Scientists create form of reanimation

Doctors in Philadelphia have found a way to reanmiate dead tissue. Let me be clear, as the original article is a little misleading. Doctors have found a way of prolonging decay and physical/mental death in patients who have been pronounced clinically dead.

When a person dies, their cells begin to deteriorate and die as well, leading to what we know as “death”. Prolonging this decay and starving cells and bacteria of oxygen can lead to prolonging one’s death. Children found at the bottom of pools have been successfully revived because their bodies were kept cold and limited of oxygen. During cardiac arrest, the heart stops beating – it’s usually fatal and people are often declared dead within minutes. Doctors at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital are bringing people “back from the dead”.

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Such is the case of one Bill Bondar, 61. Bill has no recollection of dying or even being brought back. This has perhaps as many philosophical revelations as it does physical. What is the time limit on such a procedure? Minutes, hours or years? If there is a soul, at what point does it depart from this corporeal entity?

“I didn’t know I died, I didn’t feel anything, I still don’t believe it,” Bill said.

“I looked at his face, and I was looking at a dead man,” Bill’s wife Monica said.

Cold saline is injected into a patient, and they are wrapped in cryopads to supercool the body and deprive cells of oxygen. This new technology is still in its infancy and can only be used on certain patients. It tests the limits of science, the body and philosophy. Imagine a bizarre scene out of “Flatliners” where one trys longer and longer stints of death. In fifty years if this technology is perfected, a body could theoretically live forever if its death met certain conditions.

Let’s hope the reanimated mind is in the same operational, alive condition it was frozen in.

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