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Judith,
Those are some
great questions.
My first general
thought is that surgery/anesthesia can cause local failures of structural
parts of the system, which can lead to a global failure. But, when those
local failures can be quickly reversed, then the global failure can
also be reversed. Similarly, a heart/lung machine prevents what would otherwise
be a local failure that would lead to a global failure.
As for the
cryogenic freezing/thawing cell experiments, or the dehydration/rehydration of
yeast or brine shrimp: maybe, at the least, both methods succeed because
they 1) both do not destroy the functional or the structural
organization of the system, and 2) both remove or immobilize that most
universal of solvents, liquid H2O ??
Regards,
Tim
P.S. - I miss
Looney Toons too - they rocked! :)
Senescence is an area where my father did a lot of work, at one
time. The photo on the two new books was taken during the Carter Presidency:
there was an NIH (or some such group) hosting a huge conference in Washington,
DC on aging and senescence. He said that it was all very promising at first,
but that within a couple years, it began going down the same wrong
(simplistic) roads and he lost interest in continuing in any official capacity
with that group-- it began to resemble a photo op and a circus more than
useful science, he felt. I remember him talking about the "Hayflick
Experiments" (on limits to number of times a cell can divide, etc) and a few
other things around that time, but I was a teenager at that
point and not as interested in hanging out with my Dad as I was earlier
and would be again, a few years later.
The problem Tim was describing ("global failure"
without obvious cause) is one where the relationships between the
parts begin to lose cohesion. Why this happens would be the interesting aspect
of it. The parts are seemingly in perfectly good shape, but the parts are not
all that is required for life. If it was, one could "re-animate" dead
organisms fairly easily. Frankenstein's monster could live again. What I
am curious to know is, how is it possible to cryogenically freeze a live
organism, and return it to its living state after thawing? What is the
difference between doing that vs other forms of "resussitation" and how
do those kinds of things differ from anaesthesia/surgically induced "death"
which is reversible? The tricky thing is that there are times when keeping
certain parts within a narrow set of parameters (such as putting a body on a
heart/lung machine during open heart surgery) is all that seems to be required
to preserve life in the body. In other words, medicine gets away with treating
the body in a reductionistic manner on occasion. Apparently, in keeping those
particular parts going, they manage to keep certain crucial relationships
intact and so the complexity doesn't collapse. The questions that come to me
are ones like: Why do some types of interference collapse the complex
organisation and other types don't? The answers to those kinds of questions
would be illuminating, it seems to me.
Judith
PS: My Dad loved all those early horror movies, by the way. Bela
Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr. et al.... Except, he said
"The Mob" of villagers chasing the monster were always the real horror of the
piece. Watching all those old classics was part of my childhood education!
Interesting parental strategy, you might say. (There were old Danny Kaye
movies to balance out my brainwaves.... or attempt to.) But those movies were
tame compared to the bloodsoaked video games I see advertised in between
violence-infused cartoons on Saturday mornings now. I miss the Looney Toons a
lot.
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