Because this sounds too good to be true

[Guest guest]

News of a way to avoid the fatality of most fatal diseases may indeed

sound too good to be true - as it should, since it is but a small part

of a more balanced story. In fact, the dangers of molecular technology

roughly balance its promise. In Part Three I will outline reasons for

considering nanotechnology more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

 

Fundamentally, though, nature cares nothing for our sense of good and

bad and nothing for our sense of balance. In particular, nature does

not hate human beings enough to stack the deck against us. Ancient

horrors have vanished before.

 

Years ago, surgeons strove to amputate legs fast. Robert Liston of

Edinburgh, Scotland, once sawed through a patient's thigh in a record

thirty-three seconds, removing three of his assistant's fingers in the

process. Surgeons worked fast to shorten their patients' agony, because

their patients remained conscious.

 

If terminal illness without biostasis is a nightmare today, consider

surgery without anesthesia in the days of our ancestors: the knife

slicing through flesh, the blood flowing, the saw grating on the bone

of a conscious patient. . . . Yet in October of 1846, W. T. G. Morton

and J. C. Warren removed a tumor from a patient under ether anesthesia;

Arthur Slater states that their success " was rightly hailed as the

great discovery of the age. " With simple techniques based on a known

chemical, the waking nightmare of knife and saw at long last was ended.

 

With agony ended, surgery increased, and with it surgical infection

and the horror of routine death from flesh rotting in the body. Yet in

1867 Joseph Lister published the results of his experiments with

phenol, establishing the principles of antiseptic surgery. With simple

techniques based on a known chemical, the nightmare of rotting alive

shrank dramatically.

 

Then came sulfa drugs and penicillin, which ended many deadly diseases

in a single blow... the list goes on.

 

Dramatic medical breakthroughs have come before, sometimes from new

uses of known chemicals, as in anesthesia and antiseptic surgery.

Though these advances may have seemed too good to be true, they were

true nonetheless. Saving lives by using known chemicals and procedures

to produce biostasis can likewise be true. Because doctors don't use

biostasis today.

 

Robert Ettinger proposed a biostasis technique in 1962. He states that

Professor Jean Rostand had proposed the same approach years earlier,

and had predicted its eventual use in medicine. Why did biostasis by

freezing fail to become popular? In part because of its initial

expense, in part because of human inertia, and in part because means

for repairing cells remained obscure. Yet the ingrained conservatism of

the medical profession has also played a role. Consider again the

history of anesthesia.

 

In 1846, Morton and Warren amazed the world with the " discovery of the

age " , ether anesthesia. Yet two years earlier, Horace Wells had used

nitrous oxide anesthesia, and two years before that, Crawford W. Long

had performed an operation using ether. In 1824, Henry Hickman had

successfully anesthetized animals using ordinary carbon dioxide; he

later spent years urging surgeons in England and France to test nitrous

oxide as an anesthetic. In 1799, a full forty-seven years before the

great " discovery " , and years before Liston's assistant lost his

fingers, Sir Humphry Davy wrote: " As nitrous oxide in its extensive

operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may possibly

be used during surgical operations. "

 

Yet as late as 1839 the conquest of pain still seemed an impossible

dream to many physicians. Dr. Alfred Velpeau stated: " The abolishment

of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it

today. 'Knife' and 'pain' are two words in surgery that must forever be

associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory

combination we shall have to adjust ourselves. "

 

Many feared the pain of surgery more than death itself. Perhaps the

time has come to awaken from the final medical nightmare.

 

 

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