WEBVTT - Reanimating the Dead 0:00:00.160 --> 0:00:07.240 Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to 0:00:07.400 --> 0:00:14.360 Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the 0:00:14.640 --> 0:00:16.800 podcast that looks at the future and says I'm a 0:00:16.880 --> 0:00:20.200 hungry man, but I don't want pizza. I'm Jonathan Strickland, 0:00:20.280 --> 0:00:24.079 I'm Lauren Volcabon, and I'm Joe McCormick. And welcome back 0:00:24.120 --> 0:00:28.960 to another October Forward Thinking episode. Yeah another Hey, we've 0:00:29.000 --> 0:00:31.680 been going on this sort of Halloween creepy spooky kick. 0:00:31.800 --> 0:00:33.879 Thought we'd keep it going a little longer. Right, So 0:00:33.920 --> 0:00:37.320 we've talked about monsters some on the podcast, but we 0:00:37.560 --> 0:00:40.760 actually wanted to get into yet another monster related but 0:00:40.960 --> 0:00:45.280 very scientific topic, this time the resurrection of the dead, 0:00:45.440 --> 0:00:50.600 because we all love Frankenstein here, right, frank uh it is. 0:00:51.640 --> 0:00:54.000 I am unapologetic about the fact that is one of 0:00:54.000 --> 0:00:56.720 my favorite novels. Some of the some of the like 0:00:57.000 --> 0:01:00.400 romantic Gothic elements are kind of hokey and all that, 0:01:00.480 --> 0:01:05.440 but it's but it's a great story, Yeah it is. 0:01:05.640 --> 0:01:07.880 And the pros is beautiful and and and it's very 0:01:07.959 --> 0:01:11.320 much about our our you know, seeking out our creator 0:01:11.440 --> 0:01:15.200 and asking them why we're here. And and also it's 0:01:15.240 --> 0:01:17.720 just about the dangers of science and the and the 0:01:17.840 --> 0:01:20.760 dangers associated that if we try to take on the 0:01:20.800 --> 0:01:24.800 responsibility of creating things ourselves, and then if we are 0:01:24.920 --> 0:01:31.240 not willing to carry that responsibility after creation, the terrible, 0:01:31.440 --> 0:01:35.240 terrible things that happen afterwards. Right. So, in fact, you 0:01:35.280 --> 0:01:37.119 could look at it not just as a sort of 0:01:37.160 --> 0:01:41.200 like uh, anti science scare pamphlet, but it's something about 0:01:41.240 --> 0:01:44.040 taking responsibility for what you've done, because I got to 0:01:44.120 --> 0:01:47.160 do the nurture after you create the nature, right, which 0:01:47.200 --> 0:01:50.800 we advocate all the time on this show, responsible science. Right. 0:01:51.080 --> 0:01:54.280 But to bring it back to science and technology, what's 0:01:54.320 --> 0:01:57.720 at the core of the premise of Frankenstein bringing back 0:01:57.880 --> 0:02:01.880 dead flesh, reanimation of a corpse, or if pieces of 0:02:01.920 --> 0:02:05.000 corpses stitched together, which maybe one's just as good as 0:02:05.040 --> 0:02:08.840 the other. Is this actually doable in real life? Is 0:02:08.880 --> 0:02:11.919 this a research area that people have looked into, and 0:02:11.960 --> 0:02:15.840 could we one day resurrect the dead with science? Well, 0:02:15.919 --> 0:02:19.079 to go back to the the story that that serves 0:02:19.080 --> 0:02:21.760 as the inspiration for this this podcast, you know Mary 0:02:21.760 --> 0:02:28.000 Shelley had talked about with her with her peers. You know, 0:02:28.040 --> 0:02:30.440 this was all part of trying to create a really 0:02:30.440 --> 0:02:33.800 good ghost story, and that's the story behind the writing 0:02:33.880 --> 0:02:38.919 of Frankenstein. This was a group of of creative types 0:02:39.200 --> 0:02:43.400 like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and everyone trying to 0:02:43.440 --> 0:02:46.519 I'll do each other with with spooky stories. And one 0:02:46.520 --> 0:02:51.359 of the spooky yes is Werewolf bar mitzvah Um. The 0:02:51.360 --> 0:02:55.000 The story goes that she and the others were talking 0:02:55.040 --> 0:02:57.720 about all sorts of topics like the occult, as well 0:02:57.760 --> 0:03:03.960 as recent discoveries and science like galvanic responses, which you know, 0:03:04.120 --> 0:03:08.400 the character Victor Frankenstein in the novel has studied. Whether 0:03:08.480 --> 0:03:10.920 or not that comes into play with the creature creation 0:03:11.560 --> 0:03:14.360 is kind of a matter of interpretation. Yeah. In the movies, 0:03:14.480 --> 0:03:18.880 it's almost always showing, uh that Victor Frankenstein animates his 0:03:18.919 --> 0:03:21.720 creature with the help of lightning or electricity in one 0:03:21.760 --> 0:03:24.560 form or another. The novel doesn't actually say that, though 0:03:24.639 --> 0:03:27.000 he is interested in electricity. I think it's a good 0:03:27.080 --> 0:03:29.240 guess that that's involved in the novel, even though it 0:03:29.280 --> 0:03:32.480 never explicitly says so, because there's a a passage where 0:03:32.480 --> 0:03:35.680 it says Victor studies it in the university, and there's 0:03:35.680 --> 0:03:38.000 another one where he's inspired by he's looking at the 0:03:38.000 --> 0:03:40.000 window during a storm and he sees a bolt of 0:03:40.080 --> 0:03:43.920 lightning obliterate and oak tree, and he's like, oh the power, right, 0:03:44.040 --> 0:03:47.960 and and the galvanic response was something that was uh 0:03:48.160 --> 0:03:51.080 still fairly like those those fresh science I mean, that 0:03:51.120 --> 0:03:54.480 was something that was discovered in the late eighteenth century 0:03:54.520 --> 0:03:59.400 by Luigi Galvani, who discovered that passing an electric current 0:03:59.480 --> 0:04:02.360 through muscles would cause the muscles to twitch, even if 0:04:02.360 --> 0:04:05.280 those muscles were no longer, say, attached to a living 0:04:05.360 --> 0:04:10.120 thing anymore, like frog legs. Um, that's the that's the 0:04:10.240 --> 0:04:12.880 kind of traditional yeah, the typical example. Yeah, the one 0:04:12.960 --> 0:04:15.200 that there are illustrations that you can see of the 0:04:15.240 --> 0:04:21.640 electrodes being touched to uh, dismembered frog leg and it's twitching. 0:04:23.000 --> 0:04:29.080 So that kind of created the the illusion of reanimation, right, 0:04:29.120 --> 0:04:32.919 You suddenly have a lifelike movement from something that is lifeless, 0:04:33.760 --> 0:04:37.440 which kind of brings around the question of, well, if 0:04:37.480 --> 0:04:40.320 this is an illusion of of life, is there any 0:04:40.320 --> 0:04:43.240 way to to regain permanency. Is there a way to 0:04:43.400 --> 0:04:46.720 make that comeback and actually become real life, not a 0:04:47.000 --> 0:04:50.160 not just the simulation of life? All right, Well, I 0:04:50.200 --> 0:04:53.279 think we should transition from the fiction to the facts 0:04:53.960 --> 0:04:58.520 has anybody in history actually tried to reanimate dead tissue? 0:04:58.640 --> 0:05:02.200 Is this an experiment that's been performed before? Oh yeah, 0:05:02.240 --> 0:05:06.960 all the time, actually constantly really, I mean beyond just 0:05:07.040 --> 0:05:10.840 what you're saying about making muscles, twit bringing organisms back 0:05:10.839 --> 0:05:13.920 from the death. Still. Yes. So, So here's the thing 0:05:13.920 --> 0:05:17.480 about people. We die. It's something that happens to all 0:05:17.480 --> 0:05:20.360 of us at some point or another. And so this is, uh, 0:05:20.440 --> 0:05:23.640 this has become a subject of a lot of interest 0:05:24.000 --> 0:05:27.640 because it's something we all share in common. Yeah, and 0:05:27.640 --> 0:05:31.920 it's something that most of us aren't terribly excited about happening. Um, 0:05:31.960 --> 0:05:35.040 you know, for we have been collectively as a as 0:05:35.040 --> 0:05:37.880 a species trying to save people and animals from deadly 0:05:37.920 --> 0:05:42.600 injury and death forever, I mean for recorded history, as 0:05:42.640 --> 0:05:45.120 long as it goes back. Um. There are records of 0:05:45.360 --> 0:05:49.320 resuscitation via clearing the airway and providing artificial breath that 0:05:49.440 --> 0:05:52.760 go back to like the Old Testament and the Babylonian 0:05:52.800 --> 0:05:56.080 talmod Um, but there's no record of it being actually 0:05:56.120 --> 0:06:01.360 studied scientifically until the seventeen hundreds and and blood circulations 0:06:01.480 --> 0:06:04.559 role in the whole process wasn't called into the picture 0:06:04.600 --> 0:06:07.480 until the late eighteen hundreds. I mean, people knew that 0:06:07.520 --> 0:06:09.800 blood was important obviously, like like we knew that there 0:06:09.839 --> 0:06:12.520 was a heart and that it circulated blood. Um, but 0:06:12.920 --> 0:06:15.680 it was considered like they were just mainly concerned with 0:06:15.680 --> 0:06:21.000 getting rid of it much they were Yeah, well actually 0:06:21.040 --> 0:06:23.919 I suppose so. I mean they considered it like physiologically 0:06:24.279 --> 0:06:28.040 secondary to to breathing because they had they had seen 0:06:28.160 --> 0:06:33.000 that artificial breath support could restart a heart. Meanwhile, um, 0:06:33.160 --> 0:06:36.520 those galvanic responses that we mentioned from Frankenstein, I think 0:06:36.520 --> 0:06:38.680 that people were playing around with those as well. Right, 0:06:38.920 --> 0:06:42.120 Oh yeah, no, that's that's something that we see a 0:06:42.160 --> 0:06:45.039 lot of in the nineteenth century. And we're talking like 0:06:45.120 --> 0:06:48.320 the dawn of the nineteenth century, the eighteen early undred, 0:06:48.520 --> 0:06:53.520 eighteen o three. Uh, and boy howdy, if you don't 0:06:53.640 --> 0:06:58.120 like kind of macabre descriptions, this might be a good 0:06:58.160 --> 0:06:59.920 time for you to skip ahead a little bit in 0:07:00.040 --> 0:07:03.000 the episode. Yeah, there's a possibility that you're gonna want 0:07:03.000 --> 0:07:08.200 to skip this episode entirely. Yeah, but if you are 0:07:08.279 --> 0:07:13.680 morbidly curious, we're not going to get extremely graphic, but 0:07:13.800 --> 0:07:17.239 just there's just some general that even if you're taking 0:07:17.240 --> 0:07:20.120 it from a high level perspective, it's hard to get 0:07:20.200 --> 0:07:25.360 around decapitation. But starting with Giovanni Aldini, who was the 0:07:25.440 --> 0:07:28.920 nephew of Luigi Galvanni, the man who had discovered this 0:07:29.000 --> 0:07:31.960 galvanic response. Galvanic response, by the way, did you guys 0:07:32.000 --> 0:07:34.520 know that when he discovered it, he thought he had 0:07:34.560 --> 0:07:38.960 discovered a source of electricity that was actually within the animal, 0:07:39.560 --> 0:07:41.400 not something that he had because because it was a 0:07:41.440 --> 0:07:45.240 spark that apparently came from a scalpel that caused the 0:07:45.320 --> 0:07:47.200 muscle to twitch. So at first he thought he had 0:07:47.200 --> 0:07:49.600 found something intrinsic in the animal, not something he had 0:07:49.640 --> 0:07:52.560 applied externally to the animal. Oh yeah, I think there 0:07:52.560 --> 0:07:54.600 were a lot of thoughts like that back then, animal 0:07:54.640 --> 0:07:59.320 magnetism and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, But uh, Giovanni 0:07:59.360 --> 0:08:03.440 Aldini kind of carried on in his uncle's uh footsteps. 0:08:03.640 --> 0:08:06.880 He conducted experiments on the body of a man who 0:08:07.000 --> 0:08:10.760 was formerly known as George Forster way back in three now. 0:08:10.800 --> 0:08:13.120 Forster was not a nice guy. He had been convicted 0:08:13.160 --> 0:08:17.000 of murdering his wife and child and sentenced to hang. 0:08:17.640 --> 0:08:19.520 He had been a prisoner at Newgate Prison, so he 0:08:19.560 --> 0:08:23.320 had been hanged, and then al Dini took possession of 0:08:23.360 --> 0:08:26.160 the body and performed a series of experiments for an 0:08:26.160 --> 0:08:32.000 audience of physicians and scientists. And depending upon the account 0:08:32.040 --> 0:08:35.400 you read, it sounds pretty dramatic like and keep in 0:08:35.440 --> 0:08:38.160 mind a lot of these accounts also have probably been 0:08:38.920 --> 0:08:44.320 overly uh exaggerated, zealously reported. I would say, um, this 0:08:44.400 --> 0:08:46.920 was also a very popular well maybe not very popular, 0:08:46.960 --> 0:08:51.720 but a popular pastime around around this era, the renewed 0:08:51.760 --> 0:08:56.400 interest in medicine and especially in uh work with with 0:08:56.400 --> 0:09:00.720 with cadavers as medical specimens, so much teaching a peak 0:09:00.880 --> 0:09:03.000 and you know, people didn't have Netflix, so they had 0:09:03.000 --> 0:09:04.800 to make their own fund so much so that the 0:09:05.520 --> 0:09:09.880 medical colleges were sometimes having trouble getting hold of of 0:09:09.880 --> 0:09:12.120 of cadaver. Yeah, yeah, there's the tale of Birken Hair. 0:09:12.640 --> 0:09:15.720 Birken Hair who were They were famous grave robbers who 0:09:15.760 --> 0:09:18.520 may also have helped create a couple of corpses of 0:09:18.520 --> 0:09:23.360 their own in order to sell them to a medical university. 0:09:23.400 --> 0:09:26.679 Frequently these corpses were of people who had been executed 0:09:26.720 --> 0:09:29.760 for various reasons and then uh, yeah, I guess it 0:09:29.800 --> 0:09:32.840 was considered better and once once a person hadn't been nice, 0:09:32.960 --> 0:09:35.640 once executions had been outlawed, it really kind of dried 0:09:35.720 --> 0:09:38.200 up the medical research field. But that's another story for 0:09:38.240 --> 0:09:42.680 another time. But another example is the chemist Andrew your 0:09:42.760 --> 0:09:45.480 a or or I'm not sure how you say his 0:09:45.520 --> 0:09:47.760 last name is you are e and so I didn't 0:09:47.760 --> 0:09:50.360 even think to look up how the pronunciation of his name. 0:09:50.360 --> 0:09:53.680 But he wanted to replicate Aldini's experiments. So this happened 0:09:53.679 --> 0:09:56.360 in eighteen eighteen, which coincidentally was the same year that 0:09:56.400 --> 0:10:01.280 Frankenstein was published. Um So, now, according to I'm gonna 0:10:01.280 --> 0:10:03.559 call him Andrew because there's no way I'm gonna ever 0:10:03.559 --> 0:10:06.400 say his last name correctly, applying electric current to the 0:10:06.400 --> 0:10:10.240 face of a cadaver had a pretty ghastly result. This 0:10:10.280 --> 0:10:12.960 is a direct quote from one of his papers. Every 0:10:13.000 --> 0:10:19.520 muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action, rage, horror, despair, anguish, 0:10:19.600 --> 0:10:23.760 and ghastly smiles united their hideous expression in the murderer's face. 0:10:23.960 --> 0:10:27.719 I don't know how you could do all those things simultaneously. Uh, 0:10:28.240 --> 0:10:31.480 I don't know either, but apparently it's striking. And as 0:10:31.520 --> 0:10:35.520 a little side note, there's another slightly more famous scientists 0:10:35.559 --> 0:10:40.280 actually in the circles of of electro physiology named Duchen 0:10:40.400 --> 0:10:43.360 du Boulogne, who or do Bologna if you if you 0:10:43.440 --> 0:10:46.559 prefer who further these sorts of experiments, but he used 0:10:46.920 --> 0:10:51.640 living subjects. He was trying to study the physiological uh 0:10:51.800 --> 0:10:56.280 movements and structure of musk muscles. And he would apply 0:10:56.320 --> 0:10:59.560 electrodes to people's faces and make them make horrible faces 0:10:59.640 --> 0:11:04.280 without uh, without there trying to do so. But again 0:11:04.320 --> 0:11:08.080 that that was only tangentially related. Okay, but all of 0:11:08.080 --> 0:11:12.280 this so far still basically exciting muscle activity with electrical current. 0:11:12.840 --> 0:11:17.679 What about like really sort of a more robust activation 0:11:17.880 --> 0:11:21.040 of the dead body. Can you bring back the brain activity? 0:11:21.200 --> 0:11:24.840 Can you can you bring back someone entirely well? Back 0:11:24.840 --> 0:11:29.760 on the medical resuscitation side, in eighteen seventy four, manual 0:11:29.960 --> 0:11:34.040 cardiac massage like you know, open surgery, actually getting in 0:11:34.080 --> 0:11:37.280 there and and beating a heart with your hands. Um 0:11:37.440 --> 0:11:40.480 what was shown to return a heartbeat to a dog 0:11:40.800 --> 0:11:43.960 by one more It's shift. And then in nineteen o one, 0:11:44.120 --> 0:11:47.360 the first successful open chest cardiac massage was performed on 0:11:47.440 --> 0:11:51.199 a human by one Christian eggles Rud. His patient had 0:11:51.240 --> 0:11:54.800 experienced an anesthesia induced cardiac arrest, and so this was 0:11:54.840 --> 0:11:57.280 a This was a pretty huge thing in medicine to 0:11:57.280 --> 0:12:00.319 to find out that someone whose heart had stopped eating 0:12:00.480 --> 0:12:05.800 could could be reanimated essentially. Okay, but I assumed the 0:12:05.840 --> 0:12:09.680 time scale was short there. Yeah, yeah, he wasn't. I mean, 0:12:09.960 --> 0:12:11.960 this isn't like a corpse that they had dug up 0:12:11.960 --> 0:12:13.560 from a graveyard or anything like that. It was a 0:12:13.600 --> 0:12:16.840 patient that had yes been in a hospital, had this 0:12:16.920 --> 0:12:21.440 thing happen, cardiac arrest, and then was revived. Yeah. That's 0:12:21.440 --> 0:12:25.120 where this term resuscitation comes in, sort of the bringing 0:12:25.160 --> 0:12:29.400 back after a brief cardiac arrest. Okay, I've got a 0:12:29.480 --> 0:12:31.439 really weird one I want to talk about. Have you 0:12:31.520 --> 0:12:36.400 all heard about the Russian physiologist Sergei Brokenenko. Yeah, yeah, 0:12:36.440 --> 0:12:38.520 this is the guy who who in the early nineteen 0:12:38.520 --> 0:12:41.160 twenties created this kind of life support system that he 0:12:41.240 --> 0:12:45.520 called the autojector. The auto ject or Yeah, this was 0:12:45.760 --> 0:12:50.160 this was basically a mechanical heart and lungs. Yeah, yeah, 0:12:50.320 --> 0:12:53.440 it drew. He was he was using dogs heads for 0:12:53.480 --> 0:12:56.640 this experiment. Supposedly. We we also do want to say 0:12:56.640 --> 0:12:58.079 that all of this stuff that we're going to say 0:12:58.080 --> 0:13:01.920 about some of these um early Oviet experiments is in 0:13:02.040 --> 0:13:05.680 question just because there Soviet Russia at that time was 0:13:05.760 --> 0:13:10.200 not really dedicated to factual accuracy and its record keeping 0:13:10.920 --> 0:13:14.640 a disturbing pictures. Yeah, they, I mean they there's video 0:13:14.720 --> 0:13:17.080 of this, like from later on. You can look this 0:13:17.200 --> 0:13:20.040 up on YouTube. And another thing is I also feel 0:13:20.080 --> 0:13:22.640 like we should be skeptical of some of these claims 0:13:22.679 --> 0:13:26.200 from the Soviet science era, especially of this period in 0:13:26.240 --> 0:13:28.520 the twenties and thirties. On the other hand, I haven't 0:13:28.559 --> 0:13:32.240 found any evidence of mainstream scientists challenging the validity of 0:13:32.280 --> 0:13:35.520 Brooke Ninka's results, and I've even found what looked like 0:13:35.559 --> 0:13:39.359 a few instances of his research referred to in subsequent 0:13:39.360 --> 0:13:42.839 publications in pure reviewed journals like the Annals of the 0:13:42.920 --> 0:13:46.320 Racic Surgery. Wow. Yeah, okay, So so what he did 0:13:46.640 --> 0:13:51.120 was um supposedly, using using a dog's head, he would 0:13:51.280 --> 0:13:55.280 draw the used that the spent the deoxygen eated blood 0:13:55.559 --> 0:13:57.840 out from it using this machine. The machine would then 0:13:58.040 --> 0:14:02.320 warm and reoxygenated it and then pump it back into 0:14:02.320 --> 0:14:07.120 the head and supposedly this this would animate the head 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:12.120 enough to like produce responses based on stimuli. Yeah. So, 0:14:12.160 --> 0:14:15.000 if you watch the video, he's got a severed doghead 0:14:15.200 --> 0:14:18.400 hooked up to the autojet tour and he can. He 0:14:18.440 --> 0:14:21.680 will like bang a hammer on the table where the 0:14:21.720 --> 0:14:24.800 head is and the head flinches with the hammer blows. 0:14:24.960 --> 0:14:26.880 This is awful. I want to go home and hug 0:14:26.920 --> 0:14:29.720 my dog, I know, right so much I miss my 0:14:29.800 --> 0:14:35.200 dogs about um but but that, But the weird Soviet 0:14:35.240 --> 0:14:39.120 science doesn't stop there, right, Alexi Kuliopka and fjord Or 0:14:39.840 --> 0:14:44.080 Andrea f and I know I will butcher names till 0:14:44.120 --> 0:14:47.360 the day I die, and him resuscitated and then die again. 0:14:47.640 --> 0:14:50.080 But they attempted to reanimate a human corpse back in 0:14:50.200 --> 0:14:54.800 nine and it followed those experiments we had just talked about, 0:14:54.800 --> 0:14:57.880 in fact, including a lot of others too. I mean, certainly, 0:14:58.080 --> 0:15:00.760 our our buddy Sergey was not the only dude who 0:15:00.960 --> 0:15:04.600 was trying to work with this kind of stuff right time. 0:15:04.640 --> 0:15:10.239 And Alexei was one of Sergey's students essentially, and he um. 0:15:10.320 --> 0:15:13.560 They they got hold of a corpse and hooked it 0:15:13.640 --> 0:15:15.960 up to a bunch of tubes as well, essentially tried 0:15:16.000 --> 0:15:19.560 to do a larger version of the dog experiment we 0:15:19.560 --> 0:15:23.560 were just talking about, and supposedly they were able to 0:15:23.600 --> 0:15:26.800 get the corpse's heart beating again for twenty or twenty 0:15:26.840 --> 0:15:33.160 five minutes. Uh, and that the corpse had once being resuscitated, 0:15:33.160 --> 0:15:35.880 which I guess makes the corpse become a person again. Uh. 0:15:35.920 --> 0:15:41.800 The person arguably let out a weird guttural noise from 0:15:41.960 --> 0:15:48.000 his throat and it panicked one of the the assistants, 0:15:48.040 --> 0:15:51.040 who ran from the room. And that is pretty much 0:15:51.080 --> 0:15:53.240 the extent of all the information I can find on 0:15:53.280 --> 0:15:57.400 that particular incident. Yeah again with that story, I mean, 0:15:57.440 --> 0:16:00.240 it's interesting that's reported. I think we should be little 0:16:00.240 --> 0:16:03.640 bit skeptical, but yeah, we don't know what happened. It 0:16:03.680 --> 0:16:07.000 could be the air was being forced into the body 0:16:07.040 --> 0:16:10.080 and that it was exiting through the throat, and that 0:16:10.160 --> 0:16:13.040 the noise was not any sign of consciousness or anything 0:16:13.080 --> 0:16:16.320 like that. It could have been purely physiological, but we 0:16:16.400 --> 0:16:19.720 don't know. Uh. In ninety in the United States, you 0:16:19.720 --> 0:16:22.600 have Robert E. Cornish who experimented with bringing back the dead. 0:16:22.680 --> 0:16:25.640 He started with fox terriers. Uh. He had a group 0:16:25.640 --> 0:16:28.720 of fox terriers. All of them had the same name, Lazarus. 0:16:29.720 --> 0:16:32.800 I see what he did there. Yeah. Uh, So he 0:16:33.720 --> 0:16:37.360 essentially euthanized the dog one at a time, put him 0:16:37.360 --> 0:16:41.200 on a seesaw. The seesaw essentially was meant to stimulate 0:16:41.280 --> 0:16:46.360 circulation of the blood. He also injected them with anticoagulants 0:16:46.400 --> 0:16:50.400 and epinephrin, and had mixed results. Most of the dogs 0:16:50.440 --> 0:16:53.560 remained very much dead. A couple of them seemed to revive, 0:16:53.680 --> 0:16:57.280 but had suffered ailments like blindness and brain damage, and 0:16:57.320 --> 0:16:59.680 they did not live very long. They were declared dead 0:17:00.000 --> 0:17:05.399 shortly thereafter. Um so, uh, this never went much further. 0:17:05.520 --> 0:17:08.320 It was never successful on a person, for example, but 0:17:08.440 --> 0:17:14.000 by Ninko was not done. Yeah. Yeah. In ninety four, 0:17:14.480 --> 0:17:18.280 he supposedly again attempted to revive a man who had 0:17:18.320 --> 0:17:21.879 hanged himself just three hours previous by hooking him up 0:17:21.920 --> 0:17:25.960 to this autoject or um, and supposedly the man woke 0:17:26.040 --> 0:17:29.879 up enough to stare at the assembled doctors I quote 0:17:30.119 --> 0:17:34.280 as a man and a stupor might do uh this. 0:17:34.400 --> 0:17:38.080 This reanimation, though, only lasted for two minutes because supposedly 0:17:38.400 --> 0:17:41.880 the doctor switched off the machine again I quote, unbearably 0:17:41.960 --> 0:17:45.320 horrified at what they had done. There's definitely an ethical 0:17:45.440 --> 0:17:48.840 question about bringing back someone who has chosen to take 0:17:48.880 --> 0:17:51.240 their own life. Yeah, that's a little bit, that's a 0:17:51.240 --> 0:17:53.159 little bit shady right there. We should say where the 0:17:53.200 --> 0:17:56.880 quotations were from oh right. These are from an excerpt 0:17:57.200 --> 0:17:59.359 of How to Make a Zombie the Real Life and 0:17:59.480 --> 0:18:02.400 Death Side. It's of reanimation and mind control by one 0:18:02.520 --> 0:18:06.360 Frank Swain, and it seems like a pretty rad book overall. 0:18:06.440 --> 0:18:10.000 A salon published to this excerpt, and I'm really curious 0:18:10.040 --> 0:18:12.440 to read this whole thing. Now. His prose is pretty excellent. 0:18:12.640 --> 0:18:20.479 Yeah he describes the reanimation of humans and dogheads with yeah. Okay. 0:18:20.480 --> 0:18:24.160 But but meanwhile, back on the actually documented medical end 0:18:24.400 --> 0:18:30.800 of resuscitation, people were working on restarting a heart um 0:18:30.840 --> 0:18:34.080 in in ways that we're not quite so invasive. It 0:18:34.160 --> 0:18:36.520 was still a surgical procedure for the next couple of decades. 0:18:36.560 --> 0:18:39.040 But in the nineteen fifties we figured out how to 0:18:39.200 --> 0:18:43.000 do external cardiac massage a khs compression, like the sort 0:18:43.000 --> 0:18:47.280 of thing that you do in cpr um and uh defibrillation. 0:18:47.800 --> 0:18:52.040 So those were huge advancements in buying us a little 0:18:52.040 --> 0:18:56.000 bit more time in order to bring someone back from 0:18:56.040 --> 0:18:59.520 the quote unquote dead. Right. Okay, So that's the history, 0:18:59.560 --> 0:19:02.560 and that gets us up to the point where resuscitation 0:19:02.760 --> 0:19:05.320 is a thing that commonly happens. I mean, it doesn't 0:19:05.359 --> 0:19:09.119 happen with the majority of people who go into cardiac arrest, 0:19:09.520 --> 0:19:16.520 but it does happen especially fairly success under hospital conditions. Especially. Um, 0:19:16.600 --> 0:19:19.040 So we've gotten to this point where you might be 0:19:19.160 --> 0:19:21.520 dead for a few seconds or even a few minutes 0:19:21.600 --> 0:19:25.960 and be brought back. But how long can can that 0:19:26.040 --> 0:19:29.639 go on? And from what kinds of states of death 0:19:30.080 --> 0:19:33.240 can we resuscitate people? All right, Well, this is getting 0:19:33.240 --> 0:19:36.159 into a territory where we need to define death, and 0:19:36.280 --> 0:19:39.959 of course that's an extremely tricky question that is legally 0:19:40.040 --> 0:19:43.440 being debated all the time. Yeah. I mean, you hear 0:19:43.480 --> 0:19:46.560 this term clinical death, right, and you would think that 0:19:46.560 --> 0:19:49.520 clinical death is very definitive, that there's got to be 0:19:49.680 --> 0:19:52.560 a a pretty you know, like a stable set of 0:19:52.640 --> 0:19:55.600 rules that clinical death must adhere to in order to 0:19:55.600 --> 0:19:58.720 be clinical death. And for a long time, uh, that 0:19:58.920 --> 0:20:00.280 was not the case, and in some parts of the 0:20:00.359 --> 0:20:04.000 world it may still not. Be Clinically dead essentially means 0:20:04.040 --> 0:20:06.960 that a doctor has declared a patient dead and that 0:20:07.359 --> 0:20:10.680 that's largely up to the doctor. Um. I think I've 0:20:10.720 --> 0:20:13.480 read for a long time that it referred to cardiac 0:20:13.560 --> 0:20:16.199 arrest that if the heart had stopped beating and the 0:20:16.280 --> 0:20:19.000 lung stopped working, it was considered to be irretrievable and 0:20:19.040 --> 0:20:22.440 the patient was declared dead. But yet clinical death Really 0:20:22.480 --> 0:20:24.320 all it means is that a doctor has declared a 0:20:24.320 --> 0:20:27.840 patient dead. It doesn't necessarily mean anything more than that, 0:20:27.960 --> 0:20:32.520 and it doesn't necessarily mean the patient could not be resuscitated. Uh. 0:20:32.800 --> 0:20:37.480 It all uh depends upon each individual situation. So then 0:20:37.480 --> 0:20:41.840 there's also legally dead. You've heard that term before too. Now, 0:20:41.880 --> 0:20:44.080 that used to mean someone whose heart and lungs had 0:20:44.080 --> 0:20:47.560 just stopped working and was considered to be irreversible. Uh. 0:20:47.600 --> 0:20:51.160 And so essentially it was um usually something that came 0:20:51.160 --> 0:20:54.600 from a death certificate that had been signed off by 0:20:54.680 --> 0:20:56.800 the doctor who was in charge of the patient. So 0:20:57.200 --> 0:21:00.680 you get declared clinically dead first, then legally dead in 0:21:00.720 --> 0:21:02.960 the United States, though all states and the District of 0:21:03.040 --> 0:21:06.520 Columbia have adopted the definition from the Uniform Determination of 0:21:06.520 --> 0:21:10.919 Death Act, which cites whole brain death as actual death. Uh. 0:21:11.040 --> 0:21:13.960 This is all following all of this research that was 0:21:14.000 --> 0:21:16.600 put in the nineteen fifties which led us to be 0:21:16.720 --> 0:21:21.400 able to bring people back through defibrillation and and cardiac massage. 0:21:21.880 --> 0:21:25.679 So essentially, up to the nineteen fifties, death was pretty 0:21:25.720 --> 0:21:28.960 much the moment when some major function of the body 0:21:29.840 --> 0:21:31.760 was going to fail. And the three big ones are 0:21:31.840 --> 0:21:36.800 brain activity, breathing, or heartbeat, and if one of those 0:21:36.840 --> 0:21:40.480 three were to have a critical failure they stopped working, 0:21:41.119 --> 0:21:44.640 generally speaking, the patient would very quickly have the other 0:21:44.680 --> 0:21:49.359 systems follow suit. But there's kind of a question where 0:21:49.400 --> 0:21:52.600 if we can resuscitate people after cardiac arrest, or if 0:21:52.640 --> 0:21:56.359 we can put people on, you know, artificial lungs or 0:21:56.440 --> 0:22:00.119 ventilation machines, or give people a feeding tube and all 0:22:00.160 --> 0:22:03.200 these other things that come with the modern science of medicine, 0:22:03.960 --> 0:22:06.520 does that change what the definition of death should be. 0:22:06.640 --> 0:22:09.919 It kind of changes at least how we talk about it, 0:22:10.000 --> 0:22:12.879 right because let's you know, the mechanical ventilator is a 0:22:12.880 --> 0:22:16.600 great example those Once those started to come along and 0:22:16.720 --> 0:22:18.879 they were in development in the early nine you were 0:22:18.880 --> 0:22:21.800 mentioning some of the early experiments with them, and of 0:22:21.800 --> 0:22:24.520 course obviously there's the ancient versions that have been around 0:22:24.520 --> 0:22:28.400 for quite some time to varying degrees of success um. 0:22:28.440 --> 0:22:33.240 But mechanical ventilators meant that suddenly, if the lungs failed, 0:22:33.280 --> 0:22:35.960 we could, in theory, put someone on a mechanical ventilator 0:22:36.000 --> 0:22:39.920 that might allow them to um with assisted breathing regain 0:22:40.640 --> 0:22:42.719 uh function, you can get to a point where they 0:22:42.720 --> 0:22:46.240 would be able to recover from whatever ailment had sent 0:22:46.320 --> 0:22:50.200 them into this state of being. And that something that 0:22:50.280 --> 0:22:52.480 you originally would have said, this is a dead person 0:22:52.520 --> 0:22:56.040 because they cannot breathe no longer applied. Okay, well, then 0:22:56.080 --> 0:22:58.560 should it be when the heart stops speeding? Well no, 0:22:58.960 --> 0:23:02.880 because you it also make the heart continue to beat, 0:23:02.920 --> 0:23:08.000 either with massage like CPR mechanically and possibly restart itself. Yeah. Yeah, 0:23:08.160 --> 0:23:11.360 and uh, and then you've got as long as the 0:23:11.359 --> 0:23:15.440 the cells themselves haven't died, you can keep on going 0:23:15.560 --> 0:23:19.000 and you can have people recover. Um. There's so that's 0:23:19.040 --> 0:23:21.920 that would be circulatory death, right, the idea that your 0:23:21.920 --> 0:23:25.800 heart has stopped beating. But again we don't necessarily see 0:23:25.840 --> 0:23:30.200 that as uh an actual point of no return at 0:23:30.200 --> 0:23:32.280 this Yeah, and not not anymore. And there's some really 0:23:32.320 --> 0:23:36.080 extreme examples of people surviving, right, Yeah, for a long 0:23:36.119 --> 0:23:38.400 time after their heart has stopped. Yeah. There was a 0:23:38.400 --> 0:23:43.840 a student and a Baggenholm who fell down while she 0:23:43.920 --> 0:23:49.080 was skiing. She fell onto a an icy patch on 0:23:48.600 --> 0:23:54.000 a stream, and her upper body was submerged underneath and 0:23:54.080 --> 0:23:57.240 she found a pocket of air, but she could not 0:23:57.520 --> 0:24:00.640 get out of this stream that she had fallen into. 0:24:00.680 --> 0:24:04.119 Her friends tried to help her out um and after 0:24:04.400 --> 0:24:07.080 forty minutes of her struggling to try and get get 0:24:07.119 --> 0:24:10.919 back out, her heart stopped beating uh and they her 0:24:10.960 --> 0:24:13.760