Race to be First to ‘Hibernate’ Human Beings

American doctors and researchers are racing to induce hibernation in people that will last days, months, so they can survive serious injuries and space travel. First human trials will start later this year at the Massachusetts general hospital.

TURNING science fiction into science fact, American doctors are preparing to chill volunteers into a state of suspended animation that could keep them asleep for months. Doctors and researchers are racing to find out this induced hibernation is possible so they can survive medical injuries and undergo long space travel. Dr. Hasan Alam, a surgeon at Massachusetts general hospital and consultant to the US army, is planning to start the first human trials before the end of the year. He is doing this on a limited basis now by equipping ambulances with a clear saline solution called plasma expander, which can be injected into seriously injured victims at the scene of an accident. The plasma would chill the body temperature from 37 degrees Celsius to 10 degrees Celsius, which will slow down the metabolism, delaying the shock through out the body and also restricting the damage of the wounds in the wounded area itself. This plasma expander will help emergency personnel and also in army when soldiers are injured. Dr. Alam has tested this on Yorkshire pigs, stopping their heart and electrical activity in the brain for up to two hours before replacing the plasma with warm blood and reviving it without adverse long term effects. Alam, a trauma specialist, is primarily thinking about the time-critical dash to hospital. But researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh are more ambitious. “You start with 20 minutes and then find the limits – days, weeks, months, we do not yet know,” said a UCLA medical school researcher. NASA used to work on this induced hibernation 20 years ago to help astronauts survive long space missions, but it abandoned for some reasons. European Space Agency has started working on this research in 2004. This hibernation theory has generated more interest after a Japanese man, Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, 35, fell down a snowy mountain and broke his hip. He fell into a coma, which lasted 24 days, nobody noticed him until someone found a lifeless body of his. He later was revived in a Kobe hospital. He is called by the Japanese newspapers as the “Bear Man”.

“We don’t know how he survived so long, but his body was preserved in ice for nearly a month and now he is back to normal,” a Kobe doctor said. “If we can understand why, we can save many lives in the future.”

It is interesting theory will be of immense help to get patients necessary treatment in case of serious injuries and aid space travel.