[NetBehaviour] Stuck Pig - suspended animation on Pigs.

[marc]

Stuck Pig.

"suspended animation tests have been successfully carried out with pigs. 
The domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just 
two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can 
solve the sticky ethical problems)."

Mike Duggan, a veterinary surgeon, holds his gloved hands over an 8-inch 
incision in the belly of pig 78-6, a 120-pound, pink Yorkshire. He’s 
waiting for a green light from Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon at 
Massachu­setts General Hospital.

“Make the injury,” Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the 
gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes 
holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, 
and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac 
artery. It’s 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her blood within 
moments. Heart rate and blood pressure plummet. Don’t worry – Alam and 
Duggan are going to save her.

Alam goes to work on the chest, removing part of a rib to reveal the 
heart, a throbbing, shiny pink ball the size of a fist. He cuts open the 
aorta – an even more lethal injury – and blood sprays all over our 
scrubs. The EKG flatlines. The surgeons drain the remaining blood and 
connect tubes to the aorta and other vessels, filling the circulatory 
system with chilled organ-preservation fluid – a nearly frozen daiquiri 
of salts, sugars, and free-radical scavengers.

Her temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit; brain activity has ceased. 
Alam checks the wall clock and asks a nurse to mark the time: 11:25 am.

But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead – the common term for her state 
is, believe it or not, suspended animation. Long the domain of 
transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away 
from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky 
ethical problems). Trauma surgeons can’t wait – saving people with 
serious wounds, like gunshots, is always a race against the effects of 
blood loss. When blood flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes 
of low oxygen levels causes brain death.

Chill a body, though, and you change the equation. Metabolism slows, 
oxygen demand dives, and the time available to treat the injury 
stretches. “With the pig essentially dead,” Alam says, “we’ve got hours 
to fix it and play around.” By noon the team has stitched up the 
arteries and gone to lunch. It has become ­routine: Alam has suspended 
200 pigs for an hour each, and although experimental protocol calls for 
different levels of care for each pig, the ones that got optimal 
treatment all survived. Today he’ll keep 78-6 down for two hours.

more...
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=4

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