So this guy was thinking 1 day. The cause of his thinking? His daughter's death. What was he thinking? How to stop death so as to give doctors time to fix bodily damage.

Well he's not quite at the human level yet but he has figured out what's needed to make it work and has made it work at smaller scales. The trick? Death isn't caused by oxygen deprivation, oxygen is in fact a poison that, at too low of levels for the body to use, kills. Thus if 1 was to replace oxygen with something else, say hydrogen sulfide, the body would simply go into stasis until the necessary oxygen levels were restored.

I must say, I'm impressed!

That is awesome. Do you imagine how many lives that might save?!

Indeed. An army R&D contract and $600 Mil in investments prove that others are impressed as well.

Wow... This is epic. Seriously, I'm just curious to see if this works on people.

He stalled out at pigs. Now he's trying to do injections to get it working. Once he gets it right, he'll be able to test on humans. Until then, anything the size of a pig and up is too big for the gas.

Hmm. Makes sense.

Yeah, long way away. And just because the army is paying doesn't mean that your idea is good. DARPA once looked for psychics.

This is taken from Brevia published in Science in 2005 (Link).



H₂S binds and reversibly inhibits cytochrome c oxidase at the end of the electron transport chain where oxygen is converted to water creating an electrochemical gradient that other transmembrane proteins use to synthesize ATP, the key metabolic currency. H₂S is deadly in high concentrations precisely because of its inhibitory effects on metabolism, but evident from this study was that in small doses, if balanced properly, it can slow metabolism down without stopping it completely. I assume the variations in metabolic demand of the animal tested will be a key factor in determining how long it survives in the hypometabolic state or if it can enter one at all.


Other studies have used Na₂S injected directly into the mice. (Link). All in all though, I don't think anyone can say with certainty that this would ever be feasible on humans. A balance between hydrogen sulfide and oxygen could be struck in an animal the size of a mouse, but I would imagine this would be many times more difficult if not impossible for an animal with as large a vasculature and metabolic demand as a human being.

Always good to see more stories of scientists trying new ideas, though I wouldn't get your hopes up for this particular one saving lives any time soon.

Nor would I. This guy even says it's a long way off for humans. Still you'll never complete the journey if you never start walking.

True. Basically: You can't finish what you never started.

Indeed.

I don't believe the concept of hypoxia-induced medical procedures is attributed only to Roth, as CNN seems to believe. His work focuses on hydrogen sulfide looks more like a quick and easy solution that already has results. The pioneering work (near as I can tell) on hypoxia response was published by Hochachka et al, 1996 in PNAS. There are many, many other ways to approach induced hypoxia than simply breathing in hydrogen sulfide. Just the fact that metabolism can be slowed at all in mammals without killing them is exciting in and of itself, even if a hypothetical future agent of hypoxia induction looks nothing like hydrogen sulfide and doesn't stem from this research at all.

Penguin, I must ask...what exactly is your educational background?

My background is in Biophysics. I didn't know much about hypoxia when I opened the thread (and still don't really), but you can learn a lot more about a topic in a short time by reading a couple pieces of scientific literature than with 100 CNN articles. Most of my post was paraphrasing the background and results from journal articles I cited for those without site licenses that can't read them on their own.

BIOPHYSICS?! God damn physicists can't keep their grubby hands off anything! KEEP BIOLOGY PURE! KEEP IT SEPARATE!

No, I was just wondering because your posts regarding biology or the sciences in general are well-cited, and show a higher level of scientific knowledge than most posts on here. No offense to the rest of you idiots.

I hope thats sarcasm there!

Still - while it may not work fully with humans yet, the discovery is none the less important. And, it might be the case that hydrogen sulfide isn't the best for the job, it may be another substance. I'd have said that the key discovery is that replacing the oxygen with something else is the important part? I of course could quite easily be wrong, and i'll probably be swiftly corrected on that one.

Not many of us are scientists.

Hey biology is just applied chemistry.

/chemistry is applied physics
//physics is just applied math
///thanks xkcd!
/I don't even show up on that scale lol

The way I like to see it, biology holds the most interesting questions and physics holds the most interesting answers.


Don't blame them, they are all just victims of the dreaded "Science News Cycle". To reduce the impact, I recommend slowly working your way counterclockwise around the circle.





My take is that calling this "replacing" oxygen was an addition made by CNN to make the story sound cooler. The relevant line from the study being 80 ppm of H₂S or in other words a volume of air with one million particles would have about 80 hydrogen sulfide molecules. To put that in perspective:



For reference, 800ppm is the accepted LC50 for humans (concentration that kills 50% of humans) though I'm not sure what it is in mice. So, the mice are not "replacing" oxygen like the CNN reporter seems to imply, they are having the final stage of their electron transport chain, specifically the cytochrome c oxidase, inhibited by trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide. Evidently, 80ppm is the right amount to slow metabolism in mice but not slow it so much that it is completely shut off, which would result in immediate death.

I was not suggesting that another substance could ever be breathed in place of oxygen; there are no such substances. Your body needs metabolism to survive, and your cells are designed to convert oxygen into energy. There are, however, other ways of slowing down metabolism that are completely unrelated to hydrogen sulfide inhibiting oxygenase activity. Metabolism involves a lot of protein complexes and chemical pathways. There are many more potential ways to clog or slow the system by targeting specific proteins with small molecule or peptide drugs than there are gases that might occupy oxygen binding sites and slow metabolism that way without killing you. Other mammals presumably have these systems already built into their body chemistry and thus are able to hibernate naturally. Those systems almost certainly have nothing to do with hydrogen sulfide inhibiting metabolic activity.

Didn't they theorize that the same general thing could be accomplished by mixing blood in the body with a form of saline? This sounds strangely familiar.

Frankly, biophysics is well above my head as a senior in high school.
Let's start colonizing other planets

Don't get me started!

I don't know enough Bio to do biophysics. A shame really. I really do like biology, my teacher was just so bad that I had to drop the course.

I'm not sure what to think of this, to be honest. Modern medicine and I have been at qualms lately. I've come to the conclusion that because we're all mortal, striving for longevity is a meaningless and pointless act. Honestly, if a meteorite came and took my head off, no amount of medicine could help me. And on the opposite end of things, if I lived until I was 100, it might just have been diet and exercise that kept me healthy.

Instead, I believe we should care more about our bonds with each other and about understanding ourselves and the universe (not necessarily the physical universe).

So...chemical stasis? Well, I suppose that since most people desire a temporary escape from death, such is to be expected.

That said, I wouldn't refuse treatment, if could stave off death. Not because I'm afraid of death, but simply because I don't have a reason to die.

I would never say that a new treatment like this is bad, but I don't think that it's particularly good. Unless someone can guarantee that a life preserved by this would be worth preserving, but I presume no one here can see into the future.

I guess that what I'm trying to say is that life should be about quality, not quantity, and for that reason, I find life-extending (and even life-preserving) advancements trite.

The idea is that a slower metabolism would help reduce the number of patients who die on the operating table after serious injuries/medical problems like a large loss of blood or heart attack. You couldn't conceivably be put in stasis for more than a few hours (at least that's how long the mice survived) before dieing, just long enough to perform a medical procedure or surgery. I don't think too many patients refuse nitrous oxide (laughing gas) at the dentist's office because they are worried that their life "might not be worth preserving" when they wake from their anesthesia-induced dream state a couple hours later.

This has nothing to do with keeping people in "stasis" for years beyond their life expectancy... it's a potential medical tool to keep a patient alive for a few hours while their body is fixed up. To say that a medical advancement to help a patient survive through a rough surgery or procedure is "trite" sounds a little ridiculous to me.

This is cool, hes definitely on the right path.

You misunderstood everything I said. I'm saying that survival itself is trite. I'm saying that avoiding death simply because you don't want to die is trite. And that's why I'm not impressed with any medical advancement at all.

I guess I think a bit like Dr. Manhattan. Without the ability to see into the future. Or make things explode by thinking about them.

I come to the Boiler Room to debate science and science policy not to poke holes in other people's life philosophies. That said, it would be impossible to continue a rational debate about medicine with someone who thinks life itself is "trite" and not worth preserving therefore biology is trite and not worth studying. If you are interested in the science of the issue I'm happy to discuss it, but I'm not going to get any further into a ridiculous philosophical debate where I am forced to defend the very idea that lives are worth saving at all.

It's like trying to stop old age. Never. Gonna. Happen. Time tide wait for no man, so we're all eventually going to die. Simple enough for you?!

I do believe that we should try to live our lives as best we can. Not trying to die, but just living as best we can. So maybe this idea might work. Maybe not.

I wouldn't say that biology isn't worth studying. I find life itself fascinating, and the pursuit of knowledge is far from a bad thing (I used to be a science nut, actually), it's just that I find the motive of survival to be distasteful. The ancient Greeks studied math because they thought it was cool, not because they thought that it had any benefits (I imagine I don't need to tell you that it did). But if you don't want to discuss the matter, that's fine with me.

That said, this thread hasn't been a debate, so much as "That's pretty damn cool." Which is fine enough, but I'm not sure if there's any room for debate specifically on the topic of chemical stasis.

Sure! When biologists start using bessel functions and can use ab initio calculations for their molecular simulations . But you must ask... What's next! I SAY SOCIOPHYSICS! Where we calculate the mathematical nature of social structures formed between human beings as they smash into each other at relativistic velocities!

err.... so far my "experiments" haven't yielded much. But I predict that only 1 in a trillion people will be able to say "hello" before the collision. SO! TODAY IS A GREAT DAY FOR SCIENCE! PREPARE THE LARGE HUMAN COLLIDER (LHC and you thought it was called the "hadron" silly people ).

Note: Most subjects scream AHHH! As they go by, which from the doppler effect results in a IIIEEE as they approach and an AWWW as they recede if I remember correctly (compressed and stretched sine wave manipulations in my head withstanding)

ON THE OP-

Well, I'm not so interested in being brought back to life, if I managed to come that close to death I think I'd rather "go home" if you know what I mean. Keep me here against my will and you might end up in one of my "experiments" BWAH HA HA!!! But if I'm dead, you can use me as a human projectile , as "zombie" Zarfef, fire me through the atmosphere and spread the love of physics by showing that my center of mass follows a parabolic path! Now doesn't that sound like more fun!

My... Head... Just... Exploded.

The sad thing is I understood all that.

Damn, me too. That's a pretty intersting idea, Zarfef. I like it.

I'm not sure you understand what trite means.

Or, if you do, I'm missing what exactly your point is. I don't know how exactly it would be considered dull and unoriginal.

Trite=pointless, waste of time and effort

I have to agree with him, Esau. We're all eventually gonna die.

Theoretically, yes. However I can't help but note the advances we've made in cloning, cybernetics, GEing, cellular regeneration, ect. Extended life is upon us, immortality or something close to it is the next logical step. Will we die? Most likely. Will we be the last generation that has to grow old? It's a distinct possibility if we can get the needed laws passed/repealed and the needed funding to our best scientists.

...Trite refers to something being hackneyed or unoriginal. It doesn't at all refer to something that is a pointless waste of time.


Even if it was what he meant, there is no way I can agree with the main portions of the ideology. That it is pointless to continue living merely because you are going to die is absolutely ridiculous. We all die, but resigning oneself to death simply because of that fact is unreasonable and lacks sense.

There's only one life to live; why dwell on the fact that you're not going to exist forever, when it's infinitely preferable to being here until the end of time?


While I would like to be immortal through age, it would not change the point that she was making there; we're going to die at some point, there is no getting around it.

Ideally I'd like to die at a time of my choosing. Old age is just inconvenient.

Old age has little effect on the mind (barring dementia), only the body, which is irrelevant.

It's vary relevant so long as the mind is confined to the body.

You say that now, but when you're an old man bowed over and creaking with every step, you'll wish you were younger.

Well, considering that the body is a life supported system for and commanded by the brain, I'd say it's damn relevant.