, I mean beyond just what you're saying about making muscles, twit bringing organisms back

from the death. Still. Yes. So, So here's the thing about people. We die. It's something that happens to all of us at some point or another. And so this is, uh, this has become a subject of a lot of interest because it's something we all share in common. Yeah, and

it's something that most of us aren't terribly excited about happening. Um, you know, for we have been collectively as a as a species trying to save people and animals from deadly injury and death forever, I mean for recorded history, as

long as it goes back. Um. There are records of resuscitation via clearing the airway and providing artificial breath that go back to like the Old Testament and the Babylonian talmod Um, but there's no record of it being actually studied scientifically until the seventeen hundreds and and blood circulations role in the whole process wasn't called into the picture until the late eighteen hundreds. I mean, people knew that blood was important obviously, like like we knew that there

was a heart and that it circulated blood. Um, but it was considered like they were just mainly concerned with getting rid of it much they were Yeah, well actually I suppose so. I mean they considered it like physiologically secondary to to breathing because they had they had seen that artificial breath support could restart a heart. Meanwhile, um, those galvanic responses that we mentioned from Frankenstein, I think

that people were playing around with those as well. Right, Oh yeah, no, that's that's something that we see a lot of in the nineteenth century. And we're talking like the dawn of the nineteenth century, the eighteen early undred, eighteen o three. Uh, and boy howdy, if you don't like kind of macabre descriptions, this might be a good time for you to skip ahead a little bit in the episode. Yeah, there's a possibility that you're gonna want

to skip this episode entirely. Yeah, but if you are morbidly curious, we're not going to get extremely graphic, but just there's just some general that even if you're taking it from a high level perspective, it's hard to get around decapitation. But starting with Giovanni Aldini, who was the nephew of Luigi Galvanni, the man who had discovered this

galvanic response. Galvanic response, by the way, did you guys know that when he discovered it, he thought he had discovered a source of electricity that was actually within the animal, not something that he had because because it was a spark that apparently came from a scalpel that caused the muscle to twitch. So at first he thought he had found something intrinsic in the animal, not something he had

applied externally to the animal. Oh yeah, I think there were a lot of thoughts like that back then, animal magnetism and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, But uh, Giovanni Aldini kind of carried on in his uncle's uh footsteps. He conducted experiments on the body of a man who was formerly known as George Forster way back in three now. Forster was not a nice guy. He had been convicted of murdering his wife and child and sentenced to hang.

He had been a prisoner at Newgate Prison, so he had been hanged, and then al Dini took possession of the body and performed a series of experiments for an audience of physicians and scientists. And depending upon the account you read, it sounds pretty dramatic like and keep in mind a lot of these accounts also have probably been

overly uh exaggerated, zealously reported. I would say, um, this was also a very popular well maybe not very popular, but a popular pastime around around this era, the renewed interest in medicine and especially in uh work with with with cadavers as medical specimens, so much teaching a peak and you know, people didn't have Netflix, so they had to make their own fund so much so that the medical colleges were sometimes having trouble getting hold of of

of cadaver. Yeah, yeah, there's the tale of Birken Hair. Birken Hair who were They were famous grave robbers who may also have helped create a couple of corpses of their own in order to sell them to a medical university. Frequently these corpses were of people who had been executed for various reasons and then uh, yeah, I guess it was considered better and once once a person hadn't been nice, once executions had been outlawed, it really kind of dried

up the medical research field. But that's another story for another time. But another example is the chemist Andrew your a or or I'm not sure how you say his last name is you are e and so I didn't even think to look up how the pronunciation of his name. But he wanted to replicate Aldini's experiments. So this happened in eighteen eighteen, which coincidentally was the same year that

Frankenstein was published. Um So, now, according to I'm gonna call him Andrew because there's no way I'm gonna ever say his last name correctly, applying electric current to the face of a cadaver had a pretty ghastly result. This is a direct quote from one of his papers. Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action, rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles united their hideous expression in the murderer's face.

I don't know how you could do all those things simultaneously. Uh, I don't know either, but apparently it's striking. And as a little side note, there's another slightly more famous scientists actually in the circles of of electro physiology named Duchen du Boulogne, who or do Bologna if you if you prefer who further these sorts of experiments, but he used living subjects. He was trying to study the physiological uh

movements and structure of musk muscles. And he would apply electrodes to people's faces and make them make horrible faces without uh, without there trying to do so. But again that that was only tangentially related. Okay, but all of this so far still basically exciting muscle activity with electrical current. What about like really sort of a more robust activation of the dead body. Can you bring back the brain activity?

Can you can you bring back someone entirely well? Back on the medical resuscitation side, in eighteen seventy four, manual cardiac massage like you know, open surgery, actually getting in there and and beating a heart with your hands. Um what was shown to return a heartbeat to a dog by one more It's shift. And then in nineteen o one, the first successful open chest cardiac massage was performed on

a human by one Christian eggles Rud. His patient had experienced an anesthesia induced cardiac arrest, and so this was a This was a pretty huge thing in medicine to to find out that someone whose heart had stopped eating could could be reanimated essentially. Okay, but I assumed the time scale was short there. Yeah, yeah, he wasn't. I mean, this isn't like a corpse that they had dug up from a graveyard or anything like that. It was a patient that had yes been in a hospital, had this

thing happen, cardiac arrest, and then was revived. Yeah. That's where this term resuscitation comes in, sort of the bringing back after a brief cardiac arrest. Okay, I've got a really weird one I want to talk about. Have you all heard about the Russian physiologist Sergei Brokenenko. Yeah, yeah, this is the guy who who in the early nineteen twenties created this kind of life support system that he called the autojector. The auto ject or Yeah, this was

this was basically a mechanical heart and lungs. Yeah, yeah, it drew. He was he was using dogs heads for this experiment. Supposedly. We we also do want to say that all of this stuff that we're going to say about some of these um early Oviet experiments is in question just because there Soviet Russia at that time was not really dedicated to factual accuracy and its record keeping a disturbing pictures. Yeah, they, I mean they there's video of this, like from later on. You can look this

up on YouTube. And another thing is I also feel like we should be skeptical of some of these claims from the Soviet science era, especially of this period in the twenties and thirties. On the other hand, I haven't found any evidence of mainstream scientists challenging the validity of Brooke Ninka's results, and I've even found what looked like a few instances of his research referred to in subsequent publications in pure reviewed journals like the Annals of the

Racic Surgery. Wow. Yeah, okay, So so what he did was um supposedly, using using a dog's head, he would draw the used that the spent the deoxygen eated blood out from it using this machine. The machine would then warm and reoxygenated it and then pump it back into the head and supposedly this this would animate the head enough to like produce responses based on stimuli. Yeah. So, if you watch the video, he's got a severed doghead

hooked up to the autojet tour and he can. He will like bang a hammer on the table where the head is and the head flinches with the hammer blows. This is awful. I want to go home and hug my dog, I know, right so much I miss my dogs about um but but that, But the weird Soviet science doesn't stop there, right, Alexi Kuliopka and fjord Or Andrea f and I know I will butcher names till the day I die, and him resuscitated and then die again.

But they attempted to reanimate a human corpse back in nine and it followed those experiments we had just talked about, in fact, including a lot of others too. I mean, certainly, our our buddy Sergey was not the only dude who was trying to work with this kind of stuff right time. And Alexei was one of Sergey's students essentially, and he um.

They they got hold of a corpse and hooked it up to a bunch of tubes as well, essentially tried to do a larger version of the dog experiment we were just talking about, and supposedly they were able to get the corpse's heart beating again for twenty or twenty five minutes. Uh, and that the corpse had once being resuscitated, which I guess makes the corpse become a person again. Uh. The person arguably let out a weird guttural noise from his throat and it panicked one of the the assistants,

who ran from the room. And that is pretty much the extent of all the information I can find on that particular incident. Yeah again with that story, I mean, it's interesting that's reported. I think we should be little bit skeptical, but yeah, we don't know what happened. It could be the air was being forced into the body and that it was exiting through the throat, and that the noise was not any sign of consciousness or anything like that. It could have been purely physiological, but we

don't know. Uh. In ninety in the United States, you have Robert E. Cornish who experimented with bringing back the dead. He started with fox terriers. Uh. He had a group of fox terriers. All of them had the same name, Lazarus. I see what he did there. Yeah. Uh, So he essentially euthanized the dog one at a time, put him on a seesaw. The seesaw essentially was meant to stimulate circulation of the blood. He also injected them with anticoagulants

and epinephrin, and had mixed results. Most of the dogs remained very much dead. A couple of them seemed to revive, but had suffered ailments like blindness and brain damage, and they did not live very long. They were declared dead shortly thereafter. Um so, uh, this never went much further. It was never successful on a person, for example, but

by Ninko was not done. Yeah. Yeah. In ninety four, he supposedly again attempted to revive a man who had hanged himself just three hours previous by hooking him up to this autoject or um, and supposedly the man woke up enough to stare at the assembled doctors I quote as a man and a stupor might do uh this. This reanimation, though, only lasted for two minutes because supposedly the doctor switched off the machine again I quote, unbearably

horrified at what they had done. There's definitely an ethical question about bringing back someone who has chosen to take their own life. Yeah, that's a little bit, that's a little bit shady right there. We should say where the quotations were from oh right. These are from an excerpt of How to Make a Zombie the Real Life and Death Side. It's of reanimation and mind control by one Frank Swain, and it seems like a pretty rad book overall. A salon published to this excerpt, and I'm really curious

to read this whole thing. Now. His prose is pretty excellent. Yeah he describes the reanimation of humans and dogheads with yeah. Okay. But but meanwhile, back on the actually documented medical end of resuscitation, people were working on restarting a heart um in in ways that we're not quite so invasive. It was still a surgical procedure for the next couple of decades.

But in the nineteen fifties we figured out how to do external cardiac massage a khs compression, like the sort of thing that you do in cpr um and uh defibrillation. So those were huge advancements in buying us a little bit more time in order to bring someone back from the quote unquote dead. Right. Okay, So that's the history, and that gets us up to the point where resuscitation is a thing that commonly happens. I mean, it doesn't happen with the majority of people who go into cardiac arrest,

but it does happen especially fairly success under hospital conditions. Especially. Um, So we've gotten to this point where you might be dead for a few seconds or even a few minutes and be brought back. But how long can can that go on? And from what kinds of states of death can we resuscitate people? All right, Well, this is getting into a territory where we need to define death, and of course that's an extremely tricky question that is legally

being debated all the time. Yeah. I mean, you hear this term clinical death, right, and you would think that clinical death is very definitive, that there's got to be a a pretty you know, like a stable set of rules that clinical death must adhere to in order to be clinical death. And for a long time, uh, that was not the case, and in some parts of the world it may still not. Be Clinically dead essentially means that a doctor has declared a patient dead and that

that's largely up to the doctor. Um. I think I've read for a long time that it referred to cardiac arrest that if the heart had stopped beating and the lung stopped working, it was considered to be irretrievable and the patient was declared dead. But yet clinical death Really all it means is that a doctor has declared a patient dead. It doesn't necessarily mean anything more than that, and it doesn't necessarily mean the patient could not be resuscitated. Uh.

It all uh depends upon each individual situation. So then there's also legally dead. You've heard that term before too. Now, that used to mean someone whose heart and lungs had just stopped working and was considered to be irreversible. Uh. And so essentially it was um usually something that came from a death certificate that had been signed off by

the doctor who was in charge of the patient. So you get declared clinically dead first, then legally dead in the United States, though all states and the District of Columbia have adopted the definition from the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which cites whole brain death as actual death. Uh. This is all following all of this research that was put in the nineteen fifties which led us to be able to bring people back through defibrillation and and cardiac massage.

So essentially, up to the nineteen fifties, death was pretty much the moment when some major function of the body was going to fail. And the three big ones are brain activity, breathing, or heartbeat, and if one of those three were to have a critical failure they stopped working, generally speaking, the patient would very quickly have the other

systems follow suit. But there's kind of a question where if we can resuscitate people after cardiac arrest, or if we can put people on, you know, artificial lungs or ventilation machines, or give people a feeding tube and all these other things that come with the modern science of medicine, does that change what the definition of death should be.

It kind of changes at least how we talk about it, right because let's you know, the mechanical ventilator is a great example those Once those started to come along and they were in development in the early nine you were mentioning some of the early experiments with them, and of course obviously there's the ancient versions that have been around for quite some time to varying degrees of success um.

But mechanical ventilators meant that suddenly, if the lungs failed, we could, in theory, put someone on a mechanical ventilator that might allow them to um with assisted breathing regain uh function, you can get to a point where they would be able to recover from whatever ailment had sent them into this state of being. And that something that you originally would have said, this is a dead person because they cannot breathe no longer applied. Okay, well, then

should it be when the heart stops speeding? Well no, because you it also make the heart continue to beat, either with massage like CPR mechanically and possibly restart itself. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, and then you've got as long as the the cells themselves haven't died, you can keep on going and you can have people recover. Um. There's so that's that would be circulatory death, right, the idea that your

heart has stopped beating. But again we don't necessarily see that as uh an actual point of no return at this Yeah, and not not anymore. And there's some really extreme examples of people surviving, right, Yeah, for a long time after their heart has stopped. Yeah. There was a a student and a Baggenholm who fell down while she

was skiing. She fell onto a an icy patch on a stream, and her upper body was submerged underneath and she found a pocket of air, but she could not get out of this stream that she had fallen into. Her friends tried to help her out um and after forty minutes of her struggling to try and get get back out, her heart stopped beating uh and they her friends still couldn't get her out. Finally, a rescue team was able to cut her out of the ice and

they started administering CPR. They got her to a hospital that they didn't cut her out of the s until forty minutes after her heart had stopped getting so, so forty minutes she's under their struggling. Another forty minutes after her heart had stopped beating, that's when she's cut out. And from the point where she fell to the point where her heart started beating again. Because this is this is the great part of this story. It took three

hours fifty five minutes. Now, that's the point of the time where she fell in and her heart started rebating, But subtract forty minutes from that, because it's more than because the first forty minutes her heart was beating anyway. But I've seen several different reports, but it seems at least for two or three hours her heart was stopped. Yeah, so you might say, well, how is that possible? How

can some body have their hearts stopped that long? Because with the heart stopping, you know, the blood that's flowing through our veins, it's carrying oxygen to our brains. It's also carrying away toxins and waste. You know, it's it's it's a multi functional uh system that is very important

for the support of life. So how could someone have their hearts stop for more than an hour, more than three hours, and then make a recovery and only make a recovery but not suffer permanent brain damage and in that recovery period. Well, what I've read is that her survival is chalked up to the fact that she was in an icy stream, which kept her body temperature very low while her heart was in the arrested state. Yea, she had a temperature by a temperature of fifty six

degrees fahrenheit. That's thirteen degrees celsius. That's quite chilly. Uh. And here's the thing you've heard about, you know, oxygen deprivation of the brain, you know, hypoxia and all that kind of thing about the idea of brain cells dying. Well, a lot of uh, not a lot, but brain cell death can result from oxygen being deprived from the brain and then resupplied. It's kind of a type of shock where the brain gets overwhelmed and cells start to kind

of just destroy themselves, and you can suffer severe brain damage. Uh. The cooling of the body temperature counteracts this, and so with the cooling of the body temperature combined with the cardiac arrest, it meant that by resupplying in a gradual way the the blood supply andyen that she was able to recover without this reaction of shock, which would have otherwise uh caused massive brain damage. So it's pretty phenomenal

and it's interesting. Also we should mention that when you think of applying CPR, especially when we see in the movies, you might see someone like pumping maybe fifteen times and yeah, however, however long is dramatically right exactly, and then and then they're like, we tried so hard. You know, you're supposed to keep that up for thirty eight minutes, at a minimum thirty eight minutes. You know, most most of the literature I read is actually they rounded up to forty minutes.

I just had a thought for the first time. If you come back from that, I imagine your chest must really hurt. It usually breaks the breastbone. It's it's a it's not anywhere near what it looks like in the movies. But on the other hand, a broken breastbone is way better than dead exact. Yeah, Okay, So we've established that it's possible, at least in some strange scenarios, to come back after your heart having stopped for a long time. So what actually prevents you from coming back after say

a day? So why can't you go in and give CPR to someone who's been dead for four or forty eight hours? Well, I mean it'll again, it'll really heavily depend upon the situation, because there are at least some people who claim that you could go that long, but maybe under some really bizarre circumstances, but under normal circumstances. What you're looking at the problem, the biggest problem is cellular death. Right. So death doesn't just occur at the

whole body level. It occurs at every single little cell in your body. Right, There's a there's a straightforward mechanical failure of the of the parts of the cell right right, Because once your blood stops flowing, It stops delivering nutrients and oxygen, and stops clearing out those toxins. Right. And so the way I've read this described is that your cells have little membranes, and without being constantly taken care of by the flow of blood, those membranes start to rupture.

And then once it happens, basically the parts of it come apart and that can't be repaired. And the here's the thing. Cell death is completely part of life because our cells are constantly dying to share a place. Yeah, it's the process of apoptosis right now. And the key part of that is that new cells are replacing the cells that have died off. Its planned. Right when you get to a point where you're you're no longer build, your circulation is no longer going, then you're not getting

these new cells. There's no generation going on. It's just to die off. And once the cells are dead, there's no way to revive the cell. They they they're destroyed, right, So they're literally not there anymore. It is an excell, Yeah, exactly. His cell has shuffled off the coil. It's gone to meet the choir invisible. Uh, the the the the cells also die at different rates. It kind of depends upon

the actual tissue. So brain cells can die off very they're very delicate, they can die off pretty quickly under under normal circumstances. Clearly the ones that back on home were under I mean she her with her body temperature solo.

Those were extraordinary circumstances. But under normal circumstances, it only takes a few minutes of deprivation from oxygen for brain cells to start to deteriorate to sure um and so brain death really is the kind of modern standard of what we should consider death to be right, and this would be brain death where there is no trace of

brain activity. We're not talking about limited activity because they're there are people who are in a vegetative state who uh, you know, there are arguments that they are starting to respond to a certain stimulus or that you can track some electrical activity in the brain that would not qualify for whole brain death as defined by that act I

had mentioned earlier. But if you're talking about whole brain death, then there's really no coming back from that, at least with our conventional means right now, um as far as we know. But also there's a an added complication in that people who are in a vegetative state, who are uh, their their heart is still beating and they're still breathing maybe with with assistance, but their brain is no longer active. They are ideal candidates for organ harvesting because they're still alive.

There's their organs are still being supplied, right, so they are incredibly valuable medically. So it becomes that becomes an added consideration and complication in this discussion about resuscitation, and of course the next of kins wishes or the families wishes have to be respected, and there's and there's also of course a very emotional and religious aspect to all of this. But medically speaking, that's what we've got going on right now. Um. But this is a show about

the future. So uh, is there is there any new research that that's possibly changing this. Yeah, I want to know how what's pushing the limits because so we've established a couple of boundaries. I mean, it's common to revive people after a few minutes of cardiac arrest. We we know because of cell death that you're not going to do what Frankenstein did and dig up corpses that are days old or something like that and make them right. That's just not going to happen. It can't be reversed

at that point. It's too much damage. But how far can we push the resuscitation border. How long can you go with somebody who's dead in one of these ways we've mentioned, either uh, brain dead or suffering cardiac arrest, or or any of these different kinds of death and bring them back to a healthy life state. It's it's definitely something that is dependent upon the individual situation and the the capabilities of whatever healthcare providers happened to be

uh near that person. So if we're talking about a state of the art hospital that is using the latest uh uh groundbreaking techniques and resuscitation, the number I saw was a thirty eight percent success rate for people who had gone into serious cardiac arrest using the hospital in the hospital, And so this is you know, clearly, I mean, if you're in the hospital, there's there's something that is wrong medically with you otherwise, or you're visiting someone, but

you know what I mean, if you're a patient in the hospital, something is medically wrong. So of course you are in a population where there's a higher percentage of people who could go into cardiac arrest. That makes sense. So, but in the environment, you're also in the best place for that to happen because you've got the people who

are most qualified to take care of you. UM. It's it's hard to answer this question, mainly because we don't have a uniform set of standards for every single hospital, with every single healthcare professional, with every single patient case.

They're all very particular. However, we have lots of groups that are working very hard to push the resuscitation technology and science as far as possible to give patients the best chance of being resuscitated and while being maybe being dead by one of the earlier definitions, aren't dead to the point that they cannot come back. So you've got

the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation or ill CORE. UH. They publish a consensus of findings every five years, the most recent being so we're according this inten next year we should see another publication with the latest and this is essentially an overview of all the different studies on resuscitation with kind of a best practices and you know, based upon the science, this is what we think is the best approach for resuscitating people. Uh. You've also got

specific groups. I mean, one of the stories we were looking at today talked about the University of Pennsylvania and their Center for Resuscitation Science or CRS. And again, this isn't about reanimating the dead. It's resuscitating people who have gone into cardiac arrest or stop breathing the best we can hope to do. Yeah at this point, yeah, okay. So the question for the future is how far can

we push back resuscitation. How long can you go? Um, Like we were saying, I don't think you'll ever get to the point where you can resurrect somebody who you know died out in the middle of a field somewhere and you find them hours later. At that point, too much cell death has already set in. The tissues are

irreparably damaged at the cellular level. I was trying to come up with an analogy, and I think it would be like trying to repair gas up and restart a car where all the engine parts are just rusted through with holes, Like it's just not gonna happen. The damage is systemic and catastrophic and there's no return. But what seems like a more plausible future for pushing back. The resuscitation window is a future for when you die in hospital conditions, and doctors might be able to immediately apply

some cell death prevention therapies to your body. Actually, to quote an expert in this field, Dr Sam Parnia, who's an American expert in death and resuscitation science. He gave an interview to Der Spiegel in July and he said this, in the future, we will likely get better at reversing death. We may have injectable drugs that slow the process of cell death in the brain and other organs. It is possible that in twenty years we may be able to restore people to life twelve hours or maybe even twenty

four hours after they have died. You could call that resurrection if you will, but I still call it resuscitation science. Again, I think it's important that he's making the distinction, because it's important to note this as resuscitation, even if you're

talking about something that's a day later. Because he's talking about someone who has had measures put in place to stall the onset of cell death, and he he looks at death as a process, not as in an on off switch, like it's not binary, it's not zero or one, uh, and it might not be just injectable things too. You could do you could do this with with the conditions

around the body right we were. You know, you could artificially create the same sort of situation that we talked about with with with the the lady who fell into the rosen stream. You could you could induce therapeutic hypothermia. That's specifically when you are purposefully lowering the body temperature of a patient in order to help prevent that that shock I was talking about, which is called reperfusion injury, uh, which may have been again what saved back in home

when she fell into that icy stream. And in fact, some hospitals already do a version of this. Yeah, they intentionally lower your body temperature if you go into cardiac arrest while they're trying to revive you. And I've even seen uh other suggestions. In fact, I think I saw one, yeah, from from Dr Parnia himself, who said that for people who are are responding with CPR, for someone who's going to cardiac arrest, it's not a bad idea to do something like put a bag of frozen peas on their

head to help them bring down their temperature. A little bit while you do this, and it's interesting to think of it kind of like a d I Y approach until a rescue team can arrive and take over. But yeah, this is something that we could see used more regularly.

In fact, I think Dr Parnia has said that the reason why we don't see this rolled out more uniformly throughout the the United States and then you know, by extension of the world is simply that it's it's taking time for this information to diffuse out into the medical

community and tested and right. And also the fact that that you have to have multiple specialists looking after a person who has gone through cardiac arrest because you've got so many systems there, the respiratory system, the circulatory system, the brain, and as we've discussed on this show before, Uh, the specialties that we're talking about are so intense, they're so even a specialty is so broad that there's no one who's going to be an expert in multiple ones,

Like we're not all going to be doctor House and doctor House is a fictional representation. But you know, I think one thing that's important to notice this idea he's talking about where you might have in objectable therapies to prevent cell death is not just a fantasy. There's real research going on in this area, right, Oh, absolutely, there there are lots of therapies that are under investigation for

the possible prevention of cell death. We could do a whole episode really just on those um and and we covered it a little bit in our episode on immortality called Who Wants to Live Forever which published in June of but but very briefly, researchers are looking at different cells metabolisms of stuff like sugar and oxygen um, and

at antibodies, and at regulatory enzymes and proteins. Because all right, the thing is that we we know that cells die because of both necrosis, which is which is damage um and apoptosis, which we mentioned earlier, which is regulated or programmed cell death, which happens due to normal bodily functions, or or it can happen due to stressors and diseases,

including like viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Uh So we know a lot about the mechan is ms that can trigger cell death, but not enough to know how to control it. Uh And it's important to remember here that you know, as we look into the future and and as we think about what science might do to to help resuscitate people at later and later times after death, that most of the current research is aimed more at treatment of diseases like AIDS and you know,

Alzheimer's stuff like that. Uh, plus also things like cancer in which harmful cells can be targeted for triggered death, which is pretty cool. Um. You know, I guess it could certainly lend itself to reanimation or resuscitation in the future, but right now it's it's a narrower focus. You know.

One of the other things I was thinking though, is that if we want to get fairly sci fi with this, you could imagine that if you have, as as Parnia suggests, injectable drugs that prevent cell death in hospital conditions, one could imagine maybe even some kind of implant or or a cybernetic enhancement or something that's designed to stall out

death wherever you are. So imagine you don't go into cardiac arrest in hospital conditions, but you are out hiking somewhere or something like that, and you have a sensor implanted in your body that says, hey, I just noticed that all of your signals went flat. Are you okay? And if you don't press the cancel button, it injects you immediately with the substances to prevent your cell death could be we don't know. I guess it would also

have to send out some sort of beacons. Otherwise, well, I'm still alive, but I'm incapable of moving and I'm on a mountain again. I guess you'd have to put in some really good fail safes to make sure it doesn't accidentally And yeah, that would be bad time. And we haven't even we touched on it on previous episodes. We didn't go into it here because it's not about

resurrecting or or reanimating the dead. But there's also the discussion of the study of the death of death from a genetic perspective and the shortening of telomeres and really to counter aging, so that while death would not become impossible, you wouldn't die from quote unquote natural causes. You. You might still get sick, or you might still die due to injury, but you wouldn't age. Yeah, yeah, and and check out that that episode on Immortality for more on that.

But but let's let's return to that kind of ultimate sci fi idea of of cryogeniction reanimation. So you're talking about like things from hard sci fi like Futurama exactly. Again, in this scenario, you couldn't fix the problem of natural death discovered too late, right, You couldn't go dig someone up and then once once you're at that point, cryonics doesn't help you. It's something you have to prepare for. Right.

But assuming that you know they have Walt Disney's body on ice somewhere, are they going to be able to reanimate him? So this is I can't help but think of the Simpsons. We're looking for the cure verse seventeen tab wounds in the back. Um. But now the cryogenic freezing. First of all, it does happen. There are people who are in cryogenic suspension. Now, um, they are all legally dead, because it is illegal to do this to someone who has not been proclaimed clinically dead by a doctor and

therefore legally dead. But the idea is to cool that the body down to sub zero temperatures, actually very sub zero temperatures, uh, in order to preserve the cells uh indefinitely. And the hope is that the person will be able to be revived in the future, and whatever it was that led to their demise has been Um, we've learned

enough to be able to reverse that as well. You know, I have nothing to base this on, but I just have a little intuition that says doctors must really be annoyed by people who are trying to be cryogenically frozen. Pretty annoyed by it. So you're sitting there in the room trying to save somebody's life and then like right over your shoulder, you've got these guys standing there ready to freeze them. Well, yeah, it's this is pretty this

is pretty crazy stuff. So yeah, if let's say that you have are elected to be cryogenically frozen upon your death, uh, I think they have to act quickly because again, once cellular death starts to set in, there's really no hope of of bringing that person back. Like most people say that, even looking a thousand years in the future, there's no coming back from cellular death. So you have to be able to preserve the body before that starts. So you

have to freeze the body carefully. You can't just dunk a body into liquid nitrogen. It's gonna right, right because that that would that would I mean you've seen the way that for example, an ice cube trade will overflow if you put it in the freezer to full, or that a soda can will pop if you put it in the freezer. And that's because liquid expands when it's frozen. Water doesn't, at least liquid I'm sorry. Water. So you've got a lot of water in your body, like your cells,

what's the water in them? They freeze the cells, the water inside the cells expands the cell membrane props, and then you've got cell death. That's cell death right there. So you can't do it quickly. But what they end up doing is they end up freezing your body slowly. They first have to replace all the water in your cells with a cryoprotectant, which is a chemical mixture that's essentially a non toxic anti freeze. So yeah, that's step one. You think that that's gonna be a pretty big one

right there. Then they cool your body down to about minus two and two degrees fahrenheit or one thirty celsius one that minus one thirty I should say, not plus one thirty. That would be insane. Then you'd be placed in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen and cooled to a further minus three degrees fahrenheit or minus one celsius. You'd be stored upside down because if the tank were to spring a leak, they want to protect your brain as long as possible, so you'll be upside down. So

you're like a big frozen batsickle. You're like a six pack because you're in there with other people because space is a premium, so there are chances that you're gonna be in that same tank with lots of other folks,

so you're gonna be making friends, frozen buddies. You'll be like two frozen peas in a pod and uh yeah, you'll be upside down until they figure out they're able to bring you back if they ever are, and we don't know that we can because right now we don't have the technology to actually return someone from this frozen state to a normal temperature where they could, even in theory, be revived, even if we knew how to cure whatever it was that caused them to die in the first place.

It's for people who have a lot of hope in the future. Yeah, this is where you're Yeah, this is where you're placing a bet that in the future we will have figured this out enough to reverse this process and bring someone back so that they can be resuscitated. It's don't like the people who say, like global warming, we'll figure it out, technology will fix it. Uh yeah, this is not This would not be the basket into

which I would place all of my eggs. Um. This is one of those things where it, I mean, it is like futures where you're you buy, you buy something thinking about in the future it's gonna be worth something, so I'm gonna pay for it now. I think I'd rather throw in on investing in that that injector implant thing I talked about, the completely hypothetical injector implant thing.

That you hypothetical thing as opposed to the actual thing that's happening, but the hypothetical way of resuscitating someone afterwards. Um yeah, it's you know, it's not to say that this won't ever become uh a possible, you know, working approach, but we don't have we don't. Yeah, there's nothing that we have right now that would say right now, it's kind of an entertaining cultural artifact, I think. Um, but

but it does. I mean, like Joe is saying, and we've been a little bit snarky about it, but I do think it's genuinely beautiful that that people have this this faith in the future, and yeah, and in science

to cure future science to cure all ills. I'm a very optimistic person, and I really very much like to see, uh, the the optimism come out in other ways, and I certainly hope that it unfolds in a way that is best for everybody obviously, And uh, I mean in the meantime, we're using this similar technologies, not going down to the temperatures we're talking about with crogenic freezing, but similar similar technologies to put people into what has been called suspended

animation as a means of helping resuscitate them. In fact, you probably have heard that there was a breakthrough and suspended animation in two thousand fourteen, and everyone thought, oh, is this supposed to be for space flight? And no, the answer was that was not for space flight. Was specifically for patients who were undergoing tumic like medical trauma, and it was meant to help stabilize them so that

doctors would be able to repair whatever damage. Yeah. So, uh, now that doesn't mean that we won't one day figure out a way of doing suspended animation. Obviously, that would be a huge boon for space exploration, especially if you just wanted to be able to go to sleep and wake up on Mars would be fantastic. Or maybe not Mars, maybe a planet on a different you know, system, entirely all right, So in summary, in the future, will we ever be able to bring back corpses like Dr Frankenstein?

Almost certainly not. I really can't see how that could happen in any way, no matter how good technology gets, which is too bad because Marty Feldman would be my number one, that's the first person I go to. But can we bring people back after longer and longer periods of cardiac arrest? I think that seems very plausible. We can. We can certainly bring people back from the dead as

we had to find dead in previous generations. We can do that and and hopefully yeah, right, you use these technologies to prolong life and to help beat some of these diseases that we don't really have any kind of other care for right now. Yeah. Yeah, So it's it's one of those things that we were so interested in tackling because I mean, we're all horror and science fiction fans. People can argue, but I think Frankenstein of I think of it as the first science fiction novel, and um,

I I'm really excited by these kind of topics. I think that it's fun for us to take something that's a little outside the norm for us. We've done it a few times with our what you Don't see in science fiction series. So if there are any other futuristic kind of topics that are, you know, off the beaten path, it's not maybe something that we would normally cover in an episode, but you really would like to hear our take on it, let us know we would be eager

to hear from you. You can drop us a line where you can sow an email at FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or get in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. Twitter and Google Plus we have to handle f W thinking. Just search FW thinking in Facebook's search bar will pop right up. We look forward to hearing from you, and you hear from us again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, I visit Forward Thinking dot

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