The resurrection men

[emad]

Surgeons have already brought frozen dogs back from the dead. Now they want to get their hands on us. Medical miracle - or zombie nightmare? Jimmy Lee Shreeve reports
Published: 20 July 2005

Tabloid headlines screamed "Night of the Living Dog" when scientists said they had found a way to bring dead dogs back to life.

It was indeed an amazing story - which explained the tabloids' incredulity, and their interpretation of the discovery by scientists of the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was reported that a New York Post journalist asked the director of the resuscitation centre, Dr Peter Kochanek, if he was "creating a race of zombie dogs fit for a Stephen King novel".

The team at Safar - which was founded by the late Peter Safar, who invented modern mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - weren't pleased at the frivolous coverage of their work.

The Safar scientists have developed a way to put the dogs into a hypothermia-like state - also known as suspended animation - which puts the animals' metabolism on hold. The process involves draining the dogs' veins of blood and then filling them with a near ice-cold salt solution, which lowers body temperature to 7C (usually 37C). They stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity, so are considered clinically dead.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article300439.ece

[Igel]

1. The Independent obviously has an independent idea

about what "frozen" means.

I'm glad they're not making the ice for my drinks. ;-)

Still, this direction in research has been going on for a while; I hope they succeed.