WEBVTT - Ep32 "Is death reversible?" 0:00:04.559 --> 0:00:08.320 From the point of view of biology, what is life 0:00:08.520 --> 0:00:12.480 and what is death and what is the line between them? 0:00:13.200 --> 0:00:16.360 Could you freeze your body to come back sometime in 0:00:16.400 --> 0:00:19.200 the future, and what does this have to do with 0:00:19.480 --> 0:00:24.920 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or housefly or the poet John Dunn. 0:00:28.760 --> 0:00:31.760 Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a 0:00:31.800 --> 0:00:35.640 neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes 0:00:35.720 --> 0:00:39.880 we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand 0:00:39.960 --> 0:00:43.000 why and how our lives look the way they do, 0:00:43.560 --> 0:00:47.680 and in this case, whether life is something that comes 0:00:47.720 --> 0:00:52.800 to an end inevitably or only because we don't understand 0:00:52.840 --> 0:01:00.760 the biology well enough yet. So today day's episode is 0:01:00.760 --> 0:01:07.120 about understanding what happens when your molecular cycles grind to 0:01:07.240 --> 0:01:10.440 a halt, and whether there's anything we can do to 0:01:10.680 --> 0:01:18.480 hit control z on that can death be reversed. A 0:01:18.480 --> 0:01:21.880 few months ago, my dog was lying on the floor 0:01:22.160 --> 0:01:24.960 and we were all gathered around her, and my kids 0:01:24.959 --> 0:01:28.880 were coming in and out, and everyone was crying because 0:01:28.959 --> 0:01:31.959 my dog was dying. She was fifteen and a half 0:01:32.080 --> 0:01:34.640 years old, which for a dog her size was quite old, 0:01:35.000 --> 0:01:38.600 and her body was shutting down and as I sat 0:01:38.640 --> 0:01:41.119 on the floor stroking her back, I was thinking about 0:01:41.160 --> 0:01:44.720 a poem by John Dunn that I had first read 0:01:44.720 --> 0:01:46.839 when I was a child, probably about ten years old. 0:01:47.440 --> 0:01:51.840 The poem is called Death Be Not Proud, and it 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:54.160 really blew my young mind when I read it. It 0:01:54.200 --> 0:01:59.720 begins with these lines, death be not proud, though some 0:01:59.800 --> 0:02:03.800 have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not 0:02:04.080 --> 0:02:08.560 so now. In this poem, one of his nineteen holy sonnets, 0:02:09.040 --> 0:02:12.919 Done gets right up in Death's face and he challenges 0:02:13.520 --> 0:02:16.560 Death's power and importance, and he tells death not to 0:02:16.560 --> 0:02:20.040 be proud because it is not as fearsome as it 0:02:20.120 --> 0:02:24.800 might seem. And the sonnet ends with the lines one 0:02:24.960 --> 0:02:29.480 short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be 0:02:29.560 --> 0:02:36.480 no more death, thou shalt die so. Done ends the 0:02:36.560 --> 0:02:39.960 poem by spitting right in death's champagne glass, and he 0:02:40.080 --> 0:02:44.480 tells Death that he is going to die now. John 0:02:44.560 --> 0:02:48.160 Dunn wrote this poem through a religious lens. He was 0:02:48.200 --> 0:02:52.360 giving the interpretation of the victory of the soul over death. 0:02:52.440 --> 0:02:56.120 But I had a different interpretation. I was struck by 0:02:56.160 --> 0:03:02.560 this idea of defeating death. After all, biologists, we study 0:03:02.800 --> 0:03:06.560 life and each decade we know more and more about 0:03:06.680 --> 0:03:09.800 how it works, and the more we know about life, 0:03:09.840 --> 0:03:12.480 the more we can know about how to keep it 0:03:12.520 --> 0:03:17.640 going and possibly how to even reboot it. Now that 0:03:17.680 --> 0:03:21.240 sounds crazy, but we're going to unpack that carefully in 0:03:21.280 --> 0:03:24.800 this episode. There are many ways to look at what 0:03:25.160 --> 0:03:28.840 life is. I did an on stage conversation some years 0:03:28.840 --> 0:03:32.560 ago with a mystic named Saguru, and we discussed and 0:03:32.560 --> 0:03:35.520 debated a number of issues, but he said one thing 0:03:35.560 --> 0:03:38.560 that was phrased very simply, and it proved hard for 0:03:38.640 --> 0:03:42.600 me to forget. He said, the physical body is like 0:03:42.640 --> 0:03:46.080 a fruit, and when the person is gone, the person 0:03:46.120 --> 0:03:50.480 that you loved, all you have left now is the rind. 0:03:51.080 --> 0:03:55.480 There's nothing special about the body, the physical body, and 0:03:55.680 --> 0:03:58.720 I loved that description, but as a biologist, I wanted 0:03:58.760 --> 0:04:01.880 to dig deeper. And this is a problem I had 0:04:01.880 --> 0:04:06.280 actually started thinking about years earlier, because I once went 0:04:06.360 --> 0:04:08.760 to wash a dish in the sink and there was 0:04:08.800 --> 0:04:11.800 a tupperware in there with some water in it, and 0:04:11.840 --> 0:04:15.000 there was a house fly that had died in the tupperware. 0:04:15.480 --> 0:04:18.839 And I looked at the poor little lifeless fly, and 0:04:18.920 --> 0:04:23.080 a question struck me, What is the difference between the 0:04:23.279 --> 0:04:27.440 live fly and the dead fly. If you do a 0:04:27.560 --> 0:04:31.440 chemical analysis, it's exactly the same stuff. You have x 0:04:31.520 --> 0:04:35.440 number of carbon atoms in the quadrillions or ten to 0:04:35.480 --> 0:04:38.640 the eighteenth, and you have Y number of nitrogen atoms, 0:04:38.640 --> 0:04:41.520 and you have Z number of oxygen atoms, and so on. 0:04:42.320 --> 0:04:45.640 The weight of this little dead fly is exactly the 0:04:45.640 --> 0:04:50.080 same as a living fly. The chemical composition is the same, 0:04:50.760 --> 0:04:54.599 All the trillions of proteins are the same. Everything is 0:04:54.640 --> 0:04:57.880 the same between the living fly and the dead fly. 0:04:58.720 --> 0:05:05.839 The only different is the molecular momentum. All the cascades 0:05:05.880 --> 0:05:09.120 have come to a stop. All the crebs cycles and 0:05:09.160 --> 0:05:12.280 the action of the proteins around the DNA and the 0:05:12.400 --> 0:05:16.480 endoplasmic particulum, and all the step by step chemical reactions 0:05:16.480 --> 0:05:21.960 in the cell, they've all just come to a standstill. 0:05:22.040 --> 0:05:25.479 So what Saguru referred to as the fruit to the 0:05:25.520 --> 0:05:29.320 part we love and lament I interpret this as the 0:05:29.360 --> 0:05:34.400 ongoing cascades of the cellular processes. This leads to this 0:05:34.480 --> 0:05:37.320 leads to this, and as long as everything keeps going, 0:05:37.960 --> 0:05:41.400 then the fly is alive and it moves around. As 0:05:41.440 --> 0:05:45.320 soon as something breaks about these cycles, then everything just 0:05:45.480 --> 0:05:49.120 grinds to a halt. So this leads to the question 0:05:49.680 --> 0:05:53.440 what does it require to keep everything going for cells 0:05:53.480 --> 0:05:58.120 to stay alive? And the related question is if they stopped, 0:05:58.680 --> 0:06:01.760 would there be any way to you reboot the system 0:06:01.800 --> 0:06:06.159 to get the cycles going again. So when I read 0:06:06.240 --> 0:06:08.799 Dunn's poem as a kid, where he says that death 0:06:08.839 --> 0:06:13.360 shall die, I imagined that someday, in the very distant 0:06:13.720 --> 0:06:17.560 sci fi future, we might actually be able to make 0:06:17.640 --> 0:06:20.880 this true, to get cells going again that had come 0:06:20.920 --> 0:06:24.760 to a stop. But of course, when imagining this future 0:06:24.800 --> 0:06:27.560 as a kid, you imagine it as people in silver 0:06:27.760 --> 0:06:30.960 suits zipping around in the skies. So as I got 0:06:31.000 --> 0:06:35.920 older and studied biology and became more realistic about this, 0:06:36.320 --> 0:06:39.080 I realized, of course that we were all going to 0:06:39.160 --> 0:06:44.240 die after all. So given that perspective about how distantly 0:06:44.240 --> 0:06:47.559 in the future this would happen, you can imagine how 0:06:48.040 --> 0:06:51.480 surprised I was to see the speed at which this 0:06:51.520 --> 0:06:55.520 field is moving along. I suspect that I will die 0:06:55.600 --> 0:06:59.080 and perhaps the next few or several generations. But the 0:06:59.200 --> 0:07:03.640 idea of reversing deaths, at least in some cases, is 0:07:03.800 --> 0:07:08.520 not a subject constrained to the pens of poets. Anymore. 0:07:09.520 --> 0:07:12.560 Over the past several years, you can find the beginnings 0:07:12.720 --> 0:07:17.360 of this endeavor published in the top scientific journals. And 0:07:17.520 --> 0:07:20.360 we're not talking about longevity in this episode. I'm going 0:07:20.400 --> 0:07:23.200 to talk about that in the future episode. Instead, we're 0:07:23.200 --> 0:07:29.559 talking about this completely wacky idea of reversing death, taking 0:07:29.600 --> 0:07:33.520 an organism that has already died, and reversing back out 0:07:33.520 --> 0:07:37.000 of that. Now, this sounds like something straight out of 0:07:37.400 --> 0:07:40.880 Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, which, as you remember, tells the 0:07:40.960 --> 0:07:45.720 story of a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who figures out 0:07:45.800 --> 0:07:49.679 how to reanimate the dead. But the whole thing doesn't 0:07:49.680 --> 0:07:53.360 turn out so well, and Frankenstein's monster ends up getting 0:07:53.640 --> 0:07:58.160 rejected by mankind in general, and he regretfully murders people 0:07:58.200 --> 0:08:01.760 to get revenge on his maker. But anyway, put that 0:08:01.840 --> 0:08:04.720 interpretation aside for a moment while we talk about this, 0:08:04.840 --> 0:08:08.800 because in the early twenty first century, we're now in 0:08:08.840 --> 0:08:13.440 a more realistic position to assess what is possible and 0:08:13.520 --> 0:08:17.200 to think deeply about the ethics. Now, it may sound 0:08:17.280 --> 0:08:20.600 surprising that there's enough science now to even talk about 0:08:20.600 --> 0:08:24.040 this topic, but hangtight, because we're about to see some 0:08:24.240 --> 0:08:28.920 very strange stuff. First, this question of whether death could 0:08:28.960 --> 0:08:34.400 be reversible has long been entertained, because sometimes people can 0:08:34.600 --> 0:08:37.280 fall to the bottom of a lake and freeze to 0:08:37.400 --> 0:08:40.439 death and lose all their function, and they are really 0:08:40.480 --> 0:08:43.520 truly at a stop, and then sometimes they can be 0:08:43.920 --> 0:08:48.760 brought to a hospital and revivified. For example, I remember 0:08:48.840 --> 0:08:52.040 reading a story in two thousand about a young doctor 0:08:52.120 --> 0:08:55.800 in Norway named Anna. She was a trainee surgeon who 0:08:55.920 --> 0:08:58.840 was exactly my age, and she was skiing when she 0:08:59.040 --> 0:09:03.880 fell through a rosen river and got trapped under the ice. Now, 0:09:03.920 --> 0:09:06.000 her colleagues were there and they saw her, but they 0:09:06.000 --> 0:09:08.720 couldn't get her out, and they struggled and struggled to 0:09:08.760 --> 0:09:12.480 rescue her. But she ended up being under the ice 0:09:12.880 --> 0:09:18.400 for forty minutes, and not surprisingly, her organs shut down 0:09:18.480 --> 0:09:21.760 and she died. Her body temperature had fallen more than 0:09:21.800 --> 0:09:27.040 twenty three degrees below normal. But Anna was eventually pulled 0:09:27.080 --> 0:09:30.040 out from the ice and put on an air ambulance, 0:09:30.679 --> 0:09:33.400 and she wasn't breathing when she got to the hospital. 0:09:33.440 --> 0:09:37.400 Her blood circulation had stopped, her pupils were not responding 0:09:37.440 --> 0:09:41.040 to light, but the doctors put her on a heart 0:09:41.080 --> 0:09:44.920 and lung machine and re warmed her while the circulation 0:09:45.120 --> 0:09:47.800 was kept going. They used a machine that warmed her 0:09:47.840 --> 0:09:50.839 blood and oxygenated it and then put it back in 0:09:50.920 --> 0:09:54.840 her body, and things weren't easy. She spent sixty days 0:09:54.880 --> 0:09:59.280 in intensive care in the hospital, but five months after 0:09:59.360 --> 0:10:02.600 she was frozen to death, she was back to work 0:10:02.640 --> 0:10:05.840 as a doctor and she still skis now. You can 0:10:05.880 --> 0:10:08.520 find this case in the Lancet, which is a top 0:10:08.559 --> 0:10:11.960 medical journal in the field. So this stuff happens, and 0:10:12.000 --> 0:10:14.720 it happens more than you might think. I read another 0:10:14.840 --> 0:10:17.960 article in twenty sixteen about a guy walking home from 0:10:17.960 --> 0:10:20.520 a party and he slipped and hit his head and 0:10:20.559 --> 0:10:24.720 went unconscious and wasn't found until the next morning when 0:10:24.720 --> 0:10:28.120 his father was driving around looking for him and found 0:10:28.200 --> 0:10:33.319 him buried in the snow, frozen, no vital signs. They 0:10:33.400 --> 0:10:36.120 rushed him to the hospital. They pumped him full of warm, 0:10:36.240 --> 0:10:41.240 oxygenated blood, and it wasn't an easy recovery. But a 0:10:41.320 --> 0:10:44.560 year later, even though he's missing all his toes and 0:10:44.600 --> 0:10:49.240 pinkies from frostbite, he is indistinguishable from anyone else you 0:10:49.320 --> 0:10:53.360 might meet. Essentially, he was frozen in the same way 0:10:53.400 --> 0:10:55.880 that we might put meat in the freezer, so it 0:10:55.920 --> 0:10:59.800 doesn't go bad. But it's the same principle. Despite our 0:11:00.440 --> 0:11:03.600 sense of our beautiful essences, it's also the case that 0:11:03.679 --> 0:11:07.160 we are meat and we can be frozen and we 0:11:07.200 --> 0:11:11.760 can be thawed. Now, why can't you revivify any person 0:11:11.760 --> 0:11:15.440 who has died. Well, if things aren't frozen, then the 0:11:15.440 --> 0:11:19.440 biology decomposes, the cells break down. This is of course 0:11:19.480 --> 0:11:21.560 the same thing that happens if you leave a piece 0:11:21.600 --> 0:11:24.240 of meat on your counter instead of putting it in 0:11:24.240 --> 0:11:27.040 the freezer, and in the case of a person, that 0:11:27.200 --> 0:11:32.160 causes irreversible damage to the brain. But a frozen body 0:11:32.200 --> 0:11:35.679 doesn't decay, at least not rapidly. It stays intact because 0:11:35.720 --> 0:11:39.000 the molecules can't move around as much. Everything is held 0:11:39.040 --> 0:11:44.600 into place. So the observation that people could be frozen 0:11:44.640 --> 0:11:49.839 and unfrozen got scientists interested in the speculation of whether 0:11:49.960 --> 0:11:52.800 you could take a person who has just died and 0:11:52.960 --> 0:11:56.760 freeze them on purpose, with the idea of unfreezing them later. 0:11:57.679 --> 0:12:00.800 And this successfully started in the nineteen in seventies with 0:12:00.920 --> 0:12:05.160 freezing mouse embryos, and then that became a successful way 0:12:05.200 --> 0:12:09.120 to freeze human embryos. But keep in mind a human 0:12:09.160 --> 0:12:11.920 embryo is the size of a grain of salt, and 0:12:11.960 --> 0:12:16.160 so the challenges are a little less in successfully freezing 0:12:16.200 --> 0:12:20.360 and unfreezing those. But the question people have been asking is, 0:12:20.360 --> 0:12:25.079 could you actually freeze an entire adult body and unfreeze 0:12:25.080 --> 0:12:28.000 it later, Let's say, because they have cancer that we 0:12:28.040 --> 0:12:31.200 don't know how to cure. But maybe in seventy years 0:12:31.240 --> 0:12:34.360 the medical community will have no problem curing this. It'll 0:12:34.400 --> 0:12:38.600 be easy. Could you reanimate somebody in the same way 0:12:38.720 --> 0:12:41.480 that has been done on a much shorter timescale with 0:12:41.640 --> 0:12:44.360 the woman in the icy river or the man who 0:12:44.400 --> 0:12:48.760 fell into the snow bank. Well, in a previous episode, 0:12:48.800 --> 0:12:52.640 I mentioned a company in Arizona called Alcore, which strives 0:12:52.679 --> 0:12:57.520 to do exactly this. They are a cryogenics company, and 0:12:57.679 --> 0:13:01.080 upon your death, they will swoop in to perfuse your 0:13:01.120 --> 0:13:03.720 body with the right chemicals and get you to the 0:13:03.760 --> 0:13:07.480 facility in Arizona, and there they will lower you into 0:13:07.520 --> 0:13:11.920 a vat of liquid nitrogen. Now, do they know how 0:13:11.960 --> 0:13:14.920 to cure whatever your disease was, or, for that matter, 0:13:14.960 --> 0:13:18.080 do they even know how to unfreeze you successfully? No, 0:13:18.280 --> 0:13:21.400 But that's not the point. The point is that sometime 0:13:21.559 --> 0:13:26.400 in the distant future, our great grand descendants may know 0:13:26.559 --> 0:13:29.120 how to do this, and at that point they can 0:13:29.280 --> 0:13:33.000 unfreeze you and cure you of whatever ailment you have, 0:13:33.760 --> 0:13:37.680 presumably something that was totally opaque or confusing for twenty 0:13:37.720 --> 0:13:41.720 first century minds, but easily curable with a twenty second 0:13:41.760 --> 0:13:45.560 century toolbox. Now here's something of interest. It turns out 0:13:45.600 --> 0:13:49.040 the first person to ever get frozen on purpose in 0:13:49.040 --> 0:13:53.160 this new field called cryogenics was born in what year, 0:13:53.559 --> 0:13:58.920 take a guess, eighteen ninety three, a guy named James 0:13:59.000 --> 0:14:02.360 Bedford who died in January of nineteen sixty seven from 0:14:02.480 --> 0:14:05.440 terminal cancer. He was the first person to do this. 0:14:06.000 --> 0:14:10.480 But did he die? Interesting question? I would say unresolved 0:14:10.520 --> 0:14:13.680 so far, because it's yet to be seen whether he 0:14:13.760 --> 0:14:18.160 can be rebooted nineteen sixty seven. So although this is 0:14:18.440 --> 0:14:22.000 science fiction y, it's not even that new. Now. Since 0:14:22.040 --> 0:14:26.680 that time, people have worked on the cryogenic technology to 0:14:26.720 --> 0:14:30.160 figure out how to make the freezing process better and 0:14:30.240 --> 0:14:34.200 better to prevent cell damage, because the problem is if 0:14:34.240 --> 0:14:37.920 you get an ice crystal during the freezing process, that 0:14:38.000 --> 0:14:41.400 will rupture the cell membrane and then the body that 0:14:41.480 --> 0:14:45.120 you hoped to revive is too damaged. Like when you 0:14:45.120 --> 0:14:47.800 stick a strawberry in the freezer to try to make 0:14:47.840 --> 0:14:50.680 it last longer. But once you unthought, it gets all mushy. 0:14:51.040 --> 0:14:53.760 That's the same thing that happens with any cells if 0:14:53.800 --> 0:14:57.640 they get ice crystals in it. So will Bedford's body 0:14:57.720 --> 0:15:01.400 be able to be reanimated? Who knows? And experts have 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:04.880 different opinions about whether the bodies at the alcore facility 0:15:04.960 --> 0:15:09.120 will be reeve vivifiable. But the idea of cryogenics is 0:15:09.200 --> 0:15:13.360 straightforward in the sense that even if these first few 0:15:13.480 --> 0:15:17.240 hundred experiments fail, will surely get better and better at 0:15:17.240 --> 0:15:21.120 cryogenics in the future, and the hope is that someone 0:15:21.640 --> 0:15:25.880 fifty generations from now will know how to reverse the process. 0:15:26.920 --> 0:15:28.480 And before I go to the next step, I just 0:15:28.520 --> 0:15:32.840 want to say this idea about confronting death is not 0:15:32.880 --> 0:15:36.960 just about freezing and unfreezing. The deeper issues in biology 0:15:37.440 --> 0:15:41.560 have to do with how individual cells die. It turns 0:15:41.560 --> 0:15:44.720 out that cells can get injured by various things, let's say, 0:15:44.760 --> 0:15:48.480 a lack of blood flow or a chemical insult, and 0:15:48.520 --> 0:15:51.520 then they essentially blow up and die and cause a 0:15:51.520 --> 0:15:55.360 lot of inflammation. This is called necrosis. But in nineteen 0:15:55.400 --> 0:15:58.560 seventy two it was discovered that this isn't the way 0:15:58.840 --> 0:16:03.440 cells have to die. Cells can actually die on purpose, 0:16:03.880 --> 0:16:07.720 and this is known as a potosis. A potosis means 0:16:07.720 --> 0:16:11.040 that instead of a cell simply just falling apart, instead 0:16:11.080 --> 0:16:15.640 it implements a controlled process by which it folds up 0:16:15.720 --> 0:16:20.280 shop and cleanly commits suicide. Scientists came to understand that 0:16:20.360 --> 0:16:23.680 this is a very purposeful process, and over many years 0:16:23.760 --> 0:16:28.120 they showed how apotosis is actually the way that biological 0:16:28.280 --> 0:16:34.960 organisms structure themselves. For example, a human embryo has webbed fingers, 0:16:35.000 --> 0:16:38.240 in other words, little sheets of skin between the fingers 0:16:38.680 --> 0:16:41.280 of exactly the type that you would need for swimming. 0:16:41.520 --> 0:16:45.000 But in the case of our particular species, the cells 0:16:45.080 --> 0:16:48.800 making up that webbing. Those cells die off before the 0:16:48.840 --> 0:16:52.400 baby is born, such that we have independently moving fingers. 0:16:52.880 --> 0:16:56.040 But those cells between our fingers wouldn't die off if 0:16:56.080 --> 0:16:59.640 we were another mammal, say a bat, or a kangaroo, 0:17:00.120 --> 0:17:03.480 or a whale or a manatee. I'm actually going to 0:17:03.480 --> 0:17:05.800 put an X ray picture of a manatee fin on 0:17:05.800 --> 0:17:10.200 my website because it's so stunning how the bones inside 0:17:10.240 --> 0:17:13.679 their fin look just like a human hand. The bones 0:17:13.720 --> 0:17:16.600 look that way, but the difference is that the cells 0:17:16.640 --> 0:17:20.159 between their fingers, that webbing that doesn't die off, so 0:17:20.240 --> 0:17:25.760 what you get is a fin Anyway, apotosis is everywhere. 0:17:25.800 --> 0:17:29.760 Your body has about a trillion new cells developing every day, 0:17:30.200 --> 0:17:33.439 and so you need to kill off a similar number 0:17:33.680 --> 0:17:36.480 to keep the system from getting overrun. And this is 0:17:36.600 --> 0:17:40.639 all done with this very controlled process of cell death. 0:17:41.440 --> 0:17:45.960 And the scientists behind these discoveries Horbitz and Brenner and Sulstan. 0:17:46.320 --> 0:17:49.040 They won the Nobel Prize for this in two thousand 0:17:49.040 --> 0:17:52.239 and two. But it turns out since then biologists have 0:17:52.280 --> 0:17:56.200 discovered that necrosis and apotosis are not even the only 0:17:56.280 --> 0:17:59.760 game in town. We now know there are many flavors 0:17:59.840 --> 0:18:04.880 of program cell death, like what's called pyrotosis or ferrotosis 0:18:05.000 --> 0:18:09.639 or necrotosis. These are all different mechanisms that tip the 0:18:09.760 --> 0:18:14.439 balance between different cell fates, and people are working on 0:18:14.560 --> 0:18:18.639 drugs to block all these very specific flavors of cell death. 0:18:19.320 --> 0:18:22.679 It's no longer just the cell gets sick and falls apart, 0:18:22.920 --> 0:18:26.240 but it's much more sophisticated now and that gives the 0:18:26.359 --> 0:18:32.320 possibility to molecularly block the process. So now let zoom 0:18:32.359 --> 0:18:35.920 out to the big picture. There's an increasing amount known 0:18:35.960 --> 0:18:39.600 about how cells actually shut down, and we have proof 0:18:39.600 --> 0:18:43.600 of principle that systems can get going again even after 0:18:43.600 --> 0:18:48.080 they've stopped. And all this has led to the possibility 0:18:48.560 --> 0:18:50.600 that we might be able to take something like a 0:18:50.800 --> 0:18:55.920 dead brain or dead body and reboot it. Now this 0:18:56.040 --> 0:18:58.560 sounds so crazy, but the question I want to ask 0:18:58.680 --> 0:19:01.600 is are we actually going to have to wait fifty 0:19:01.680 --> 0:19:05.000 generations to see this happen? Or is it possible that 0:19:05.080 --> 0:19:08.479 things are moving so rapidly that there's some reason to 0:19:08.520 --> 0:19:11.040 think that we could take, say, a dead brain, a 0:19:11.119 --> 0:19:13.960 totally dead brain that's been dead for four hours, and 0:19:14.000 --> 0:19:17.480 get the whole factory running again. Well you'd agree that 0:19:17.600 --> 0:19:21.679 seems like a science fiction fantasy. But a colleague of 0:19:21.720 --> 0:19:25.199 mine recently published two papers in the journal Nature, and 0:19:25.320 --> 0:19:28.720 it seems we're already at the point, give or take, 0:19:29.160 --> 0:19:32.119 where we may be able to do something just about 0:19:32.200 --> 0:19:35.639 like that, at least in pigs. In the journals, this 0:19:35.720 --> 0:19:39.600 is cast in the paper as quote Cellular and molecular 0:19:39.680 --> 0:19:43.280 recovery in pigs, which I suspect doesn't sound that interesting 0:19:43.320 --> 0:19:45.080 to most people on the planet, and so it didn't 0:19:45.080 --> 0:19:48.680 get that much attention. But this is seriously big stuff. 0:19:49.359 --> 0:19:52.160 So I called up my colleague who wrote these recent papers, 0:19:52.600 --> 0:19:56.880 and I asked him, is cell death inevitable? Let's say 0:19:56.920 --> 0:19:59.320 when a person has a stroke and there's no blood 0:19:59.320 --> 0:20:02.040 going to the set. Well, we've always thought of that 0:20:02.119 --> 0:20:05.879 as being a really terrible scenario that inevitably leads to 0:20:05.960 --> 0:20:08.919 sell death. But is that the case? 0:20:25.160 --> 0:20:27.080 So we used to think that, and we had a 0:20:27.280 --> 0:20:31.919 publication four years ago where we actually christened if sales 0:20:31.960 --> 0:20:35.359 actually die after death after blood flow stops, and we 0:20:35.440 --> 0:20:40.000 realized that actually death is a portracted process. It takes 0:20:40.000 --> 0:20:42.440 a bit actually for sales to die, and if you 0:20:42.560 --> 0:20:46.440 intervene properly, you can maybe reverse those processes. 0:20:47.320 --> 0:20:53.000 That's Vanimir Russella. He's an mdphd originally from Croatia. He 0:20:53.040 --> 0:20:56.080 did his postalk and became a research scientist at Yale 0:20:56.160 --> 0:20:58.719 School of Medicine, and now he's spun off a company 0:20:58.720 --> 0:21:06.080 around this called Becksore. So you mean the death of 0:21:06.320 --> 0:21:09.399 an organism, let's say, of a person. You're saying it 0:21:09.440 --> 0:21:14.200 doesn't happen all at once, but it takes time to die. 0:21:14.600 --> 0:21:16.320 So yeah, yeah, So I think I just want to 0:21:16.320 --> 0:21:19.720 be like a nuance here. There were instances that so 0:21:19.880 --> 0:21:23.280 it is well known that For example, you can find 0:21:23.400 --> 0:21:27.800 living cells in human specimens after hours of death, and 0:21:28.119 --> 0:21:31.000 scientists have used like chunks of tissue to find like 0:21:31.040 --> 0:21:32.840 living sales and record from them. 0:21:33.200 --> 0:21:35.200 It was also observed. 0:21:34.800 --> 0:21:39.040 That people who have died and were undercolt conditions that 0:21:39.480 --> 0:21:42.840 they could be actually brought sort of The implication there 0:21:42.920 --> 0:21:46.320 is that there are cells o functional. So there were 0:21:46.320 --> 0:21:50.200 instances where this was a scene and recorded in the literature. 0:21:50.600 --> 0:21:53.119 So let's just double click on that. So tell us 0:21:53.119 --> 0:21:57.119 what you mean about people who were frozen and were recovered. 0:21:57.440 --> 0:22:00.800 Give us an example, So on the macros kale, like right, 0:22:00.960 --> 0:22:03.840 talking about the whole human, not about. 0:22:03.600 --> 0:22:06.159 A single cell. It was observed that people. 0:22:05.880 --> 0:22:08.760 Who have drowned their bodies would cool down as they 0:22:08.800 --> 0:22:12.200 were drowning, that after a prolonged period of time, these 0:22:12.240 --> 0:22:16.080 people could be resuscitated. So the time it was, you know, 0:22:16.240 --> 0:22:19.800 we are not used as seeing like someone resuscitated after 0:22:19.880 --> 0:22:24.879 that how long, Well, I don't know specifics, but just 0:22:24.920 --> 0:22:28.159 to give you like a benchmark data point. Usually it 0:22:28.240 --> 0:22:32.240 is assumed from the classical literature that four minutes after 0:22:32.520 --> 0:22:35.680 blood flow stops, bodies cells just die. 0:22:35.760 --> 0:22:36.360 So that was. 0:22:36.359 --> 0:22:41.040 Always like a clinical data point, after which was really 0:22:41.080 --> 0:22:45.000 difficult to bring people back with resuscitation. 0:22:45.920 --> 0:22:50.200 Okay, so you started suspecting that maybe cells aren't as 0:22:50.240 --> 0:22:52.600 fragile as we thought. So what did you do? 0:22:53.840 --> 0:22:58.760 So yeah, so we have it's interesting storied up my 0:22:58.920 --> 0:23:04.480 pi at the time. And then a Sistan received a 0:23:04.520 --> 0:23:09.119 tissue specimens from abroad and they got stuck at customs 0:23:09.160 --> 0:23:12.000 for a really long period of time. And so by 0:23:12.080 --> 0:23:14.520 the time they came in the lab, you know, the 0:23:14.640 --> 0:23:16.639 researchers were like thinking, oh. 0:23:16.280 --> 0:23:19.360 You know, it's done, like the specimen is useless. 0:23:19.400 --> 0:23:22.400 But they still made slice sculptures and after a week 0:23:22.440 --> 0:23:24.600 they realized that they were living cells. 0:23:24.960 --> 0:23:28.199 So that was the first observation that got the group like. 0:23:28.240 --> 0:23:31.840 Thinking, and in our case in particular, we just wanted 0:23:31.880 --> 0:23:36.240 to scale the whole approach, initially going from a small. 0:23:35.920 --> 0:23:38.040 Slice to a whole inteked brain. 0:23:38.240 --> 0:23:42.000 Right, So you said, hey, what if you could get 0:23:42.119 --> 0:23:46.680 a brain of an organism that has died, could you 0:23:46.880 --> 0:23:50.040 restore the function somehow? So what did you do to 0:23:50.080 --> 0:23:52.080 try to tackle that problem? 0:23:52.119 --> 0:23:55.879 So, you know, as one does, we started going to 0:23:55.920 --> 0:24:00.000 a local slaughterhouse and we were procuring a tissue. 0:24:00.320 --> 0:24:02.680 You were getting pig brains, right, pig reins. 0:24:02.760 --> 0:24:05.919 Yes, so people don't. Luckily there we are like, people 0:24:05.920 --> 0:24:07.760 don't eat the pig brains. 0:24:07.640 --> 0:24:10.280 And this was the el right, yes, yes, yes, yes. 0:24:10.200 --> 0:24:13.879 Yes, So we will go to the local slaughterhouse. You know, 0:24:14.000 --> 0:24:15.120 they would do their job. 0:24:15.200 --> 0:24:17.720 By the time when they are done, we would get 0:24:17.920 --> 0:24:20.560 pig hits and so we'll bring them to the lab. 0:24:20.760 --> 0:24:23.439 We would take the brain out, and. 0:24:23.320 --> 0:24:26.679 Then we started developing this technology that could connect with 0:24:26.720 --> 0:24:30.320 the vascular system of the brain and profuse a fluid 0:24:30.760 --> 0:24:34.240 to sort of reboot the self functionality. 0:24:34.480 --> 0:24:36.680 And how long had these pigs been dead? 0:24:37.720 --> 0:24:40.679 On every g it was four hours, So from the 0:24:40.760 --> 0:24:45.240 time of pig being killed in the slaughterhouse to the 0:24:45.280 --> 0:24:48.879 time point where we started our profusion intervention, it was 0:24:49.000 --> 0:24:50.360 usually four hours. 0:24:50.720 --> 0:24:53.360 So then what you did is you profused and tell 0:24:53.440 --> 0:24:56.359 us about profusion and what that means and what that 0:24:56.440 --> 0:24:56.879 looks like. 0:24:57.640 --> 0:25:01.440 So there's a device, so you take the isolated brain, 0:25:01.560 --> 0:25:04.159 which is sort of front of you. You load the 0:25:04.160 --> 0:25:08.800 brain into this device and then the device pushes artificial 0:25:08.840 --> 0:25:12.840 blood or blood like fluid through the brain and it 0:25:12.880 --> 0:25:16.000 does it under controlled conditions. It has a bunch of 0:25:16.320 --> 0:25:21.720 drugs inside that counter certain cell processes. So the whole 0:25:21.760 --> 0:25:27.040 point is to try to reinstate homeosthetic environment or this 0:25:27.200 --> 0:25:32.560 like like normal environment in which cells are usually accustomed. 0:25:31.960 --> 0:25:34.320 To be and so what did you find? 0:25:34.600 --> 0:25:38.479 So we found that So this is an interesting equation. 0:25:38.560 --> 0:25:40.679