Brief Suspended Animation is Successful in Pigs

Surgeons are experimenting with ways to use cryogenics to aid in surgery. If you can put someone in suspended animation, it would make the process of surgery much easier. Here is a description from Wired Magazine about such an experiment in a porcine test subject:

"Make the injury," Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It's 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her blood within moments. Heart rate and blood pressure plummet. Don't worry - Alam and Duggan are going to save her.

Alam goes to work on the chest, removing part of a rib to reveal the heart, a throbbing, shiny pink ball the size of a fist. He cuts open the aorta - an even more lethal injury - and blood sprays all over our scrubs. The EKG flatlines. The surgeons drain the remaining blood and connect tubes to the aorta and other vessels, filling the circulatory system with chilled organ-preservation fluid - a nearly frozen daiquiri of salts, sugars, and free-radical scavengers.

Her temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit; brain activity has ceased. Alam checks the wall clock and asks a nurse to mark the time: 11:25 am.

But 78-6 is, in fact, only mostly dead - the common term for her state is, believe it or not, suspended animation. Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems). Trauma surgeons can't wait - saving people with serious wounds, like gunshots, is always a race against the effects of blood loss. When blood flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes of low oxygen levels causes brain death.

Chill a body, though, and you change the equation. Metabolism slows, oxygen demand dives, and the time available to treat the injury stretches. "With the pig essentially dead," Alam says, "we've got hours to fix it and play around." By noon the team has stitched up the arteries and gone to lunch. It has become routine: Alam has suspended 200 pigs for an hour each, and although experimental protocol calls for different levels of care for each pig, the ones that got optimal treatment all survived. Today he'll keep 78-6 down for two hours.

This is just crazy. I love it when some enterprising person says, "You know that is science fiction, but there is really no theoretical reason why it couldn't work. Why not try it?"