And I mean ICE!
Mice have been placed in a state of near suspended animation, raising the possibility that hibernation could one day be induced in humans.
If so, it might be possible to put astronauts into hibernation-like states for long-haul space flights – as often depicted in science fiction films.
A US team from Seattle reports its findings in Science magazine.
In this case, suspended animation means the reversible cessation of all visible life processes in an organism.
Now if they’d only discovered this a few weeks ago, they’d have had the perfect solution for the Terry Schaivo debacle. Actually, this is rather reminiscent of voodoo and zombies and the like, isn’t it?
Read more here.
UPDATE: Slate magazine incorrectly labels me as a “Real Estate Broker”, which I am not. I do hold a license, but it was for an online experiment, not to earn a living. Go here for details about my career.
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on Friday, April 22nd, 2005 at 7:07 am and is filed under Humor & Culture, technology.
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3 Responses to “On The Rocks”
April 22nd, 2005 at 8:16 pm
Erm, how would it have helped in the Schiavo case? I don’t ask this rhetorically or insolently, I’m honestly not sure what you think the application would be.
I know there’s discussion of using it to treat trauma victims — slowing down their vitals until they can be brought into a hospital for serious treatment, so they don’t bleed to death, or suffer organ or neurological degradation as quickly — but unless you mean that this could’ve been applied to Schiavo when they realized her surgery had gone awry, to prevent her from suffering brain damage before they could fix it (and that was years ago, not weeks), I really don’t get what you’re saying.
Curiously,
Auros
April 23rd, 2005 at 7:50 am
Just that keeping her in a hibernated state would in effect put her to rest without eliminating all hope of someday reviving her.
April 23rd, 2005 at 9:26 pm
But that misses the point of all the legal wrangling of the case. The courts decided that it wasn’t her wish to be preserved or put to rest in that state. FL law defauts to making the spouse your legal representative; the courts determined that there was no reason to override that, and that there was corroboration of his claim about her wishes. Given that, a “better” technology for preserving her is irrelevant.
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