[extropy-chat] transhumanist nut jobs

[spike]

Bad news, fellow cryonicists.  This month's issue of Wired refers to
cryonicists as transhumanist nut-jobs.  Then the article goes on to explain,
presumably to non-transhumanist non-nut-jobs, how this crazy idea might
actually work:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/posts.html?pg=4


Stuck Pig

Mike Duggan, a veterinary surgeon, holds his gloved hands over an 8-inch
incision in the belly of pig 78-6, a 120-pound, pink Yorkshire. He's waiting
for a green light from Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon at Massachu-setts
General Hospital.

"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.

That afternoon, the team scrubs back in and starts pumping warm blood into
78-6, watching the heart twitch and writhe like a bag of worms as it
struggles to find a rhythm. A healthy heart should feel like a rare steak,
Alam explains; medium or well-done -suggests muscle damage. He pokes it.
"Medium," he says, removing clamps to let it pump more blood. If he closes
the chest too soon and the heart tires, he won't be able to save the animal.


A few minutes later, Alam touches the heart again. "Medium-rare," he says.
"Looks pretty good." But he admits he's ballparking. "It's the gestalt," he
says. "It's not in any book."

Over the next hour, the surgeons stitch up 78-6. Everyone leaves except
Alam, who perches on a stool at her side. When he removes her breathing
tube, she breathes irregularly a few times and he leans in with a hand
venti-lator, squeezing rhythmically and stroking her head. She quivers; her
ear twitches.

By 6 pm she's awake, draped in a blanket. Attendants roll her gurney into a
recovery room with classical music playing on a radio and a healthy pig in
an adjacent stall to keep her company. Pigs like that. Tests on other
subjects - and postmortem examinations of brains - have revealed no
cognitive damage from the -procedure, but Alam will nevertheless stick
around until 78-6 gets back on her feet, around midnight. "She didn't look
so great before," he says, patting the pig's side. "But she's going to make
it." 

- Bijal P. Trivedi