Wasn't I just saying that, in addition to the Methuselah Mouse, we need people working on a Lazarus Mouse? Well, via the Immortality Institute, here's the scoop on a company in Florida that might be doing some work along those lines:
Someday, David Shumaker hopes to perfect the science that will allow him to bring someone who's clinically dead back to life.
First, he'll have to get through the city of Boca Raton.
Shumaker's company, Suspended Animation, wants to build a research laboratory in the city to perfect the process of treating a dead body so it can stored and later brought back to life.
On Thursday, Shumaker and other Suspended Animation officials will take their case to the Planning & Zoning Board. Plans call for a 5,800-square-foot building in an office park off Rogers Circle on the city's north side.
Interestingly, Suspended Animation is attempting to develop a vitrification technique, which will be a competing technology for Alcor's cold storage. Vitrification is like high-tech mummification: the body is "dried" by replacing all the water with a solid or (more likely) gelatinous substance. If you can successfully swap out a body's water with such a substance, it should remain in a low-volatility state, a near stasis, for an indefinite period of time. If you can then reverse the process some time later, the body should be extremely well preserved. Eric Drexler provides a good description of the process in Engines of Creation.
Here's an interesting twist. The company's focus is somewhat different from Alcor's:
"The real focus is producing a medical treatment that ultimately will be done on people that are still alive," Shumaker said. "We're not raising the dead; we're stabilizing living tissue."
Shumaker, a physicist, envisions the process being used by terminally ill patients who want to be placed in cryosuspension, a sort of cold storage, until a cure is found for their ailments -- not just those who fancy being brought back to life in the distant future.
So perhaps what we're talking about here is more of a Rip Van Winkle Mouse than a Lazarus Mouse.
It only makes sense that the company would want to try this kind of technique out on animals before human beings. So, naturally, animal rights groups are already among those protesting Suspended Animation's presence. Here's an interesting quote:
"We find the experiments to be unnecessary, especially considering that so many people have volunteered to participate in this kind of research," said Crystal Miller-Spiegel, senior policy analyst for the American Anti-Vivisection Society, a Jenkintown, Pa., group that opposes research on animals. "We feel human volunteers would be more appropriate in this area of research."
Well, yeah. Better to risk expendable humans than fluffy bunnies. Of course, in the long run, the process is intended for humans and humans will be subjected to it.
I wonder what the legality of this will be? If the company can demonstrate revival of a vitrified mouse, and then, say, a rabbit, and then a rhesus monkey, would the state stand in the way of terminally ill (or just old and suffering) people who wanted to undergo it? This is different from Alcor's approach to cryonics, where a person (or just their head) is put into stasis only after they've died, although vitrification could presumably be used for that as well.
What would the legal status be of a living person put into a demonstrably reversible state of vitrification? Alive? Dead? What if the process had been demonstrated up through the monkey, but not yet on a human being?
This may be a viable alternative to pulling the plug, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. I wonder how cases like that of Terri Schiavo would be impacted. If you could end any suffering the patient may be experiencing, and offer the hope of an eventual treatment — our definition of what constitutes "irreversible brain damage" is bound to be refined over time — why wouldn't this be a viable alternative? I know that if I were in that state, that's exactly what I would want done for me.
Moreover, if I were 85 or so and in poor health, having trouble getting around, maybe experiencing a lot of pain, I think I'd jump at the chance to be put in stasis. Even if the reversibility had not yet been demonstrated.
Which makes me wonder how big a coincidence it is that Suspended Animation has decided to locate in Boca Raton, a haven for well-off retirees?
Posted by Phil at November 6, 2003 12:10 PM | TrackBack