Suspended Animation

Medical science marches forward. Or sideways. Or something.

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

Neither dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time. Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.

Interesting. Unless you're one of the guinea pigs, of course.

"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. "So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation."

Now see, that's why people don't like doctors. Okay, actually there are a whole bunch of reasons why people don't like doctors. But that's one of them.

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...

The technique was first demonstrated in pigs in 2002 by Hasan Alam at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues. The animals were sedated and a massive haemorrhage induced, to mimic the effect of multiple gunshot wounds. Their blood was drained and replaced by either a cold potassium or saline solution, rapidly cooling the body to around 10 °C. After the injuries were treated, the animals were gradually warmed up as the solution was replaced with blood.

The pig's heart usually started beating again by itself, although some pigs needed a jump-start.

Some pigs are more equal than others.

"After we did those experiments, the definition of 'dead' changed," says Rhee. "Every day at work I declare people dead."

By strange coincidence, so do I. Of course they're not actually dead. We know this because when we remove them from the payroll, they start moving and speaking after seven days.

The technique will be tested on 10 people, and the outcome compared with another 10 who met the criteria but who weren't treated this way because the team wasn't on hand.

Um... I have a question: wouldn't the universal results of the control group be, well... "dead"? By that standard, any result other than "dead" has to be called a resounding success, yes? Unless the patient comes round with a uncontrollable craving for brain tissue, of course.