On Wednesday 02 May 2007 5:21 pm, Srini Ramakrishnan wrote: > The body on the cart is > dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to > resolve that paradox in favor of life.
er... what will they do if they get this chap's heart beating again? Use him as an organ donor I suppose. Every organ has an "ischemia time" - i.e time without oxygen or circulation before its cells start showing signs of death. Off the top of my head I recall that ischemia time at body temperature for the liver is 15 minutes, for a kidney it's about half an hour and for muscles it can be as long as 6 hours. Heart, being muscle will probably last longer than liver or kidney (or retina for that matter). I have heard my own father's intestinal sounds (caused by movement of the intestine) five minutes after I declared him dead, shut his eyes and kissed him one last time. "Cardioplegia" is a technique that is used in open heart surgery and I have been on open heart teams using that in the early 1980s in Pondicherry. This "cardioplegia" was combined with physical cooling of the body to reduce body temperature and reduce oxygen demand of the body. It has been known for a long time that people who drown in cold water can sometimes be revived even after their heart appears to have stopped, and that appears to be what this guy is talking about. The questions the article has NOT answered is the fact that brain tissue will be dead, and secondly, there is nerve tissue in the heart itself that regulates heartbeat and that too will be dead after 5 minutes of non oxygenation so a restarted heart may need an artificial pacemaker. The other "little" problem is that when even 5% of "trillions" of cells die, they release fairly toxic chemicals and when you do restart the heart all these chemicals spread out through the body into every cell and cause secondary problems that can kill. No mention of that in this rather sensational news item. Apart from the errors - such as suggesting that stopping heart massage is a random whim. The author of the article is bullshitting like mad. shiv
