X-Message-Number: 28645 Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 08:50:01 -0800 (PST) From: 2Arcturus <> Subject: Suspended Animation (Prehoda) --0-867669592-1162918201=:356 I thought some others might find this interesting. It's a "flight of fancy" on a possible method of radical life extension combining (in stages) human hibernation, chemical anabiosis, and suspended animation by Prehoda in his book Suspended Animation. Although it's a really old book, he anticipates some current concerns of cryonics (e.g., unique vulnerability of kidneys, and 'annealing' methods of cooling). ------- HUMAN HIBERNATION One week is spent taking care of professional and family affairs. You then enter the elaborate hibernation center. Electrodes are taped to the skull and the skin areas near the heart. Other physiological measuring instruments will monitor blood pressure and all important functions. Your left arm has a plastic artery shunt like that used twenty years before for prolonged treatment with an artificial kidney. You lie down in your hibernaculum and the lid slides closed. An 80-percent xenon and 20-percent oxygen mixture produces unconsciousness. Hibernation-inducing chemicals enter your body through the plastic shunt on your arm. The shunt also allows your blood to be removed and passed through an artificial kidney (human kidneys do not function well during hibernation). The temperature drops to 2 C. Antabolone and other metabolic inhibitors that do not affect the heart are injected to further reduce metabolic activity which is now 1/100th of normal. Unsaturated fats and other essential nutrients are included in the intravenous mixture introduced into the body through the artery shunt on the arm. There is practically no electrical activity in your brain and you are in a dreamless sleep. Your breathing is maintained artificially at a rate automatically regulated by your carbon dioxide output. Chemicals which prevent the blood cells from clumping together are continuously injected into your body. Your heart rate is reduced to one or two beats a minute. Every 14 days your temperature is raised to 37 C for a few hours, so that the energy stores within the cells can be replenished. Other cellular adjustments requiring a normal temperature can now take place. During these brief periods at 37 C, the xenonoxygen gas mixture is turned back on, keeping you in an anesthetized state. After 9 months in hibernation, you are brought back to normal and awakened. For the next 20 days you eat, exercise and are given treatments for your cancer and arteriosclerosis. Relatives and close friends visit during the alert period. The twenty days of activity restore your muscles and other body functions. You are then returned to your hibernaculum for another 9 months of cold sleep. The 20-day awake cycles do not seem to be separated by 9-month intervals. To the hibernaut they seem to be only one night apart. Many occupants of hibernacula in the center are relatively young and not suffering from serious diseases. They want to see the somewhat distant future and also believe that aging will be brought under complete control sometime during the 21st century. You go through the 9-month-hibernation, 20-day-activity cycles from 1989 till 1994. Seven awake cycles have allowed you to keep mformed of world events and still know your rapidly-growing grandchildren. Suddenly you are awakened in a strange room whIch appears to be an intensive care center. Your physician tells you that arteriosclerosis in your coronary arteries caused your heart to cease functioning during hibernation. The center's supercomputer continuously monitors the body functions of every hibernaut. A device which rhythmically depresses the chest to cause blood to be pumped through the heart was automatically activated. You are informed that your physicians decided after exploratory surgery to implant an artificial heart. Apparently your blood did not respond to the anti-clotting chemicals, and you will now be placed in chemical anabiosis, which requires an artificial heart. CHEMICAL ANABIOSIS Your new hibernaculum is a thick-walled hyperbaric chamber. The xenon-oxygen mixture again produces unconsciousness. The pressure is increased to 45 psi. The blood is slowly removed from your arm and replaced with a cell-free plasma which contains sufficient dissolved oxygen to meet all body requirements. It is cycled outside the body to remove carbon dioxide and other poisonous waste. Powerful metabolic inhibitors are now injected into the body, stopping almost all metabolic activity. The pressure is raised to thousands of psi, allowing the body temperature to be lowered several degrees below the O C freezing point of water at normal sea level pressure. The artificial heart pumps once every two minutes. Every 30 days, the body temperature is raised to normal and the metabolic inhibitors are discontinued, to permit necessary cellular adjustments which must be made at 37 C. Anesthesia is maintained with xenon-oxygen, and after the super-computer has monitored physiological responses for a few hours, the metabolic inhibitors are again injected and the temperature lowered, returning you to a state of chemical anabiosis. Once a year you are revived for twenty days of normal physical activity. Tubes extend outside your chest, going under your arms to a 20-pound portable backpack which powers your artificial heart. Your physical movements are somewhat restricted. The skin areas where the artificial heart tubes enter the body are potential sights of infection. During your active periods you are kept in a pathogen-free room and can visit relatives only through a transparent window. Five more years pass. It is now 1999. Seven hibernation cycles and five chemical anabiosis cycles have allowed you to live eight years beyond your life expectancy in 1989. You are awakened and given a thorough medical examination. There are evidences of disease processes in parts of your body that could not have been detected by instruments available in 1989. Many organs would need to be transplanted. Again the chances of success are uncertain. There is a new alternative in 1999-suspended animation. The freezing barrier had been overcome the previous year. Animals have been frozen and revived with no appreciable damage. You can noW be held in the frozen state until science can guarantee reliable cures for your diseases and also restore you to youthful vigor. Again you decide to take your chances with the future. You bid au revoir to family and friends. One last look at the 20th century, and you prepare for your journey through time into the world of tomorrow. SUSPENDED ANIMATION You are fed intravenously for two days with an enriching fluid that causes a euphoric mental attitude. The digestive tract and bladder are drained of all organic material. The skin is carefully cleaned with special chemicals. Again the xenon-oxygen provided perfect anesthesia. The surgeons open your chest and remove the artificial heart. Your circulatory system is now connected to a new machine that first perfuses an oxygenated cell-free plasma through your body at 45 psi. The temperature is reduced and the surgical team makes a final check before leaving the super-hyperbaric chamber. The rest of the procedure will be automatically controlled by the super-computer. The massive chamber door, which opens on the inside, is closed. It incorporates a unique sealing mechanism in which a metal that melts near room temperature fills the thin crack between the door and the chamber. The temperature around the door is reduced, creating a solid metal bond. The body temperature is lowered to O C and a heavy water (D2O) perfusate now circulates through the body. Soon most of, the H2O molecules within the cells have been replaced with D2O. A 5-percent-by-volume addition of fluorinated DMSO is now added to the perfusate. This chemical will partially protect the cells during freezing, but its main function is to act as a biological carrier, insuring that the powerful metabolic inhibitors will reach adequate levels within all the cells. Salt-free albumin and A TP are added to the perfusate, allowing the level of dissolved salts within the cells to be reduced. The pressure is greatly increased, and large quantities of dissolved xenon gas begin to be circulated through the body. The fluid-filled cavities around the brain, spinal cord and in the eyes are properly protected by separate perfusion systems. The heavy-water-based perfusate fluid is replaced with a liquid fluorocarbon which can hold large quantities of dissolved xenon. The pressure is slowly raised as the temperature is reduced. At 5,000 psi, an optimum quantity of xenon can be perfused through the body, thoroughly penetrating every cell. No more xenon is needed. The pressure is slowly increased to 30,062 psi. The perfusate pump is shut off. The body temperature is -24 C. The pressure is then lowered to 5,000 psi and rapid solidification begins to take place through the body. Cooling continues as the pressure is again increased to 30,062 psi, allowing the heat of fusion energy to be dissipated. The up-and-down pressure cycle is repeated four more times during continuous cooling, permitting the body to be uniformly frozen. Xenon hydrate protects every cell against freezing damage. The body temperature continues to be lowered at a controlled rate until it is only 4.2 degrees above absolute zero-the temperature of liquid helium. You are now in a state of complete suspended animation. The years pass. A united humanity colonizes the solar system. All disease and aging are cured-relegated to history. Man enters radiotelescope contact with three super-intelligent civilizations on planets circling distant stars. Our new-found extraterrestrial mends are carefully sending us all the recorded wisdom and technological capabilities of millions of years of advanced scientific research. Such knowledge is rapidly allowing Earth to be converted into a true paradise. The first starship is taking man on his initial voyage to Alpha Centauri. 2069 A. D.-the time has arrived for your reanimation. Already cells removed from different parts of your body in 1999 have been stimulated into growing into complete replacement organs. The old diseases are fully curable. Your frozen body is again placed in a pressure chamber. Its temperature is slowly raised to -80 C and the pressure increased to 30,062 psi. Precisely controlled microwaves and ultrasonic waves quickly raise the temperature to -24 C, where all the tissues are again in the liquid state. Thermal runaway damage is prevented. The temperature is slowly raised and the pressure carefully lowered. Perfusion fluids circulate through the body, removing the xenon and fluorinated DMSO. Chemicals are introduced to counteract the metabolic inhibitors. H2O replaces all of the D2O. The salt content of the cells is properly adjusted. When the temperature is raised to 25 C, natural blood replaces the perfusate fluid and the pressure is reduced to 15 psi. The body temperature nears 37 C and the EEG brain wave monitoring shows that there has been no neural damage during the long years of suspended animation. Slowly, the first thought begins to form deep in the subconscious. You are now awakening to see old and new family members. One of them is introduced as your physician, who supervised your reanimation. He is the grandson of your grandson. You have awakened to begin again the life that ended the night before-a night which spanned seven decades of momentous change on Earth. We now return from our flight of fantasy. The preceding description is science fiction, just as any description of a rocketpowered voyage to the moon in 1939 was science fiction at that time. The basic engineering principles behind our Apollo lunar program were known thirty years ago. In the late 1930s, Arthur C. Clarke and other space pioneers prepared blueprints and illustrations of the type of launch systems needed to reach our nearest celestial neighbor. These detailed drawings were met with extreme skepticism. A reliable liquid fueled rocket had not been demonstrated in 1939, let alone a multi-staged rocket system. Solid state electronics did not exist in 1939. The transistor was not invented until 1948. The next 20 to 30 years will require biological discoveries of comparable importance to the transistor to make this chapter become reality. I have tried to show how one person might benefit, first from human hibernation, then chemical anabiosis and finally suspended animation, in a pattern which assumes that they will be perfected one-by-one over a fifteen-year period. The predicted date of availability of a scientific breakthrough can be only an educated guess. These achievements in reduced metabolism might be realized Sooner or much later than the dates I have selected. On the other hand, suspended animation may never be achieved. A review, however, of past attempts to seriously forecast the future achievements of science shows that the optimists are almost always correct. Therefore, something very much like this flight of fantasy could be the reality of your travel through time as a frozen hibernaut. - Suspended Animation: The Research Possibility That May Allow Man to Conquer The Limiting Chains of Time. By Robert W. Prehoda. Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1969. P. 122 FF. Sponsored Link Get an Online or Campus degree - Associate's, Bachelor's, or Master's - in less than one year. --0-867669592-1162918201=:356 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=28645