To Treat the Dead

[Brutus]

looks like the doctors had it wrong... again.
short, interesting read.


The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself.

By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
May 7, 2007 issue - Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of "clinical death"—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368186...sweek?GT1=9951

[Automatic Monkey]

I just read that! Holy cow!

What I found most interesting is that the process by which oxygen-reperfused cells die is the same process by which cells that have turned cancerous are supposed to die.

Now here's a hypothesis: It's known that a lot of oxidizers and reactive compounds of oxygen are carcinogenic. Suppose the oxygen radicals are destroying a lot of cells, but some cells randomly have the ability to resist apoptosis and by means of natural selection these cells start to become predominant in the affected tissue. It would seem reasonable that these cells would also be able to resist the way the mitochondria are supposed to shut off cancer cells, and cancer would develop.