Space travel barrier removed as docs freeze and revive human for first time
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
Space travel barrier removed as docs
freeze and revive human for first time
Process is initially intended to save
lives on Earth, rather than to send astronauts on long haul flights
ByMichael Moran13:20, 20 NOV 2019 UPDATED14:42,
20 NOV 2019
Journeys
to other star systems will forever be out of reach unless a massive
breakthrough in physics makes faster-than-light travel a reality, or a
breakthrough in medicine makes suspended animation possible. Now, at least, one
of those things has happened.
Samuel Tisherman, a professor at
the University of Maryland School of Medicine, is the leader of a team that has
successfully put a human being in suspended animation.
The
technique allows surgeons to 'press pause' on life while they look for a
solution
Describing the
successful operation as “a little surreal,” Professor Tisherman told New
Scientist how he removed the patient’s blood and replaced with ice-cold saline
solution.
The patient, technically dead at
this point, was removed from the cooling system and taken to an operating
theatre for a two-hour surgical procedure before having their blood restored
and being warmed to the normal temperature of 37C.
Prof Tisherman says he will be producing a full account of the
procedure in a scientific paper in the new year.
He says that his focus is on
pausing life long enough to perform emergency surgery rather than sending
astronauts on interstellar journeys.ED
ARTICLES
He tells the story of a young man who was stabbed over a row in
a bowling alley: “He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly
he was dead. We could have saved him if we’d had enough time.”
His suspended animation technique
is intended as a way of securing that extra time.
“I want to make clear that we’re
not trying to send people off to Saturn,” he says. “We’re trying to buy
ourselves more time to save lives.”
But
inevitably space agencies such as NASA and the ESA – as well as more ambitious
tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos – will be taken a keen
interest in Prof Tisherman’s paper when it is published in 2020.
A journey to Saturn can take up
to seven years, so keeping the crew on ice might be easier than keeping them
healthy and happy for all that time.
While Prof Tisherman has released
this news of one successful trial, there is no word on how many previous
attempts were made with critical patients before this.
The
experiment was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The
FDA waived the usual requirement for patient consent in this case as the
patient could not be saved by any other means.
At the moment, the biggest
obstacle to reliable animation of a patient who has been super-cooled in this
way is cell damage as they are re-warmed – so-called reperfusion injuries.
Prof Tisherman says that there may be a drug, or cocktail of
drugs, that can help minimise these injuries but, he says: “but we haven’t
identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet”.
Once he has, whether or not he
wants to send a refrigerated crew to Saturn, it’s likely that sooner or later
that’s exactly what will happen.
New cash machines: withdraw money with veins in your finger Cash machine technology that reads the pattern of finger veins is already available in Japan and Poland By Telegraph Reporters 6:59PM BST 15 May 2014 Cash machines could soon be installed with devices that identify customers by reading the veins in their fingers. The technology is already being rolled out in Poland, where 1,730 cash machines will this year be installed with readers, negating the need for a debit card and Pin. Developed by Hitachi, the Japanese electronics firm, the machines read the patterns of the veins just below the surface of the skin on your finger using infra-red sensors. The light is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the veins to capture a unique finger vein pattern profile, which is matched to a profile. The technology is used by Japanese banks and also in Turkey, offering “groundbreaking levels of accuracy and speed of authentication”, Hitachi said, which in t...
The City That’s Trying to Replace Politicians With Computers (It’s Working) After sneaking his AI-written water bill into law, Ramiro Rosário says government press-release writers could go, too By Samantha Pearson and Luciana Magalhaes Dec. 22, 2023 8:58 am ET PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — In a country with a history of corruption and government inefficiency, Councilman Ramiro Rosário has come up with what he believes is a winning strategy to improve the work of politicians: replace them with computers. The 37-year-old legislator in Brazil’s southern city of Porto Alegre passed the country’s first law in November that was written entirely by ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by the San Francisco startup OpenAI. The law itself was purposefully boring—a proposal to stop the local water company from charging residents for new water meters when they were stolen from their front yards. It would easily pass, calculated Rosário. One recent day, donning jeans and sneakers...
Will AI replace doctors who read X-rays, or just make them better than ever? As AI moves into medicine, perhaps no one has more to gain or lose than radiologists, the doctors who review medical scans for signs of cancer and other diseases By MATTHEW PERRONE AP Health Writer May 14, 2024, 9:16 AM ET WASHINGTON -- How good would an algorithm have to be to take over your job? It’s a new question for many workers amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI programs that can hold conversations, write stories and even generate songs and images within seconds. For doctors who review scans to spot cancer and other diseases, however, AI has loomed for about a decade as more algorithms promise to improve accuracy, speed up work and, in some cases, take over entire parts of the job. Predictions have ranged from doomsday scenarios in which AI fully replaces radiologists, to sunny futures in which it frees them to focus on the most rewarding aspects of their work. That tension reflects how AI is rollin...
Comments
Post a Comment