Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says I'm a
Speaker 1: hungry man, but I don't want pizza. I'm Jonathan Strickland,
Speaker 1: I'm Lauren Volcabon, and I'm Joe McCormick. And welcome back
Speaker 1: to another October Forward Thinking episode. Yeah another Hey, we've
Speaker 1: been going on this sort of Halloween creepy spooky kick.
Speaker 1: Thought we'd keep it going a little longer. Right, So
Speaker 1: we've talked about monsters some on the podcast, but we
Speaker 1: actually wanted to get into yet another monster related but
Speaker 1: very scientific topic, this time the resurrection of the dead,
Speaker 1: because we all love Frankenstein here, right, frank uh it is.
Speaker 1: I am unapologetic about the fact that is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite novels. Some of the some of the like
Speaker 1: romantic Gothic elements are kind of hokey and all that,
Speaker 1: but it's but it's a great story, Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: And the pros is beautiful and and and it's very
Speaker 1: much about our our you know, seeking out our creator
Speaker 1: and asking them why we're here. And and also it's
Speaker 1: just about the dangers of science and the and the
Speaker 1: dangers associated that if we try to take on the
Speaker 1: responsibility of creating things ourselves, and then if we are
Speaker 1: not willing to carry that responsibility after creation, the terrible,
Speaker 1: terrible things that happen afterwards. Right. So, in fact, you
Speaker 1: could look at it not just as a sort of
Speaker 1: like uh, anti science scare pamphlet, but it's something about
Speaker 1: taking responsibility for what you've done, because I got to
Speaker 1: do the nurture after you create the nature, right, which
Speaker 1: we advocate all the time on this show, responsible science. Right.
Speaker 1: But to bring it back to science and technology, what's
Speaker 1: at the core of the premise of Frankenstein bringing back
Speaker 1: dead flesh, reanimation of a corpse, or if pieces of
Speaker 1: corpses stitched together, which maybe one's just as good as
Speaker 1: the other. Is this actually doable in real life? Is
Speaker 1: this a research area that people have looked into, and
Speaker 1: could we one day resurrect the dead with science? Well,
Speaker 1: to go back to the the story that that serves
Speaker 1: as the inspiration for this this podcast, you know Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley had talked about with her with her peers. You know,
Speaker 1: this was all part of trying to create a really
Speaker 1: good ghost story, and that's the story behind the writing
Speaker 1: of Frankenstein. This was a group of of creative types
Speaker 1: like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and everyone trying to
Speaker 1: I'll do each other with with spooky stories. And one
Speaker 1: of the spooky yes is Werewolf bar mitzvah Um. The
Speaker 1: The story goes that she and the others were talking
Speaker 1: about all sorts of topics like the occult, as well
Speaker 1: as recent discoveries and science like galvanic responses, which you know,
Speaker 1: the character Victor Frankenstein in the novel has studied. Whether
Speaker 1: or not that comes into play with the creature creation
Speaker 1: is kind of a matter of interpretation. Yeah. In the movies,
Speaker 1: it's almost always showing, uh that Victor Frankenstein animates his
Speaker 1: creature with the help of lightning or electricity in one
Speaker 1: form or another. The novel doesn't actually say that, though
Speaker 1: he is interested in electricity. I think it's a good
Speaker 1: guess that that's involved in the novel, even though it
Speaker 1: never explicitly says so, because there's a a passage where
Speaker 1: it says Victor studies it in the university, and there's
Speaker 1: another one where he's inspired by he's looking at the
Speaker 1: window during a storm and he sees a bolt of
Speaker 1: lightning obliterate and oak tree, and he's like, oh the power, right,
Speaker 1: and and the galvanic response was something that was uh
Speaker 1: still fairly like those those fresh science I mean, that
Speaker 1: was something that was discovered in the late eighteenth century
Speaker 1: by Luigi Galvani, who discovered that passing an electric current
Speaker 1: through muscles would cause the muscles to twitch, even if
Speaker 1: those muscles were no longer, say, attached to a living
Speaker 1: thing anymore, like frog legs. Um, that's the that's the
Speaker 1: kind of traditional yeah, the typical example. Yeah, the one
Speaker 1: that there are illustrations that you can see of the
Speaker 1: electrodes being touched to uh, dismembered frog leg and it's twitching.
Speaker 1: So that kind of created the the illusion of reanimation, right,
Speaker 1: You suddenly have a lifelike movement from something that is lifeless,
Speaker 1: which kind of brings around the question of, well, if
Speaker 1: this is an illusion of of life, is there any
Speaker 1: way to to regain permanency. Is there a way to
Speaker 1: make that comeback and actually become real life, not a
Speaker 1: not just the simulation of life? All right, Well, I
Speaker 1: think we should transition from the fiction to the facts
Speaker 1: has anybody in history actually tried to reanimate dead tissue?
Speaker 1: Is this an experiment that's been performed before? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: all the time, actually constantly really, I mean beyond just
Speaker 1: what you're saying about making muscles, twit bringing organisms back
Speaker 1: from the death. Still. Yes. So, So here's the thing
Speaker 1: about people. We die. It's something that happens to all
Speaker 1: of us at some point or another. And so this is, uh,
Speaker 1: this has become a subject of a lot of interest
Speaker 1: because it's something we all share in common. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's something that most of us aren't terribly excited about happening. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, for we have been collectively as a as
Speaker 1: a species trying to save people and animals from deadly
Speaker 1: injury and death forever, I mean for recorded history, as
Speaker 1: long as it goes back. Um. There are records of
Speaker 1: resuscitation via clearing the airway and providing artificial breath that
Speaker 1: go back to like the Old Testament and the Babylonian
Speaker 1: talmod Um, but there's no record of it being actually
Speaker 1: studied scientifically until the seventeen hundreds and and blood circulations
Speaker 1: role in the whole process wasn't called into the picture
Speaker 1: until the late eighteen hundreds. I mean, people knew that
Speaker 1: blood was important obviously, like like we knew that there
Speaker 1: was a heart and that it circulated blood. Um, but
Speaker 1: it was considered like they were just mainly concerned with
Speaker 1: getting rid of it much they were Yeah, well actually
Speaker 1: I suppose so. I mean they considered it like physiologically
Speaker 1: secondary to to breathing because they had they had seen
Speaker 1: that artificial breath support could restart a heart. Meanwhile, um,
Speaker 1: those galvanic responses that we mentioned from Frankenstein, I think
Speaker 1: that people were playing around with those as well. Right,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, that's that's something that we see a
Speaker 1: lot of in the nineteenth century. And we're talking like
Speaker 1: the dawn of the nineteenth century, the eighteen early undred,
Speaker 1: eighteen o three. Uh, and boy howdy, if you don't
Speaker 1: like kind of macabre descriptions, this might be a good
Speaker 1: time for you to skip ahead a little bit in
Speaker 1: the episode. Yeah, there's a possibility that you're gonna want
Speaker 1: to skip this episode entirely. Yeah, but if you are
Speaker 1: morbidly curious, we're not going to get extremely graphic, but
Speaker 1: just there's just some general that even if you're taking
Speaker 1: it from a high level perspective, it's hard to get
Speaker 1: around decapitation. But starting with Giovanni Aldini, who was the
Speaker 1: nephew of Luigi Galvanni, the man who had discovered this
Speaker 1: galvanic response. Galvanic response, by the way, did you guys
Speaker 1: know that when he discovered it, he thought he had
Speaker 1: discovered a source of electricity that was actually within the animal,
Speaker 1: not something that he had because because it was a
Speaker 1: spark that apparently came from a scalpel that caused the
Speaker 1: muscle to twitch. So at first he thought he had
Speaker 1: found something intrinsic in the animal, not something he had
Speaker 1: applied externally to the animal. Oh yeah, I think there
Speaker 1: were a lot of thoughts like that back then, animal
Speaker 1: magnetism and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, But uh, Giovanni
Speaker 1: Aldini kind of carried on in his uncle's uh footsteps.
Speaker 1: He conducted experiments on the body of a man who
Speaker 1: was formerly known as George Forster way back in three now.
Speaker 1: Forster was not a nice guy. He had been convicted
Speaker 1: of murdering his wife and child and sentenced to hang.
Speaker 1: He had been a prisoner at Newgate Prison, so he
Speaker 1: had been hanged, and then al Dini took possession of
Speaker 1: the body and performed a series of experiments for an
Speaker 1: audience of physicians and scientists. And depending upon the account
Speaker 1: you read, it sounds pretty dramatic like and keep in
Speaker 1: mind a lot of these accounts also have probably been
Speaker 1: overly uh exaggerated, zealously reported. I would say, um, this
Speaker 1: was also a very popular well maybe not very popular,
Speaker 1: but a popular pastime around around this era, the renewed
Speaker 1: interest in medicine and especially in uh work with with
Speaker 1: with cadavers as medical specimens, so much teaching a peak
Speaker 1: and you know, people didn't have Netflix, so they had
Speaker 1: to make their own fund so much so that the
Speaker 1: medical colleges were sometimes having trouble getting hold of of
Speaker 1: of cadaver. Yeah, yeah, there's the tale of Birken Hair.
Speaker 1: Birken Hair who were They were famous grave robbers who
Speaker 1: may also have helped create a couple of corpses of
Speaker 1: their own in order to sell them to a medical university.
Speaker 1: Frequently these corpses were of people who had been executed
Speaker 1: for various reasons and then uh, yeah, I guess it
Speaker 1: was considered better and once once a person hadn't been nice,
Speaker 1: once executions had been outlawed, it really kind of dried
Speaker 1: up the medical research field. But that's another story for
Speaker 1: another time. But another example is the chemist Andrew your
Speaker 1: a or or I'm not sure how you say his
Speaker 1: last name is you are e and so I didn't
Speaker 1: even think to look up how the pronunciation of his name.
Speaker 1: But he wanted to replicate Aldini's experiments. So this happened
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighteen, which coincidentally was the same year that
Speaker 1: Frankenstein was published. Um So, now, according to I'm gonna
Speaker 1: call him Andrew because there's no way I'm gonna ever
Speaker 1: say his last name correctly, applying electric current to the
Speaker 1: face of a cadaver had a pretty ghastly result. This
Speaker 1: is a direct quote from one of his papers. Every
Speaker 1: muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action, rage, horror, despair, anguish,
Speaker 1: and ghastly smiles united their hideous expression in the murderer's face.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you could do all those things simultaneously. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know either, but apparently it's striking. And as
Speaker 1: a little side note, there's another slightly more famous scientists
Speaker 1: actually in the circles of of electro physiology named Duchen
Speaker 1: du Boulogne, who or do Bologna if you if you
Speaker 1: prefer who further these sorts of experiments, but he used
Speaker 1: living subjects. He was trying to study the physiological uh
Speaker 1: movements and structure of musk muscles. And he would apply
Speaker 1: electrodes to people's faces and make them make horrible faces
Speaker 1: without uh, without there trying to do so. But again
Speaker 1: that that was only tangentially related. Okay, but all of
Speaker 1: this so far still basically exciting muscle activity with electrical current.
Speaker 1: What about like really sort of a more robust activation
Speaker 1: of the dead body. Can you bring back the brain activity?
Speaker 1: Can you can you bring back someone entirely well? Back
Speaker 1: on the medical resuscitation side, in eighteen seventy four, manual
Speaker 1: cardiac massage like you know, open surgery, actually getting in
Speaker 1: there and and beating a heart with your hands. Um
Speaker 1: what was shown to return a heartbeat to a dog
Speaker 1: by one more It's shift. And then in nineteen o one,
Speaker 1: the first successful open chest cardiac massage was performed on
Speaker 1: a human by one Christian eggles Rud. His patient had
Speaker 1: experienced an anesthesia induced cardiac arrest, and so this was
Speaker 1: a This was a pretty huge thing in medicine to
Speaker 1: to find out that someone whose heart had stopped eating
Speaker 1: could could be reanimated essentially. Okay, but I assumed the
Speaker 1: time scale was short there. Yeah, yeah, he wasn't. I mean,
Speaker 1: this isn't like a corpse that they had dug up
Speaker 1: from a graveyard or anything like that. It was a
Speaker 1: patient that had yes been in a hospital, had this
Speaker 1: thing happen, cardiac arrest, and then was revived. Yeah. That's
Speaker 1: where this term resuscitation comes in, sort of the bringing
Speaker 1: back after a brief cardiac arrest. Okay, I've got a
Speaker 1: really weird one I want to talk about. Have you
Speaker 1: all heard about the Russian physiologist Sergei Brokenenko. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the guy who who in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties created this kind of life support system that he
Speaker 1: called the autojector. The auto ject or Yeah, this was
Speaker 1: this was basically a mechanical heart and lungs. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it drew. He was he was using dogs heads for
Speaker 1: this experiment. Supposedly. We we also do want to say
Speaker 1: that all of this stuff that we're going to say
Speaker 1: about some of these um early Oviet experiments is in
Speaker 1: question just because there Soviet Russia at that time was
Speaker 1: not really dedicated to factual accuracy and its record keeping
Speaker 1: a disturbing pictures. Yeah, they, I mean they there's video
Speaker 1: of this, like from later on. You can look this
Speaker 1: up on YouTube. And another thing is I also feel
Speaker 1: like we should be skeptical of some of these claims
Speaker 1: from the Soviet science era, especially of this period in
Speaker 1: the twenties and thirties. On the other hand, I haven't
Speaker 1: found any evidence of mainstream scientists challenging the validity of
Speaker 1: Brooke Ninka's results, and I've even found what looked like
Speaker 1: a few instances of his research referred to in subsequent
Speaker 1: publications in pure reviewed journals like the Annals of the
Speaker 1: Racic Surgery. Wow. Yeah, okay, So so what he did
Speaker 1: was um supposedly, using using a dog's head, he would
Speaker 1: draw the used that the spent the deoxygen eated blood
Speaker 1: out from it using this machine. The machine would then
Speaker 1: warm and reoxygenated it and then pump it back into
Speaker 1: the head and supposedly this this would animate the head
Speaker 1: enough to like produce responses based on stimuli. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: if you watch the video, he's got a severed doghead
Speaker 1: hooked up to the autojet tour and he can. He
Speaker 1: will like bang a hammer on the table where the
Speaker 1: head is and the head flinches with the hammer blows.
Speaker 1: This is awful. I want to go home and hug
Speaker 1: my dog, I know, right so much I miss my
Speaker 1: dogs about um but but that, But the weird Soviet
Speaker 1: science doesn't stop there, right, Alexi Kuliopka and fjord Or
Speaker 1: Andrea f and I know I will butcher names till
Speaker 1: the day I die, and him resuscitated and then die again.
Speaker 1: But they attempted to reanimate a human corpse back in
Speaker 1: nine and it followed those experiments we had just talked about,
Speaker 1: in fact, including a lot of others too. I mean, certainly,
Speaker 1: our our buddy Sergey was not the only dude who
Speaker 1: was trying to work with this kind of stuff right time.
Speaker 1: And Alexei was one of Sergey's students essentially, and he um.
Speaker 1: They they got hold of a corpse and hooked it
Speaker 1: up to a bunch of tubes as well, essentially tried
Speaker 1: to do a larger version of the dog experiment we
Speaker 1: were just talking about, and supposedly they were able to
Speaker 1: get the corpse's heart beating again for twenty or twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes. Uh, and that the corpse had once being resuscitated,
Speaker 1: which I guess makes the corpse become a person again. Uh.
Speaker 1: The person arguably let out a weird guttural noise from
Speaker 1: his throat and it panicked one of the the assistants,
Speaker 1: who ran from the room. And that is pretty much
Speaker 1: the extent of all the information I can find on
Speaker 1: that particular incident. Yeah again with that story, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that's reported. I think we should be little
Speaker 1: bit skeptical, but yeah, we don't know what happened. It
Speaker 1: could be the air was being forced into the body
Speaker 1: and that it was exiting through the throat, and that
Speaker 1: the noise was not any sign of consciousness or anything
Speaker 1: like that. It could have been purely physiological, but we
Speaker 1: don't know. Uh. In ninety in the United States, you
Speaker 1: have Robert E. Cornish who experimented with bringing back the dead.
Speaker 1: He started with fox terriers. Uh. He had a group
Speaker 1: of fox terriers. All of them had the same name, Lazarus.
Speaker 1: I see what he did there. Yeah. Uh, So he
Speaker 1: essentially euthanized the dog one at a time, put him
Speaker 1: on a seesaw. The seesaw essentially was meant to stimulate
Speaker 1: circulation of the blood. He also injected them with anticoagulants
Speaker 1: and epinephrin, and had mixed results. Most of the dogs
Speaker 1: remained very much dead. A couple of them seemed to revive,
Speaker 1: but had suffered ailments like blindness and brain damage, and
Speaker 1: they did not live very long. They were declared dead
Speaker 1: shortly thereafter. Um so, uh, this never went much further.
Speaker 1: It was never successful on a person, for example, but
Speaker 1: by Ninko was not done. Yeah. Yeah. In ninety four,
Speaker 1: he supposedly again attempted to revive a man who had
Speaker 1: hanged himself just three hours previous by hooking him up
Speaker 1: to this autoject or um, and supposedly the man woke
Speaker 1: up enough to stare at the assembled doctors I quote
Speaker 1: as a man and a stupor might do uh this.
Speaker 1: This reanimation, though, only lasted for two minutes because supposedly
Speaker 1: the doctor switched off the machine again I quote, unbearably
Speaker 1: horrified at what they had done. There's definitely an ethical
Speaker 1: question about bringing back someone who has chosen to take
Speaker 1: their own life. Yeah, that's a little bit, that's a
Speaker 1: little bit shady right there. We should say where the
Speaker 1: quotations were from oh right. These are from an excerpt
Speaker 1: of How to Make a Zombie the Real Life and
Speaker 1: Death Side. It's of reanimation and mind control by one
Speaker 1: Frank Swain, and it seems like a pretty rad book overall.
Speaker 1: A salon published to this excerpt, and I'm really curious
Speaker 1: to read this whole thing. Now. His prose is pretty excellent.
Speaker 1: Yeah he describes the reanimation of humans and dogheads with yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1: But but meanwhile, back on the actually documented medical end
Speaker 1: of resuscitation, people were working on restarting a heart um
Speaker 1: in in ways that we're not quite so invasive. It
Speaker 1: was still a surgical procedure for the next couple of decades.
Speaker 1: But in the nineteen fifties we figured out how to
Speaker 1: do external cardiac massage a khs compression, like the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that you do in cpr um and uh defibrillation.
Speaker 1: So those were huge advancements in buying us a little
Speaker 1: bit more time in order to bring someone back from
Speaker 1: the quote unquote dead. Right. Okay, So that's the history,
Speaker 1: and that gets us up to the point where resuscitation
Speaker 1: is a thing that commonly happens. I mean, it doesn't
Speaker 1: happen with the majority of people who go into cardiac arrest,
Speaker 1: but it does happen especially fairly success under hospital conditions. Especially. Um,
Speaker 1: So we've gotten to this point where you might be
Speaker 1: dead for a few seconds or even a few minutes
Speaker 1: and be brought back. But how long can can that
Speaker 1: go on? And from what kinds of states of death
Speaker 1: can we resuscitate people? All right, Well, this is getting
Speaker 1: into a territory where we need to define death, and
Speaker 1: of course that's an extremely tricky question that is legally
Speaker 1: being debated all the time. Yeah. I mean, you hear
Speaker 1: this term clinical death, right, and you would think that
Speaker 1: clinical death is very definitive, that there's got to be
Speaker 1: a a pretty you know, like a stable set of
Speaker 1: rules that clinical death must adhere to in order to
Speaker 1: be clinical death. And for a long time, uh, that
Speaker 1: was not the case, and in some parts of the
Speaker 1: world it may still not. Be Clinically dead essentially means
Speaker 1: that a doctor has declared a patient dead and that
Speaker 1: that's largely up to the doctor. Um. I think I've
Speaker 1: read for a long time that it referred to cardiac
Speaker 1: arrest that if the heart had stopped beating and the
Speaker 1: lung stopped working, it was considered to be irretrievable and
Speaker 1: the patient was declared dead. But yet clinical death Really
Speaker 1: all it means is that a doctor has declared a
Speaker 1: patient dead. It doesn't necessarily mean anything more than that,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't necessarily mean the patient could not be resuscitated. Uh.
Speaker 1: It all uh depends upon each individual situation. So then
Speaker 1: there's also legally dead. You've heard that term before too. Now,
Speaker 1: that used to mean someone whose heart and lungs had
Speaker 1: just stopped working and was considered to be irreversible. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so essentially it was um usually something that came
Speaker 1: from a death certificate that had been signed off by
Speaker 1: the doctor who was in charge of the patient. So
Speaker 1: you get declared clinically dead first, then legally dead in
Speaker 1: the United States, though all states and the District of
Speaker 1: Columbia have adopted the definition from the Uniform Determination of
Speaker 1: Death Act, which cites whole brain death as actual death. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is all following all of this research that was
Speaker 1: put in the nineteen fifties which led us to be
Speaker 1: able to bring people back through defibrillation and and cardiac massage.
Speaker 1: So essentially, up to the nineteen fifties, death was pretty
Speaker 1: much the moment when some major function of the body
Speaker 1: was going to fail. And the three big ones are
Speaker 1: brain activity, breathing, or heartbeat, and if one of those
Speaker 1: three were to have a critical failure they stopped working,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, the patient would very quickly have the other
Speaker 1: systems follow suit. But there's kind of a question where
Speaker 1: if we can resuscitate people after cardiac arrest, or if
Speaker 1: we can put people on, you know, artificial lungs or
Speaker 1: ventilation machines, or give people a feeding tube and all
Speaker 1: these other things that come with the modern science of medicine,
Speaker 1: does that change what the definition of death should be.
Speaker 1: It kind of changes at least how we talk about it,
Speaker 1: right because let's you know, the mechanical ventilator is a
Speaker 1: great example those Once those started to come along and
Speaker 1: they were in development in the early nine you were
Speaker 1: mentioning some of the early experiments with them, and of
Speaker 1: course obviously there's the ancient versions that have been around
Speaker 1: for quite some time to varying degrees of success um.
Speaker 1: But mechanical ventilators meant that suddenly, if the lungs failed,
Speaker 1: we could, in theory, put someone on a mechanical ventilator
Speaker 1: that might allow them to um with assisted breathing regain
Speaker 1: uh function, you can get to a point where they
Speaker 1: would be able to recover from whatever ailment had sent
Speaker 1: them into this state of being. And that something that
Speaker 1: you originally would have said, this is a dead person
Speaker 1: because they cannot breathe no longer applied. Okay, well, then
Speaker 1: should it be when the heart stops speeding? Well no,
Speaker 1: because you it also make the heart continue to beat,
Speaker 1: either with massage like CPR mechanically and possibly restart itself. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and then you've got as long as the
Speaker 1: the cells themselves haven't died, you can keep on going
Speaker 1: and you can have people recover. Um. There's so that's
Speaker 1: that would be circulatory death, right, the idea that your
Speaker 1: heart has stopped beating. But again we don't necessarily see
Speaker 1: that as uh an actual point of no return at
Speaker 1: this Yeah, and not not anymore. And there's some really
Speaker 1: extreme examples of people surviving, right, Yeah, for a long
Speaker 1: time after their heart has stopped. Yeah. There was a
Speaker 1: a student and a Baggenholm who fell down while she
Speaker 1: was skiing. She fell onto a an icy patch on
Speaker 1: a stream, and her upper body was submerged underneath and
Speaker 1: she found a pocket of air, but she could not
Speaker 1: get out of this stream that she had fallen into.
Speaker 1: Her friends tried to help her out um and after
Speaker 1: forty minutes of her struggling to try and get get
Speaker 1: back out, her heart stopped beating uh and they her
Speaker 1: friends still couldn't get her out. Finally, a rescue team
Speaker 1: was able to cut her out of the ice and
Speaker 1: they started administering CPR. They got her to a hospital
Speaker 1: that they didn't cut her out of the s until
Speaker 1: forty minutes after her heart had stopped getting so, so
Speaker 1: forty minutes she's under their struggling. Another forty minutes after
Speaker 1: her heart had stopped beating, that's when she's cut out.
Speaker 1: And from the point where she fell to the point
Speaker 1: where her heart started beating again. Because this is this
Speaker 1: is the great part of this story. It took three
Speaker 1: hours fifty five minutes. Now, that's the point of the
Speaker 1: time where she fell in and her heart started rebating,
Speaker 1: But subtract forty minutes from that, because it's more than
Speaker 1: because the first forty minutes her heart was beating anyway.
Speaker 1: But I've seen several different reports, but it seems at
Speaker 1: least for two or three hours her heart was stopped. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you might say, well, how is that possible? How
Speaker 1: can some body have their hearts stopped that long? Because
Speaker 1: with the heart stopping, you know, the blood that's flowing
Speaker 1: through our veins, it's carrying oxygen to our brains. It's
Speaker 1: also carrying away toxins and waste. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a multi functional uh system that is very important
Speaker 1: for the support of life. So how could someone have
Speaker 1: their hearts stop for more than an hour, more than
Speaker 1: three hours, and then make a recovery and only make
Speaker 1: a recovery but not suffer permanent brain damage and in
Speaker 1: that recovery period. Well, what I've read is that her
Speaker 1: survival is chalked up to the fact that she was
Speaker 1: in an icy stream, which kept her body temperature very
Speaker 1: low while her heart was in the arrested state. Yea,
Speaker 1: she had a temperature by a temperature of fifty six
Speaker 1: degrees fahrenheit. That's thirteen degrees celsius. That's quite chilly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing you've heard about, you know, oxygen
Speaker 1: deprivation of the brain, you know, hypoxia and all that
Speaker 1: kind of thing about the idea of brain cells dying. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of uh, not a lot, but brain cell
Speaker 1: death can result from oxygen being deprived from the brain
Speaker 1: and then resupplied. It's kind of a type of shock
Speaker 1: where the brain gets overwhelmed and cells start to kind
Speaker 1: of just destroy themselves, and you can suffer severe brain damage. Uh.
Speaker 1: The cooling of the body temperature counteracts this, and so
Speaker 1: with the cooling of the body temperature combined with the
Speaker 1: cardiac arrest, it meant that by resupplying in a gradual
Speaker 1: way the the blood supply andyen that she was able
Speaker 1: to recover without this reaction of shock, which would have
Speaker 1: otherwise uh caused massive brain damage. So it's pretty phenomenal
Speaker 1: and it's interesting. Also we should mention that when you
Speaker 1: think of applying CPR, especially when we see in the movies,
Speaker 1: you might see someone like pumping maybe fifteen times and yeah, however,
Speaker 1: however long is dramatically right exactly, and then and then
Speaker 1: they're like, we tried so hard. You know, you're supposed
Speaker 1: to keep that up for thirty eight minutes, at a
Speaker 1: minimum thirty eight minutes. You know, most most of the
Speaker 1: literature I read is actually they rounded up to forty minutes.
Speaker 1: I just had a thought for the first time. If
Speaker 1: you come back from that, I imagine your chest must
Speaker 1: really hurt. It usually breaks the breastbone. It's it's a
Speaker 1: it's not anywhere near what it looks like in the movies.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, a broken breastbone is way
Speaker 1: better than dead exact. Yeah, Okay, So we've established that
Speaker 1: it's possible, at least in some strange scenarios, to come
Speaker 1: back after your heart having stopped for a long time.
Speaker 1: So what actually prevents you from coming back after say
Speaker 1: a day? So why can't you go in and give
Speaker 1: CPR to someone who's been dead for four or forty
Speaker 1: eight hours? Well, I mean it'll again, it'll really heavily
Speaker 1: depend upon the situation, because there are at least some
Speaker 1: people who claim that you could go that long, but
Speaker 1: maybe under some really bizarre circumstances, but under normal circumstances.
Speaker 1: What you're looking at the problem, the biggest problem is
Speaker 1: cellular death. Right. So death doesn't just occur at the
Speaker 1: whole body level. It occurs at every single little cell
Speaker 1: in your body. Right, There's a there's a straightforward mechanical
Speaker 1: failure of the of the parts of the cell right right,
Speaker 1: Because once your blood stops flowing, It stops delivering nutrients
Speaker 1: and oxygen, and stops clearing out those toxins. Right. And
Speaker 1: so the way I've read this described is that your
Speaker 1: cells have little membranes, and without being constantly taken care
Speaker 1: of by the flow of blood, those membranes start to rupture.
Speaker 1: And then once it happens, basically the parts of it
Speaker 1: come apart and that can't be repaired. And the here's
Speaker 1: the thing. Cell death is completely part of life because
Speaker 1: our cells are constantly dying to share a place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the process of apoptosis right now. And the key
Speaker 1: part of that is that new cells are replacing the
Speaker 1: cells that have died off. Its planned. Right when you
Speaker 1: get to a point where you're you're no longer build,
Speaker 1: your circulation is no longer going, then you're not getting
Speaker 1: these new cells. There's no generation going on. It's just
Speaker 1: to die off. And once the cells are dead, there's
Speaker 1: no way to revive the cell. They they they're destroyed, right,
Speaker 1: So they're literally not there anymore. It is an excell, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: His cell has shuffled off the coil. It's gone to
Speaker 1: meet the choir invisible. Uh, the the the the cells
Speaker 1: also die at different rates. It kind of depends upon
Speaker 1: the actual tissue. So brain cells can die off very
Speaker 1: they're very delicate, they can die off pretty quickly under
Speaker 1: under normal circumstances. Clearly the ones that back on home
Speaker 1: were under I mean she her with her body temperature solo.
Speaker 1: Those were extraordinary circumstances. But under normal circumstances, it only
Speaker 1: takes a few minutes of deprivation from oxygen for brain
Speaker 1: cells to start to deteriorate to sure um and so
Speaker 1: brain death really is the kind of modern standard of
Speaker 1: what we should consider death to be right, and this
Speaker 1: would be brain death where there is no trace of
Speaker 1: brain activity. We're not talking about limited activity because they're
Speaker 1: there are people who are in a vegetative state who uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are arguments that they are starting to
Speaker 1: respond to a certain stimulus or that you can track
Speaker 1: some electrical activity in the brain that would not qualify
Speaker 1: for whole brain death as defined by that act I
Speaker 1: had mentioned earlier. But if you're talking about whole brain death,
Speaker 1: then there's really no coming back from that, at least
Speaker 1: with our conventional means right now, um as far as
Speaker 1: we know. But also there's a an added complication in
Speaker 1: that people who are in a vegetative state, who are uh,
Speaker 1: their their heart is still beating and they're still breathing
Speaker 1: maybe with with assistance, but their brain is no longer active.
Speaker 1: They are ideal candidates for organ harvesting because they're still alive.
Speaker 1: There's their organs are still being supplied, right, so they
Speaker 1: are incredibly valuable medically. So it becomes that becomes an
Speaker 1: added consideration and complication in this discussion about resuscitation, and
Speaker 1: of course the next of kins wishes or the families
Speaker 1: wishes have to be respected, and there's and there's also
Speaker 1: of course a very emotional and religious aspect to all
Speaker 1: of this. But medically speaking, that's what we've got going
Speaker 1: on right now. Um. But this is a show about
Speaker 1: the future. So uh, is there is there any new
Speaker 1: research that that's possibly changing this. Yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: know how what's pushing the limits because so we've established
Speaker 1: a couple of boundaries. I mean, it's common to revive
Speaker 1: people after a few minutes of cardiac arrest. We we
Speaker 1: know because of cell death that you're not going to
Speaker 1: do what Frankenstein did and dig up corpses that are
Speaker 1: days old or something like that and make them right.
Speaker 1: That's just not going to happen. It can't be reversed
Speaker 1: at that point. It's too much damage. But how far
Speaker 1: can we push the resuscitation border. How long can you
Speaker 1: go with somebody who's dead in one of these ways
Speaker 1: we've mentioned, either uh, brain dead or suffering cardiac arrest,
Speaker 1: or or any of these different kinds of death and
Speaker 1: bring them back to a healthy life state. It's it's
Speaker 1: definitely something that is dependent upon the individual situation and
Speaker 1: the the capabilities of whatever healthcare providers happened to be
Speaker 1: uh near that person. So if we're talking about a
Speaker 1: state of the art hospital that is using the latest
Speaker 1: uh uh groundbreaking techniques and resuscitation, the number I saw
Speaker 1: was a thirty eight percent success rate for people who
Speaker 1: had gone into serious cardiac arrest using the hospital in
Speaker 1: the hospital, And so this is you know, clearly, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're in the hospital, there's there's something that is
Speaker 1: wrong medically with you otherwise, or you're visiting someone, but
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, if you're a patient in
Speaker 1: the hospital, something is medically wrong. So of course you
Speaker 1: are in a population where there's a higher percentage of
Speaker 1: people who could go into cardiac arrest. That makes sense. So,
Speaker 1: but in the environment, you're also in the best place
Speaker 1: for that to happen because you've got the people who
Speaker 1: are most qualified to take care of you. UM. It's
Speaker 1: it's hard to answer this question, mainly because we don't
Speaker 1: have a uniform set of standards for every single hospital,
Speaker 1: with every single healthcare professional, with every single patient case.
Speaker 1: They're all very particular. However, we have lots of groups
Speaker 1: that are working very hard to push the resuscitation technology
Speaker 1: and science as far as possible to give patients the
Speaker 1: best chance of being resuscitated and while being maybe being
Speaker 1: dead by one of the earlier definitions, aren't dead to
Speaker 1: the point that they cannot come back. So you've got
Speaker 1: the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation or ill CORE. UH.
Speaker 1: They publish a consensus of findings every five years, the
Speaker 1: most recent being so we're according this inten next year
Speaker 1: we should see another publication with the latest and this
Speaker 1: is essentially an overview of all the different studies on
Speaker 1: resuscitation with kind of a best practices and you know,
Speaker 1: based upon the science, this is what we think is
Speaker 1: the best approach for resuscitating people. Uh. You've also got
Speaker 1: specific groups. I mean, one of the stories we were
Speaker 1: looking at today talked about the University of Pennsylvania and
Speaker 1: their Center for Resuscitation Science or CRS. And again, this
Speaker 1: isn't about reanimating the dead. It's resuscitating people who have
Speaker 1: gone into cardiac arrest or stop breathing the best we
Speaker 1: can hope to do. Yeah at this point, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So the question for the future is how far can
Speaker 1: we push back resuscitation. How long can you go? Um,
Speaker 1: Like we were saying, I don't think you'll ever get
Speaker 1: to the point where you can resurrect somebody who you
Speaker 1: know died out in the middle of a field somewhere
Speaker 1: and you find them hours later. At that point, too
Speaker 1: much cell death has already set in. The tissues are
Speaker 1: irreparably damaged at the cellular level. I was trying to
Speaker 1: come up with an analogy, and I think it would
Speaker 1: be like trying to repair gas up and restart a
Speaker 1: car where all the engine parts are just rusted through
Speaker 1: with holes, Like it's just not gonna happen. The damage
Speaker 1: is systemic and catastrophic and there's no return. But what
Speaker 1: seems like a more plausible future for pushing back. The
Speaker 1: resuscitation window is a future for when you die in
Speaker 1: hospital conditions, and doctors might be able to immediately apply
Speaker 1: some cell death prevention therapies to your body. Actually, to
Speaker 1: quote an expert in this field, Dr Sam Parnia, who's
Speaker 1: an American expert in death and resuscitation science. He gave
Speaker 1: an interview to Der Spiegel in July and he said this,
Speaker 1: in the future, we will likely get better at reversing death.
Speaker 1: We may have injectable drugs that slow the process of
Speaker 1: cell death in the brain and other organs. It is
Speaker 1: possible that in twenty years we may be able to
Speaker 1: restore people to life twelve hours or maybe even twenty
Speaker 1: four hours after they have died. You could call that
Speaker 1: resurrection if you will, but I still call it resuscitation science. Again,
Speaker 1: I think it's important that he's making the distinction, because
Speaker 1: it's important to note this as resuscitation, even if you're
Speaker 1: talking about something that's a day later. Because he's talking
Speaker 1: about someone who has had measures put in place to
Speaker 1: stall the onset of cell death, and he he looks
Speaker 1: at death as a process, not as in an on
Speaker 1: off switch, like it's not binary, it's not zero or one, uh,
Speaker 1: and it might not be just injectable things too. You
Speaker 1: could do you could do this with with the conditions
Speaker 1: around the body right we were. You know, you could
Speaker 1: artificially create the same sort of situation that we talked
Speaker 1: about with with with the the lady who fell into
Speaker 1: the rosen stream. You could you could induce therapeutic hypothermia.
Speaker 1: That's specifically when you are purposefully lowering the body temperature
Speaker 1: of a patient in order to help prevent that that
Speaker 1: shock I was talking about, which is called reperfusion injury, uh,
Speaker 1: which may have been again what saved back in home
Speaker 1: when she fell into that icy stream. And in fact,
Speaker 1: some hospitals already do a version of this. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: intentionally lower your body temperature if you go into cardiac
Speaker 1: arrest while they're trying to revive you. And I've even
Speaker 1: seen uh other suggestions. In fact, I think I saw one, yeah,
Speaker 1: from from Dr Parnia himself, who said that for people
Speaker 1: who are are responding with CPR, for someone who's going
Speaker 1: to cardiac arrest, it's not a bad idea to do
Speaker 1: something like put a bag of frozen peas on their
Speaker 1: head to help them bring down their temperature. A little
Speaker 1: bit while you do this, and it's interesting to think
Speaker 1: of it kind of like a d I Y approach
Speaker 1: until a rescue team can arrive and take over. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something that we could see used more regularly.
Speaker 1: In fact, I think Dr Parnia has said that the
Speaker 1: reason why we don't see this rolled out more uniformly
Speaker 1: throughout the the United States and then you know, by
Speaker 1: extension of the world is simply that it's it's taking
Speaker 1: time for this information to diffuse out into the medical
Speaker 1: community and tested and right. And also the fact that
Speaker 1: that you have to have multiple specialists looking after a
Speaker 1: person who has gone through cardiac arrest because you've got
Speaker 1: so many systems there, the respiratory system, the circulatory system,
Speaker 1: the brain, and as we've discussed on this show before, Uh,
Speaker 1: the specialties that we're talking about are so intense, they're
Speaker 1: so even a specialty is so broad that there's no
Speaker 1: one who's going to be an expert in multiple ones,
Speaker 1: Like we're not all going to be doctor House and
Speaker 1: doctor House is a fictional representation. But you know, I
Speaker 1: think one thing that's important to notice this idea he's
Speaker 1: talking about where you might have in objectable therapies to
Speaker 1: prevent cell death is not just a fantasy. There's real
Speaker 1: research going on in this area, right, Oh, absolutely, there
Speaker 1: there are lots of therapies that are under investigation for
Speaker 1: the possible prevention of cell death. We could do a
Speaker 1: whole episode really just on those um and and we
Speaker 1: covered it a little bit in our episode on immortality
Speaker 1: called Who Wants to Live Forever which published in June
Speaker 1: of but but very briefly, researchers are looking at different
Speaker 1: cells metabolisms of stuff like sugar and oxygen um, and
Speaker 1: at antibodies, and at regulatory enzymes and proteins. Because all right,
Speaker 1: the thing is that we we know that cells die
Speaker 1: because of both necrosis, which is which is damage um
Speaker 1: and apoptosis, which we mentioned earlier, which is regulated or
Speaker 1: programmed cell death, which happens due to normal bodily functions,
Speaker 1: or or it can happen due to stressors and diseases,
Speaker 1: including like viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Uh
Speaker 1: So we know a lot about the mechan is ms
Speaker 1: that can trigger cell death, but not enough to know
Speaker 1: how to control it. Uh And it's important to remember
Speaker 1: here that you know, as we look into the future
Speaker 1: and and as we think about what science might do
Speaker 1: to to help resuscitate people at later and later times
Speaker 1: after death, that most of the current research is aimed
Speaker 1: more at treatment of diseases like AIDS and you know,
Speaker 1: Alzheimer's stuff like that. Uh, plus also things like cancer
Speaker 1: in which harmful cells can be targeted for triggered death,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool. Um. You know, I guess it
Speaker 1: could certainly lend itself to reanimation or resuscitation in the future,
Speaker 1: but right now it's it's a narrower focus. You know.
Speaker 1: One of the other things I was thinking though, is
Speaker 1: that if we want to get fairly sci fi with this,
Speaker 1: you could imagine that if you have, as as Parnia suggests,
Speaker 1: injectable drugs that prevent cell death in hospital conditions, one
Speaker 1: could imagine maybe even some kind of implant or or
Speaker 1: a cybernetic enhancement or something that's designed to stall out
Speaker 1: death wherever you are. So imagine you don't go into
Speaker 1: cardiac arrest in hospital conditions, but you are out hiking
Speaker 1: somewhere or something like that, and you have a sensor
Speaker 1: implanted in your body that says, hey, I just noticed
Speaker 1: that all of your signals went flat. Are you okay?
Speaker 1: And if you don't press the cancel button, it injects
Speaker 1: you immediately with the substances to prevent your cell death
Speaker 1: could be we don't know. I guess it would also
Speaker 1: have to send out some sort of beacons. Otherwise, well,
Speaker 1: I'm still alive, but I'm incapable of moving and I'm
Speaker 1: on a mountain again. I guess you'd have to put
Speaker 1: in some really good fail safes to make sure it
Speaker 1: doesn't accidentally And yeah, that would be bad time. And
Speaker 1: we haven't even we touched on it on previous episodes.
Speaker 1: We didn't go into it here because it's not about
Speaker 1: resurrecting or or reanimating the dead. But there's also the
Speaker 1: discussion of the study of the death of death from
Speaker 1: a genetic perspective and the shortening of telomeres and really
Speaker 1: to counter aging, so that while death would not become impossible,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't die from quote unquote natural causes. You. You
Speaker 1: might still get sick, or you might still die due
Speaker 1: to injury, but you wouldn't age. Yeah, yeah, and and
Speaker 1: check out that that episode on Immortality for more on that.
Speaker 1: But but let's let's return to that kind of ultimate
Speaker 1: sci fi idea of of cryogeniction reanimation. So you're talking
Speaker 1: about like things from hard sci fi like Futurama exactly. Again,
Speaker 1: in this scenario, you couldn't fix the problem of natural
Speaker 1: death discovered too late, right, You couldn't go dig someone
Speaker 1: up and then once once you're at that point, cryonics
Speaker 1: doesn't help you. It's something you have to prepare for. Right.
Speaker 1: But assuming that you know they have Walt Disney's body
Speaker 1: on ice somewhere, are they going to be able to
Speaker 1: reanimate him? So this is I can't help but think
Speaker 1: of the Simpsons. We're looking for the cure verse seventeen
Speaker 1: tab wounds in the back. Um. But now the cryogenic freezing.
Speaker 1: First of all, it does happen. There are people who
Speaker 1: are in cryogenic suspension. Now, um, they are all legally dead,
Speaker 1: because it is illegal to do this to someone who
Speaker 1: has not been proclaimed clinically dead by a doctor and
Speaker 1: therefore legally dead. But the idea is to cool that
Speaker 1: the body down to sub zero temperatures, actually very sub
Speaker 1: zero temperatures, uh, in order to preserve the cells uh indefinitely.
Speaker 1: And the hope is that the person will be able
Speaker 1: to be revived in the future, and whatever it was
Speaker 1: that led to their demise has been Um, we've learned
Speaker 1: enough to be able to reverse that as well. You know,
Speaker 1: I have nothing to base this on, but I just
Speaker 1: have a little intuition that says doctors must really be
Speaker 1: annoyed by people who are trying to be cryogenically frozen.
Speaker 1: Pretty annoyed by it. So you're sitting there in the
Speaker 1: room trying to save somebody's life and then like right
Speaker 1: over your shoulder, you've got these guys standing there ready
Speaker 1: to freeze them. Well, yeah, it's this is pretty this
Speaker 1: is pretty crazy stuff. So yeah, if let's say that
Speaker 1: you have are elected to be cryogenically frozen upon your death, uh,
Speaker 1: I think they have to act quickly because again, once
Speaker 1: cellular death starts to set in, there's really no hope
Speaker 1: of of bringing that person back. Like most people say that,
Speaker 1: even looking a thousand years in the future, there's no
Speaker 1: coming back from cellular death. So you have to be
Speaker 1: able to preserve the body before that starts. So you
Speaker 1: have to freeze the body carefully. You can't just dunk
Speaker 1: a body into liquid nitrogen. It's gonna right, right because
Speaker 1: that that would that would I mean you've seen the
Speaker 1: way that for example, an ice cube trade will overflow
Speaker 1: if you put it in the freezer to full, or
Speaker 1: that a soda can will pop if you put it
Speaker 1: in the freezer. And that's because liquid expands when it's frozen.
Speaker 1: Water doesn't, at least liquid I'm sorry. Water. So you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of water in your body, like your cells,
Speaker 1: what's the water in them? They freeze the cells, the
Speaker 1: water inside the cells expands the cell membrane props, and
Speaker 1: then you've got cell death. That's cell death right there.
Speaker 1: So you can't do it quickly. But what they end
Speaker 1: up doing is they end up freezing your body slowly.
Speaker 1: They first have to replace all the water in your
Speaker 1: cells with a cryoprotectant, which is a chemical mixture that's
Speaker 1: essentially a non toxic anti freeze. So yeah, that's step one.
Speaker 1: You think that that's gonna be a pretty big one
Speaker 1: right there. Then they cool your body down to about
Speaker 1: minus two and two degrees fahrenheit or one thirty celsius
Speaker 1: one that minus one thirty I should say, not plus
Speaker 1: one thirty. That would be insane. Then you'd be placed
Speaker 1: in a tank filled with liquid nitrogen and cooled to
Speaker 1: a further minus three degrees fahrenheit or minus one celsius.
Speaker 1: You'd be stored upside down because if the tank were
Speaker 1: to spring a leak, they want to protect your brain
Speaker 1: as long as possible, so you'll be upside down. So
Speaker 1: you're like a big frozen batsickle. You're like a six
Speaker 1: pack because you're in there with other people because space
Speaker 1: is a premium, so there are chances that you're gonna
Speaker 1: be in that same tank with lots of other folks,
Speaker 1: so you're gonna be making friends, frozen buddies. You'll be
Speaker 1: like two frozen peas in a pod and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll be upside down until they figure out they're able
Speaker 1: to bring you back if they ever are, and we
Speaker 1: don't know that we can because right now we don't
Speaker 1: have the technology to actually return someone from this frozen
Speaker 1: state to a normal temperature where they could, even in theory,
Speaker 1: be revived, even if we knew how to cure whatever
Speaker 1: it was that caused them to die in the first place.
Speaker 1: It's for people who have a lot of hope in
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, this is where you're Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where you're placing a bet that in the future we
Speaker 1: will have figured this out enough to reverse this process
Speaker 1: and bring someone back so that they can be resuscitated.
Speaker 1: It's don't like the people who say, like global warming,
Speaker 1: we'll figure it out, technology will fix it. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not This would not be the basket into
Speaker 1: which I would place all of my eggs. Um. This
Speaker 1: is one of those things where it, I mean, it
Speaker 1: is like futures where you're you buy, you buy something
Speaker 1: thinking about in the future it's gonna be worth something,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna pay for it now. I think I'd
Speaker 1: rather throw in on investing in that that injector implant
Speaker 1: thing I talked about, the completely hypothetical injector implant thing.
Speaker 1: That you hypothetical thing as opposed to the actual thing
Speaker 1: that's happening, but the hypothetical way of resuscitating someone afterwards.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, it's you know, it's not to say that
Speaker 1: this won't ever become uh a possible, you know, working approach,
Speaker 1: but we don't have we don't. Yeah, there's nothing that
Speaker 1: we have right now that would say right now, it's
Speaker 1: kind of an entertaining cultural artifact, I think. Um, but
Speaker 1: but it does. I mean, like Joe is saying, and
Speaker 1: we've been a little bit snarky about it, but I
Speaker 1: do think it's genuinely beautiful that that people have this
Speaker 1: this faith in the future, and yeah, and in science
Speaker 1: to cure future science to cure all ills. I'm a
Speaker 1: very optimistic person, and I really very much like to see, uh,
Speaker 1: the the optimism come out in other ways, and I
Speaker 1: certainly hope that it unfolds in a way that is
Speaker 1: best for everybody obviously, And uh, I mean in the meantime,
Speaker 1: we're using this similar technologies, not going down to the
Speaker 1: temperatures we're talking about with crogenic freezing, but similar similar
Speaker 1: technologies to put people into what has been called suspended
Speaker 1: animation as a means of helping resuscitate them. In fact,
Speaker 1: you probably have heard that there was a breakthrough and
Speaker 1: suspended animation in two thousand fourteen, and everyone thought, oh,
Speaker 1: is this supposed to be for space flight? And no,
Speaker 1: the answer was that was not for space flight. Was
Speaker 1: specifically for patients who were undergoing tumic like medical trauma,
Speaker 1: and it was meant to help stabilize them so that
Speaker 1: doctors would be able to repair whatever damage. Yeah. So, uh,
Speaker 1: now that doesn't mean that we won't one day figure
Speaker 1: out a way of doing suspended animation. Obviously, that would
Speaker 1: be a huge boon for space exploration, especially if you
Speaker 1: just wanted to be able to go to sleep and
Speaker 1: wake up on Mars would be fantastic. Or maybe not Mars,
Speaker 1: maybe a planet on a different you know, system, entirely
Speaker 1: all right, So in summary, in the future, will we
Speaker 1: ever be able to bring back corpses like Dr Frankenstein?
Speaker 1: Almost certainly not. I really can't see how that could
Speaker 1: happen in any way, no matter how good technology gets,
Speaker 1: which is too bad because Marty Feldman would be my
Speaker 1: number one, that's the first person I go to. But
Speaker 1: can we bring people back after longer and longer periods
Speaker 1: of cardiac arrest? I think that seems very plausible. We can.
Speaker 1: We can certainly bring people back from the dead as
Speaker 1: we had to find dead in previous generations. We can
Speaker 1: do that and and hopefully yeah, right, you use these
Speaker 1: technologies to prolong life and to help beat some of
Speaker 1: these diseases that we don't really have any kind of
Speaker 1: other care for right now. Yeah. Yeah, So it's it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that we were so interested in
Speaker 1: tackling because I mean, we're all horror and science fiction fans.
Speaker 1: People can argue, but I think Frankenstein of I think
Speaker 1: of it as the first science fiction novel, and um,
Speaker 1: I I'm really excited by these kind of topics. I
Speaker 1: think that it's fun for us to take something that's
Speaker 1: a little outside the norm for us. We've done it
Speaker 1: a few times with our what you Don't see in
Speaker 1: science fiction series. So if there are any other futuristic
Speaker 1: kind of topics that are, you know, off the beaten path,
Speaker 1: it's not maybe something that we would normally cover in
Speaker 1: an episode, but you really would like to hear our
Speaker 1: take on it, let us know we would be eager
Speaker 1: to hear from you. You can drop us a line
Speaker 1: where you can sow an email at FW thinking at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot com, or get in touch with
Speaker 1: us on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. Twitter and Google
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Speaker 1: We look forward to hearing from you, and you hear
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