fiction novel. It is more like a biochemistry textbook.
Another adviser to VitalMedix is Dr. Greg Beilman, a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota and a colonel in
the Army Reserves. He’s performed dozens of surgeries on battle-injured soldiers in Iraq and Kosovo. “My interest is personal,”
he said. “I got interested in this after my deployment to Kosovo in 2000. There were a couple of things we worked on there:
better ways to resuscitate people in the field and also how to better use resources in a field situation. I mean, when you’re
in Afghanistan, six hours from a combat hospital, what’s the best way to stop the bleeding?”
You can’t hike around an Afghan mountain range with a cooling box and a supply of chilled saline. You need something the medic
can deploy when it’s pitch black and someone is shooting at his head—a drug that can be administered quickly and easily. In
experiments on rats and pigs, Tamiasyn shows promise. The animals got the drug after going into shock from blood loss but
before there was any attempt at resuscitation. In both kinds of animals, it lengthened survival time, and organ function actually
improved as opposed to getting worse.
Suspended animation and hibernation are two experimental approaches to saving trauma victims, but there are others, including
the use of female hormones. It sounds pretty strange, but I was actually the coauthor on one of these studies, with colleagues
at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. We found that giving the hormone progesterone led to better recoveries for people who
suffer head injuries. Research on animals goes further; with the help of funding from DARPA, Dr. Irshad Chaudry at the University
of Alabama at Birmingham has found that small doses of the female hormone progesterone can sharply improve survival from everything
from sepsis to blood loss to cardiac arrest. 29
Some doctors believe that progesterone evolved to function as a protection against blood loss in mammals, which often lose
large amounts of blood during childbirth. 30 Jon Mogford of DARPA says the action of progesterone is actually more complicated than hydrogen sulfide. “Probably it’s a
combination of anti-inflammatory mechanisms, preventing cell death and also controlling blood flow. We don’t know how it’s
doing that in hemorrhagic shock, but it’s valid to presume that it would help survival.”
Yet another approach involves—you might have guessed it—extreme hypothermia. A surgeon named Hasan Alam, at Massachusetts
General Hospital, let us watch one of the surgeries. The test subjects are pigs. Alam knocks them out with an anesthetic,
opens the chest, slices open the aorta—sometimes other major organs, too—and quickly drains about 60 percent of the pig’s
blood. After a wait of thirty minutes, he inserts a catheter directly to the aorta and starts a pump that fills the animal’s
heart and blood supply with a chilled solution of organ preservation fluid: a mixture of electrolytes and antioxidants that
are typically used to extend the life of organs used in transplant operations. Forget moderation; Alam brings the temperature
down to about 10 degrees Celsius (or 50 degrees Fahrenheit). It takes almost an hour to get the pigs that cold.
At that point, he gets to the real work. “I can stop the [heart] pump. They have almost no blood in the body, no brain activity,
no heartbeat, and it gives me plenty of time to fix the underlying injuries,” said Alam. Under normal circumstances, the internal
injuries and massive blood loss would invariably be fatal to pigs, or to humans, for that matter, but in Alam’s lab, every
single test pig has survived. A few days after surgery, he puts each pig through a few paces to assess their cognitive functioning.
As best as he can tell, they suffer no brain damage at all. Even under the microscope, the brain cells show no sign of damage. 31
If it works in
Another adviser to VitalMedix is Dr. Greg Beilman, a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota and a colonel in
the Army Reserves. He’s performed dozens of surgeries on battle-injured soldiers in Iraq and Kosovo. “My interest is personal,”
he said. “I got interested in this after my deployment to Kosovo in 2000. There were a couple of things we worked on there:
better ways to resuscitate people in the field and also how to better use resources in a field situation. I mean, when you’re
in Afghanistan, six hours from a combat hospital, what’s the best way to stop the bleeding?”
You can’t hike around an Afghan mountain range with a cooling box and a supply of chilled saline. You need something the medic
can deploy when it’s pitch black and someone is shooting at his head—a drug that can be administered quickly and easily. In
experiments on rats and pigs, Tamiasyn shows promise. The animals got the drug after going into shock from blood loss but
before there was any attempt at resuscitation. In both kinds of animals, it lengthened survival time, and organ function actually
improved as opposed to getting worse.
Suspended animation and hibernation are two experimental approaches to saving trauma victims, but there are others, including
the use of female hormones. It sounds pretty strange, but I was actually the coauthor on one of these studies, with colleagues
at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta. We found that giving the hormone progesterone led to better recoveries for people who
suffer head injuries. Research on animals goes further; with the help of funding from DARPA, Dr. Irshad Chaudry at the University
of Alabama at Birmingham has found that small doses of the female hormone progesterone can sharply improve survival from everything
from sepsis to blood loss to cardiac arrest. 29
Some doctors believe that progesterone evolved to function as a protection against blood loss in mammals, which often lose
large amounts of blood during childbirth. 30 Jon Mogford of DARPA says the action of progesterone is actually more complicated than hydrogen sulfide. “Probably it’s a
combination of anti-inflammatory mechanisms, preventing cell death and also controlling blood flow. We don’t know how it’s
doing that in hemorrhagic shock, but it’s valid to presume that it would help survival.”
Yet another approach involves—you might have guessed it—extreme hypothermia. A surgeon named Hasan Alam, at Massachusetts
General Hospital, let us watch one of the surgeries. The test subjects are pigs. Alam knocks them out with an anesthetic,
opens the chest, slices open the aorta—sometimes other major organs, too—and quickly drains about 60 percent of the pig’s
blood. After a wait of thirty minutes, he inserts a catheter directly to the aorta and starts a pump that fills the animal’s
heart and blood supply with a chilled solution of organ preservation fluid: a mixture of electrolytes and antioxidants that
are typically used to extend the life of organs used in transplant operations. Forget moderation; Alam brings the temperature
down to about 10 degrees Celsius (or 50 degrees Fahrenheit). It takes almost an hour to get the pigs that cold.
At that point, he gets to the real work. “I can stop the [heart] pump. They have almost no blood in the body, no brain activity,
no heartbeat, and it gives me plenty of time to fix the underlying injuries,” said Alam. Under normal circumstances, the internal
injuries and massive blood loss would invariably be fatal to pigs, or to humans, for that matter, but in Alam’s lab, every
single test pig has survived. A few days after surgery, he puts each pig through a few paces to assess their cognitive functioning.
As best as he can tell, they suffer no brain damage at all. Even under the microscope, the brain cells show no sign of damage. 31
If it works in
Similar Books
