X-Message-Number: 812 Date: 06 May 92 22:23:39 EDT From: Bob Smart <> Subject: CRYONICS The Los Angeles Times of Thursday, 30 Apr 1992 ran an article by staff medical writer Robert Steinbrook that might be of interest to CryoNet readers. It's pretty long, but I'll abstract it here: Loma Linda University Medical Center surgeons have taken lamb and goat hearts which were "lifeless within dead animals for as long as 45 minutes," implanted them into other animals, and reactivated the transplanted organs. According to research team leader Dr. Steven R. Gundry, the process, which includes various drugs and "other manipulations," has been used to "reanimate" and transplant over 20 animal hearts. The scientists characterized this work as "preliminary," but they believe further progress could make the process usable in humans, with one benefit being that organs which are now considered unsuitable for transplantation because they've been "dead" too long could some day be recovered and reused. The article also mentions the legal and ethical problems that such a development could spark, and suggests that legal definitions of "death," which frequently make mention of "irreversible" heart stoppage, may no longer be adequate when "reversibility" becomes a more fluid state. The article also notes what it calls a "fundamental conflict of interest between emergency room physicians who try to save lives and transplant surgeons who try to obtain the heart or other organs for use in another patient." Even Dr. Gundry drew a parallel between possible implications of his research and the film "Coma," in which patients are killed in operating rooms so that their organs may be harvested. A key aspect of Gundry's process lies in the use of "the right cocktail" of medications to preserve heart tissue and restore normal blood flow. For years, physicians have held that heart tissue suffers irreversible damage after 15 minutes or so of oxygen deprivation at normal temperatures, but Gundry's "cocktail" includes drugs to break up arterial clots, prevent heart artery spasms, and ward off a cataclysmic, irreversible heart contraction sometimes caused by abnormally high calcium concentrations. The reanimation process is a gradual one, taking around an hour to reattain normal blood flow. The first journal-published report of this research will appear in the May issue of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, and describes the team's experience with four juvenile lamb hearts. The anesthetized lambs were allowed to bleed to death (to simulate the typical mode of death for most human organ donors, who are usually victims of auto crashes or other traumatic injury), and their hearts were left in place for 30 minutes (a time chosen to simulate the delay involved in obtaining permission from next of kin to use organs for transplant). After this 30-minute delay, the lamb hearts were filled with "a cold, preservative solution," removed from their original bodies, and packed away in iced saltwater for another 90 minutes. After this total two-hour delay, the hearts were transplanted into other lambs, where all four transplanted hearts resumed normal function. Similar experiments have left the dead hearts in the original bodies for up to 45 minutes, and Gundry says that so far, he "does not know how long is 'too long' before irreversible cell death occurs." [ Could this work be applied toward improved suspension protocols? - KQB ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=812