My guess is that his primary concern is to develop the medical technology to resuscitate patients in critical conditions - ie by lowering the temperatue of the brain to prevent irreversible brain damage whilst allowing sufficient time for the heart damage to be repaired, etc. This is all a worthwhile aim of itself.
That it also gives him the opportunity to perform some simple experimental tests of some of the more outrageous NDE claims, is simply icing on the cake. It's good that he has a sufficiently open mind to think of tests. I have heard (from somewhere unsubstantiated, no doubt), that the tests have turned up nothing startling, but whether it does or not, it's still interesting science. It reminds my of a scientific investigation I performed into the effects of pyramids on razor blade when I was at uni. Its the only time I've really dabbled with woo. I not only got a negative result (no significant difference between the treated blades, and controls), but interestingly, I found a potential explanation of the effect. Both control blades and treated blades lasted longer and were subjectively sharper than the blades I used before the experiment. If I hadn't done a controlled experiment, I would have concluded the effect to be real. I published the experiment in a local student magazine (it wasn't nearly rigourous enough for peer review), and the reaction I got from my colleagues was quite interesting - generally very supportive, as a matter of fact. I wonder if that would have been the case if I had found a positive result. Cheers On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 09:12:44AM -0400, [email protected] wrote: > You could be correct that Parnia's study is buried in double-talk. Usually if > scientists reach a dead-end, during testing they abandon the thesis. If what > he is doing, is little more, then looking for unicorns, then yes, its a dead > end (pun?) and we will see in November. > > > > In a message dated 5/19/2013 6:19:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time, > [email protected] writes: > Since the study has been going on five years, and there has been no leak of a > positive result, I expect that there are no positive results to report. I > find it hard to imagine that an amazing positive result, that would be known > to several members of a medical team, could be kept secret. > -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
