New Research Can Preserve Organs for 10 Days
singularityhub.com
singularityhub.com
I bet this is keying off the exsanguination and Hydrogen Sulfide work we've read about before in places like Scientific American -- where cell damage happens in the transition to a low oxygen environment, not necessarily being in one.
Aside from the far-out dream of cryogenics, of which I'm a big fan, this has huge implications for surgery. If you can take a person into hibernation for a day, working at your leisure, you can do all sorts of things that we couldn't do before.
Huge, huge story.
I just scan several science sites and look for those terms.
(When my browser comes up, I have 43 tabs for my home page)
Chinese execution harvesters will now be able to export their wares globally.
To better understand if and how Somah preserved a heart, Thatte and his group harvested two female pig hearts and placed them in two different containers. One was filled with Somah, the other with Celsior from Genzyme – the standard chemical bath which preserves organs in hospitals today. As described in the journal Circulation, the team took tissue samples every four hours from each heart. They found that the Somah heart had a much lower rate of cell decay, including important cardiomyocyte and endothelial cells which are necessary for the heart to work in a new host. Based on this research they concluded that hearts preserved in Somah should be viable for up to 10 days. Celsior can store the organ for 4 hours. That’s an epic difference.
Seriously though, this probably complicates organ allocation tremendously. Right now they only have to consider the relatively small pool of recipients that are compatible and close enough to hit the window. There may be scaling issues.