Human Hibernation

The November issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC has a long article about a NASA project at the University of Pittsburgh, with the goal of making it possible for human beings to enter "a bearlike state of hibernation." Unfortunately, NG articles are behind a paywall, but here's an overview of the experiment on a different site:

Benefits of Sleeping in Space

The condition is "bearlike" in that subjects enter a period of torpor during which they can briefly awaken, unlike some rodents whose core body temperatures drop below freezing. The NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article mentions a ground squirrel in a lab put into such a deep "sleep" it appeared dead, yet revived unharmed. The magazine contains a photo of a dormant squirrel obliviously held in a researcher's hands.

A BBC America wildlife series about mammals includes video of hibernating bats, in which a male is shown briefly emerging from dormancy to mate with a sleeping female, who doesn't wake up. What happened to consent? :)

NASA hopes hibernation-like torpor might make long voyages to Mars and beyond more feasible. In that condition, astronauts would use less energy, needing less food, water, and oxygen. Sleeping through much of the trip would minimize interpersonal friction, too. Unlike astronauts at low gravity and/or in confined quarters, as well as people forced to spend weeks or months in bed because of illness, hibernating animals don't lose bone density or muscle mass. They also avoid strokes and diabetes despite their accumulation of extra fat. If space travelers could go dormant that way, even if only part of the time, they could arrive at their destinations in better health.

At present, we're nowhere near the capability of voyaging to interplanetary or interstellar locations in the "cold sleep" familiar in science fiction. We don't have to wait for long-range interplanetary travel to reap benefits from human hibernation, though. Slowing body functions in cardiac, brain-injured, and stroke patients could stabilize them until treatment could be administered -- if techniques or drugs can be developed to induce that condition instantly without dangerous side effects.

The Wikipedia page on suspended animation touches upon effects of hypothermia in humans and experiments in induced hibernation:

Suspended Animation

If I had the metabolism of a bear, I would happily go to sleep the night of the first Sunday in Advent and stay that way until the return of Daylight Saving Time, waking only for the week from Christmas Eve through New Year's Eve. Missing the cold, dark months wouldn't bother me a bit.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Defining Death

I've been reading a book called WHEN THE "DEAD" ROSE IN BRITAIN, by Nicole C. Salomone. After a forty-page overview of the history of medicine in Europe and Britain, the author delves into "premature burial and the misdiagnosis of death," mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among the various related topics covered, there's a chapter on European vampire legends, the main reason I bought the book. Over hundreds of years, doctors as well as clergymen and philosophers debated and analyzed in great detail the dividing line between life and death and the criteria for diagnosing death. They distinguished between apparent death (or suspended animation) and absolute death, from which no recovery was possible.

Some physicians explained the essence of aliveness as the "vital spark," rather tautologically defined as the force that maintained life in the body. Later, it was suggested that the vital spark was in fact electricity, a hypothesis seemingly validated by the fact that an electrical current sent through an animal cadaver can make its limbs move. The recognition of the absence of breath and heartbeat as probable but not certain evidence of death inspired development of techniques for resuscitation, some of which produced concrete benefits in reviving victims of drowning and eventually led to CPR as we know it today. Societies for "the Recovery of Persons Apparently Dead" were organized. Salomone seems to accept as fact most of the recorded accounts of people misdiagnosed as dead, often prepared for interment and buried or dissected. On the other hand, the lack of specific details in many of those stories (e.g., names and precisely identified locations) leads me to think a lot were what would now be called urban legends. In any case, a widespread belief in and fear of premature burial in the nineteenth century resulted in the invention of numerous models of "safety coffins."

In modern times, medicine and the law have determined that life resides in the brain. Permanent cessation of brain activity -- "brain death" -- equals the demise of the person. Robert Heinlein's very uneven brain-transplant novel, I WILL FEAR NO EVIL, includes an extended dialogue on this issue, for me the most interesting scene in the book.

If a person has apparently died and been restored to life, was he or she actually dead during the period of "apparent death"? Are "near-death experiences" genuine glimpses of the afterlife or merely the random firing of nerve impulses? Maybe such people are only "mostly dead," like the hero in THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

If science eventually develops a technique for uploading a person's consciousness into a computer, as often envisioned in speculative fiction, is a person whose body has died with the mind preserved in this way alive or dead?

In the Star Trek universe, given that the transporter disintegrates the transportee into component particles that are reassembled at the destination, do people being teleported survive the experience? Or, as Dr. McCoy speculates, do you die every time you step onto the transporter pad, to be replaced by an exact duplicate? If it's an exact duplicate, though, how could you tell? Your memories and personality seem unimpaired. Furthermore, what about the episodes when a transporter accident creates two of the same person? Does destroying one of them or even merging them together (or splitting a new individual generated from two people by the transporter into his component halves, as debated in one VOYAGER episode) count as murder? In the eighteenth century, when the foolproof way of determining whether someone was alive or dead was to wait until the body started to decompose, the quandary was simple by comparison.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt

Giant Viruses

Scientists have discovered and revived a 30,000-year-old virus, not seen since the Upper Paleolithic era, buried under the Siberian permafrost:

Ancient Giant Virus

This organism is "giant" on the virus scale; that is, it's big enough to be seen with an ordinary microscope. Fortunately, it poses no danger to humanity. It survives and reproduces by infecting a species of amoeba. However, the fact that this microbe remains infectious after so many millennia of dormancy implies that "it's possible that dangerous viruses do lurk in suspended animation deep belowground. . . . These viruses are buried deep, so it's likely that only human activities — such as mining and drilling for minerals, oil and natural gas — would disturb them."

Has any SF novelist used this premise in an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic for which no immunity or cure exists? Inevitably, the concept of a dangerous organism frozen in suspended animation for tens of thousands of years brings to mind the alien shapeshifter discovered in Antarctica in John W. Campbell's classic story "Who Goes There?" (adapted to film at least three times, first as THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD). Also lurking at the South Pole, prehistoric shoggoths are awakened in H. P. Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

Or could microscopic life on Mars from thousands or millions of years ago be merely dormant rather than extinct?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt