people, this sort of procedure could have a huge impact in a hospital emergency room. Trauma is the leading
cause of death for people under fifty and kills more under thirty-five than all other causes combined. 32 Alam said, “If somebody comes in tonight after getting shot in the chest, I’ll open the chest to control bleeding. If I can
control it in just a few minutes, I think they’ll live. If it’s more like five minutes, they’ll probably die. But if I can
get the brain temperature down like this, I’ll have more like two hours.”
What all these approaches have in common is that they tinker with the cellular machinery that processes oxygen. Think back
to what Lance Becker teaches: in a medical crisis like traumatic blood loss or cardiac arrest, it’s not just the loss of oxygen,
but the body’s reaction that’s dangerous. Estrogen minimizes this reaction. Hypothermia puts it into slow motion. Hydrogen
sulfide perhaps can stop the reaction altogether.
If it all sounds far-fetched, especially the approach using hydrogen sulfide, remember that nature is full of creatures that
can turn off the need to breathe. They’re everywhere. You can even find an example on the back of a comic book, next to the
ads for X-ray specs and action figures. I’m talking about the mail-order ads for creatures called Sea-Monkeys. They’re actually
a tiny kind of shrimp, marketed as “instant life” or “real live fun pets you grow yourself.” Sea-Monkeys can survive without
oxygen, in cysts, for as long as four years. Drop them into water, and as the sales pitch says, you get instant life for about
three dollars, plus shipping and handling.
It may be that creatures like this provide real clues to solving the puzzle of suspended animation. One person who believes
this is Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center. In the operating
room, he monitors patients during high-risk surgeries to repair brain aneurysms. An aneurysm is a blister on a blood vessel
in the brain, caused by a weakening of the blood vessel wall. Sometimes, to fix it, a neurosurgeon has to first stop blood
from flowing to the spot, usually by using a simple clip on the vessel.
Since this cuts off blood flow to the affected part of the brain, the procedure carries the risk of brain damage. The same
thing happens if the heart fails. “It’s usually said that if the heart stops beating, you’ll have severe neurological damage
if it lasts more than five minutes,” says Bickler. “We try to buy more time.” To buy time, the anesthesiologist will try to
reduce the brain’s need for oxygen with a mix of powerful drugs. Unfortunately, this safeguard doesn’t always work. During
high-risk brain surgeries, a significant number of patients emerge with brain damage due to lack of oxygen. 33
During a small number of extremely complex surgeries lasting an hour or more, some patients are put into deep hypothermia,
much like Hasan Alam did in his swine experiments. For more routine aneurysm repairs, a number of doctors have tried the more
modest version of hypothermia, cooling the brain to 33 degrees Celsius, but surprisingly—to Bickler, at least—a large clinical
trial on this found no benefit.
Like many doctors, Bickler had put a lot of faith in hypothermia. He decided to try and piece together what went wrong. When
he thought about the experiment and why it failed, he reasoned that it must be because the bulk of the brain damage wasn’t
taking place
while
the oxygen was cut off, which is when the patients were being cooled. The damage was coming
afterward,
caused by the body’s reaction to oxygen deprivation. Bickler figured that the same thing must be happening in people who
suffered cardiac arrest.
Bickler’s particular interest is blood chemistry, and his focus was on how that chemistry changes after the body is deprived
of oxygen. We’ve
cause of death for people under fifty and kills more under thirty-five than all other causes combined. 32 Alam said, “If somebody comes in tonight after getting shot in the chest, I’ll open the chest to control bleeding. If I can
control it in just a few minutes, I think they’ll live. If it’s more like five minutes, they’ll probably die. But if I can
get the brain temperature down like this, I’ll have more like two hours.”
What all these approaches have in common is that they tinker with the cellular machinery that processes oxygen. Think back
to what Lance Becker teaches: in a medical crisis like traumatic blood loss or cardiac arrest, it’s not just the loss of oxygen,
but the body’s reaction that’s dangerous. Estrogen minimizes this reaction. Hypothermia puts it into slow motion. Hydrogen
sulfide perhaps can stop the reaction altogether.
If it all sounds far-fetched, especially the approach using hydrogen sulfide, remember that nature is full of creatures that
can turn off the need to breathe. They’re everywhere. You can even find an example on the back of a comic book, next to the
ads for X-ray specs and action figures. I’m talking about the mail-order ads for creatures called Sea-Monkeys. They’re actually
a tiny kind of shrimp, marketed as “instant life” or “real live fun pets you grow yourself.” Sea-Monkeys can survive without
oxygen, in cysts, for as long as four years. Drop them into water, and as the sales pitch says, you get instant life for about
three dollars, plus shipping and handling.
It may be that creatures like this provide real clues to solving the puzzle of suspended animation. One person who believes
this is Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center. In the operating
room, he monitors patients during high-risk surgeries to repair brain aneurysms. An aneurysm is a blister on a blood vessel
in the brain, caused by a weakening of the blood vessel wall. Sometimes, to fix it, a neurosurgeon has to first stop blood
from flowing to the spot, usually by using a simple clip on the vessel.
Since this cuts off blood flow to the affected part of the brain, the procedure carries the risk of brain damage. The same
thing happens if the heart fails. “It’s usually said that if the heart stops beating, you’ll have severe neurological damage
if it lasts more than five minutes,” says Bickler. “We try to buy more time.” To buy time, the anesthesiologist will try to
reduce the brain’s need for oxygen with a mix of powerful drugs. Unfortunately, this safeguard doesn’t always work. During
high-risk brain surgeries, a significant number of patients emerge with brain damage due to lack of oxygen. 33
During a small number of extremely complex surgeries lasting an hour or more, some patients are put into deep hypothermia,
much like Hasan Alam did in his swine experiments. For more routine aneurysm repairs, a number of doctors have tried the more
modest version of hypothermia, cooling the brain to 33 degrees Celsius, but surprisingly—to Bickler, at least—a large clinical
trial on this found no benefit.
Like many doctors, Bickler had put a lot of faith in hypothermia. He decided to try and piece together what went wrong. When
he thought about the experiment and why it failed, he reasoned that it must be because the bulk of the brain damage wasn’t
taking place
while
the oxygen was cut off, which is when the patients were being cooled. The damage was coming
afterward,
caused by the body’s reaction to oxygen deprivation. Bickler figured that the same thing must be happening in people who
suffered cardiac arrest.
Bickler’s particular interest is blood chemistry, and his focus was on how that chemistry changes after the body is deprived
of oxygen. We’ve
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