The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Science

He Is Not Really Dead

The latest issue of Newsweek has an interesting article called Back From the Dead. Some of you may be aware that I spent seven years working as a CPR and First Aid Instructor so these sorts of articles are of interest to me.

This is a story about what happens when your heart stops: about new research into how brain cells die and how something as simple as lowering body temperature may keep them alive—research that could ultimately save as many as 100,000 lives a year. And it’s about the mind as well, the visions people report from their deathbeds and the age-old questions about what, if anything, outlives the body. It begins with a challenge to something doctors have always been taught in medical school: that after about five minutes without a pulse, the brain starts dying, followed by heart muscle—the two most voracious consumers of oxygen in the body, victims of their own appetites. The emerging view is that oxygen deprivation is merely the start of a cascade of reactions within and outside the cells that can play out over the succeeding hours, or even days. Dying turns out to be almost as complicated a process as living, and somehow, among its labyrinthine pathways

I find this to be fascinating. Not unlike so many others I have wondered what happens when you die. Where does your mind go? Do you feel any pain? Do you have any understanding of what is happening? Do you go off into the next whatever with the words, sounds and noises of those that were around you?

Becker’s interest in mitochondria reflects a new understanding about how cells die from loss of circulation, or ischemia. Five minutes without oxygen is indeed fatal to brain cells, but the actual dying may take hours, or even days. Doctors have known for a long time that the consequences of ischemia play out over time. “Half the time in cardiac arrest, we get the heart going again, blood pressure is good, everything is going along,” says Dr. Terry Vanden Hoek, director of the Emergency Resuscitation Center at the University of Chicago, “and within a few hours everything crashes and the patient is dead.” It took some time, though, for basic research to supply an explanation. Neumar, working with rats, simulates cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and then examines the neurons at intervals afterward. Up to 24 hours later they appear normal, but then in the next 24 hours, something kicks in and they begin to deteriorate. And Dr. James R. Brorson of the University of Chicago has seen something similar in neural cells grown in culture; deprive them of oxygen and watch for five minutes, or even much longer, and not much happens. “If your car runs out of gas, your engine isn’t destroyed, it just needs fuel,” he says.

Cell death isn’t an event; it’s a process. And in principle, a process can be interrupted. The process appears to begin in the mitochondria, which control the cell’s self-destruct mechanism, known as apoptosis, and a related process, necrosis. Apoptosis is a natural function, destroying cells that are no longer needed or have been damaged in some way. Cancer cells, which might otherwise be killed by apoptosis, survive by shutting down their mitochondria; cancer researchers are looking for ways to turn them back on. Becker is trying to do the opposite, preventing cells that have been injured by lack of oxygen from, in effect, committing suicide.

It’s a daunting problem. “We’re asking the questions,” says one leading researcher, Dr. Norm Abramson of the University of Pittsburgh. “We just haven’t found the answers.” Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that apoptosis couldn’t be stopped once it was underway. It proceeds by a complex sequence of reactions—including inflammation, oxidation and cell-membrane breakdown—none of which seems to respond to traditional therapies. Becker views cell death in cardiac arrest as a two-step process, beginning with oxygen deprivation, which sets up the cell for apoptosis; then the heart starts up again and the patient gets a lungful of oxygen, triggering what is called reperfusion injury. The very substance required to save the patient’s life ends up injuring or killing him.

I truly do not fear death. How can I fear it? I don’t really know anything about it. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to die. When I said that I want to live for a thousand years it is because I have so many interests. There is so much to do and so very little time.

To quote my grandfather I’ll fight for every last breath because I can and because I am. It doesn’t have to make sense to you, but it does to me.

My children are a huge part of my interest in living. It is not just because I can’t imagine not being there for them but because I am intensely curious about who they are going to become. When they grow up who will they be. What will they do and with whom?

Anyway, I think that the article is quite interesting. Give it a read.

Summer Solstice 2007

(Another recycled post. This one ran here.)

Today marks the Summer Solstice. Wikipedia provides this explanation:

“The summer solstice is an astronomical term regarding the position of the sun in relation to the celestial equator. At the time of the summer solstice, Earth is at a point in its orbit where one hemisphere is most tilted towards the sun, causing the sun to appear at 23.45 degrees above the celestial equator, thus making its highest path across the sky. The summer solstice is the day of the year with the longest daylight period and hence the shortest night. This day usually occurs on June 21/June 22 in the northern hemisphere and on December 21/December 22 in the southern hemisphere. The actual date changes due to differences between the calendar year and the tropical year.”

I have been rather fond of the day for years, primarily because it marks the beginning of summer. Summer is easily my favorite season, especially early in the summer. There is something about early summer that just makes me smile. Maybe it is because it is filled with so much potential.

I also find the summer solstice to be interesting because of Stonehenge.

“Stonehenge (stōn‘hÄ•nj‘) , group of standing stones on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, S England. Preeminent among megalithic monuments in the British Isles, it is similar to an older and larger monument at Avebury. The great prehistoric structure is enclosed within a circular ditch 300 ft (91 m) in diameter, with a bank on the inner side, and is approached by a broad roadway called the Avenue. Within the circular trench the stones are arranged in four series: The outermost is a circle of sandstones about 13.5 ft (4.1 m) high connected by lintels; the second is a circle of bluestone menhirs; the third is horseshoe shaped; the innermost, ovoid. Within the ovoid lies the Altar Stone. The Heelstone is a great upright stone in the Avenue, northeast of the circle. It was at one time widely believed that Stonehenge was a druid temple, but this is contradicted by the fact that the druids probably did not arrive in Britain until c.250 B.C. In 1963 the American astronomer Gerald Hawkins theorized that Stonehenge was used as a huge astronomical instrument that could accurately measure solar and lunar movements as well as eclipses. “

I don’t know about you, but there is something very cool about the place. I haven’t been there, but it is on my list of places to visit.

Americans Are Growing Shorter

New research shows that Americans are coming up short, but not in terms of money or lifestyle. Our growing problem is with our height.

The study, conducted by the University of Munich and Princeton University, found that the United States had the shortest population in the industrialized world, and the reason may have to do with the way people live.

America’s first president, George Washington, stood a commanding 6-foot-2. In Washington’s day, our country’s residents were the tallest in the world.

“It’s well known that the Americans held the title for 200 years,” said University of Munich professor John Komlos. “Ever since the colonial times, the Americans were the tallest.”

Today the Netherlands towers above the rest of the world as the tallest country, with an average height of 6-foot 1, without the wooden shoes. In 1850, Americans were two inches taller than the Dutch.

In Denmark, men average 6 feet in height, a couple of inches taller than the American male average of 5-foot-10.

For the full story click here.

Harpoon may prove whale was at least 115 years old

Biologists, long stumped at figuring out how old whales are, lucked out when a 50-ton bowhead caught off Alaska came with a telltale clue: fragments of a harpoon lodged in a shoulder bone.

The weapon was used more than a century ago by whalers from New Bedford, enabling researchers to estimate that the whale was at least 115 years old and providing more evidence for their long-held belief that the bowhead whale is one of the longest living mammals on earth, surviving for up to 150 years.

“It’s pretty rare that you get the chance to date the age of a whale,” said John Bockstoce, the whaling historian at the New Bedford Whaling Museum who analyzed the fragments.

“We’re all finding it very interesting,” he said yesterday.

A biologist in Alaska spotted the pieces of the projectile as they were being pulled from the whale’s blubber by Eskimos who had killed the animal last month.

He sent them to Bockstoce, who identified them as parts of an exploding lance made in New Bedford in the late 1800s, when the city was the world’s whaling capital. Hunters would spear the animal with the weapon, which would detonate once inside.

Hunters used a similar modern device to kill the whale.

Anthropologists have analyzed hunting devices found in whales before, said Scott Kraus, vice president for research at the New England Aquarium in Boston.

It was often difficult, however, to determine when the weapon was fired.

“What you don’t know is if some Yankee whaler had a harpoon made in 1830, traded it to an Inuit, and the Inuit or his offspring used it 40 years later,” Kraus said.

For the full story click here. It is amazing to think that such a large creature could live for so long.