Interessante! Non avevo mai sentito dell'"uomo-orso" giapponese di cui
si parla alla fine dell'articolo: in coma per 24 giorni nella neve - e
sopravvissuto.

Ciao,
Fabio

Race to be first to 'hibernate' human beings

John Harlow in Los Angeles

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1845294.ece

TURNING science fiction into science fact, American doctors are
preparing to chill volunteers into a state of suspended animation that
could keep them asleep for months.

Medical teams in Los Angeles, Boston and Pittsburgh are racing to
become the first to test out new theories of "induced hibernation"
which could save lives and also help to send man towards the stars.

Hasan Alam, a surgeon at Massachusetts general hospital and consultant
to the US army, is poised to start the first human trials before the
end of the year.

Last week he said that he wanted to equip ambulances with a clear
saline solution called plasma expander that would be injected into
seriously injured victims at the scene of a car accident.

The plasma would rapidly send body temperature from 37C to 10C,
slowing the metabolism, delaying the onset of shock and limiting
damage from wounds.

Alam has experimented on eight-stone Yorkshire pigs, stopping the
heart and electrical activity in the brain for up to two hours before
slowly replacing the plasma with warm blood and reviving the animals
with no apparent long-term effects.

The plasma could also be tested on soldiers: many survive an initial
injury only to die waiting for treatment.

Alam, a trauma specialist, is primarily thinking about the
time-critical dash to hospital. But researchers at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Safar Center for Resuscitation
Research at the University of Pittsburgh are more ambitious. "You
start with 20 minutes and then find the limits – days, weeks, months,
we do not yet know," said a UCLA medical school researcher.

Although it is 20 years since Nasa abandoned work on induced
hibernation as a way of helping astronauts to survive long space
missions, research began again at the European Space Agency in 2004.
Funding has flowed in the United States since October, when Mitsutaka
Uchikoshi, 35, strayed from a Japanese office barbecue, fell down a
snowy mountain and broke his hip.

He lapsed into a frozen coma, which lasted 24 days until his
apparently lifeless body was found and revived in a Kobe hospital. He
is now known in Japanese newspapers as the "Bear Man".

"We don't know how he survived so long, but his body was preserved in
ice for nearly a month and now he is back to normal," a Kobe doctor
said. "If we can understand why, we can save many lives in the
future."