Researchers have created what they call "Zombie Dogs".

The gist of the article is that they are able to
A: Drain all the blood from a dog
B: Replace it with an ice-cold saline solution.
C: Wait a few hours
D: Replace blood and administer an electric shock.
E: Have living dog that suffered no ill side effects from being clincally dead for a few hours.

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I personally don't think these dogs are clinically "dead" so they are not being brought back to life. Twenty years ago, when I was an EMT, we were taught about cold-water drownings. There are lots of cases where "frozen" people have been brought "back to life" with little or no ill effects. Our rule of thumb in the field was that no one was dead until they were warm and dead. IIRC, similar techniques (cooling of the body) have been also used in hospitals to keep someone alive while awaiting surgery.

This research seems to be a formalized (and maybe better) technique for achieving this.

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Yep... There are several cases of people falling into really cold water, having body temperatures well below normal on being rescued, and being resuscitated later.

Interesting. So, the technique is that the blood is drained and replaced with very, very cold saline solution. That results in the body processes being affected similarly to people who have drowned in icy waters, keeping them intact far beyond what a human could normally survive. Then, the saline is replaced by blood once again, and the heart restarted with electro-shock.

Its an interesting technique. I'd be wary of their claims of "no brain damage" though... possible, but long-term effects could be really nasty.

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The idea of replacing the blood, I think, is to cool the body down as fast as possible. Might be a better idea to use something that can carry readily absorbable oxygen though - even a body in a hybernation-like state uses some. So much the better to prevent brain damage.

I suppose the point of using saltwater rather than cold blood is to prove that the dogs body isn't using oxygen.

Remember though, this was only a few hours. Also, saline would be better than very cold blood for emergencies where a person might have to be chilled out in this fashion...

I must say it would be cool if you could completely halt a person't metabolism and keep them chilled out for a long time... If that could be done, we could get on with a manned Mars mission!

wouldn't there be some danger of pickling

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Well that dog looks perfectly normal to me.

Whoa. Score one for me; in one of my SF stories, describing cryo-stasis, I made the point that the machine pumped all of a person's blood out, replacing it with a specially formulated fluid, as they were chilled down to the proper temperature. Of course, this was for a few hours and there will be bugs, but I wonder if we might develop real cryo-sleep a bit sooner than I thought?

Izunya

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Mal: Define "interesting!"
Wash: Oh God, oh God, we're all going to die?

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I hope so.

perhaps real cryo sleep would involve some sort artificial pump pumping cold-oxygenated artificial blood around the body, just enough to keep it going.

Someone call S.T.A.R.S. now! I seem to have left my chainsaw at home.

Obligatory, Resident Evil Reference, I Presume?

Hmmm ...

I Wonder, What Took, SO Long!

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Heh. If we're getting into the zombie references, let me be the first to say . . . <deep voice, moderately insane> "Groovy."

Izunya

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Mal: Define "interesting!"
Wash: Oh God, oh God, we're all going to die?

- from Serenity

"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun"

Far superior films, I agree. But Resident Evil has a higher Zombie Dog count, you see.

But how is that not 'dead'? No body or higher brain functions seems pretty dead to me, even if it is commonly reversable. I wonder, in light of not only this but all medical techniques that are bringing people back from further and further towards the brink, if we are going to have to find a new definition for the word dead.

I also think things like this will probably make many people uncomfortable. As we start toying with death like this, I think it starts losing alot of it's timeless mystique. It becomes just a condition that can be rectified with the proper treatment. It is something technical to be dealt with rather than the final, mystical passage that it used to be. Also, it begs the question that if you bring them back after three hours or whatever, where were they for those three hours? And the answer to that is what I think will be unpleasant to alot of people, because I think the answer will be that it didn't go anywhere. It just turned off for a few hours, like a computer or a lightbulb.

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I would define death as irreversable brain damage to the point that the person can no longer function and memories and patterns of action no longer exist. As long as there isn't massive irreversable brain damage, I don't see it being even close to death.

We've already had to deal with this. It used to be that if your heart stopped, that was death. Now there are people that have lived for a time without a living heart. There's no doubt that the boundery will continue to change. And what happens when you can regenerate substantial amounts of brain tissue?

Well, folks can always come up with religious arguments, but the brain does operate in a mechanistic way. Personal experience: Conscious sedation is a very strange experience. One minute you are talking to the nurse, you're told they are injecting the sedative into your IV, and for a few seconds your vision gets a little odd. Without any obvious interuption, you are in another room, talking to another nurse, and find out it is an hour later. You are told that you were conscious and spoke during that time, but you have no memory of it. So, what happened to the "you" that you don't remember? It gives me the very eerie feeling that someone had deleted some of my files ...

Those files weren't deleted.

I suppose(you probably know) that there is a short term memory and memories from this part of the brain are transfered to the long term memory(about an hour later, I don't know) and if something interferes with this process(being very drunk for example) then you will lose those memories.

Right. More like closing the file without saving.

Which brings up a point: having no memories from cryo-sleep wouldn't necessarily disprove the existence of a soul or spirit. You could have been told the Sublime Secrets to Absolutely Everything, but if the neurons aren't filing, you've got nowhere to keep it. (Or it could mean your spirit stuck around and took a nap, because you weren't dead yet.) The real shocker would be if there were memories of any sort, even fragmentary ones.

While staying neutral on the whole "soul" thing, which is kind of close to the Forbidden Topic o' Religion anyway, I have to say that I would expect some psychological after-effects to cryo-sleep. If nothing else, a newfound fear of cold, from subconscious memories during the first part of the chill-down process.

Oh, and my admittedly unhelpful input on the whole "death" thing: a person is dead when there's no way to restart them.

Izunya