“Coming Back from the Dead” Is No Longer Science Fiction
Last year, there were widespread reports of a 53-year-old Frenchman who had suffered a cardiac arrest and "died," but was then resuscitated back to life 18 hours after his heart had stopped.
The once black-and-white line between life and death is now blurrier than ever.
This was thought to have been possible in part because his body had progressively cooled down naturally after his heart had stopped, through exposure to the outside cold. The medical team who revived him were reported as being "stupefied" that they had been able to bring him back to life, in particular since he had not even suffered brain damage.
Interestingly, this man represents one of a growing number of extraordinary cases in which people who would otherwise be declared dead have now been revived. It is a testament to the incredible impact of resuscitation science -- a science that is providing opportunities to literally reverse death, and in doing so, shedding light on the age-old question of what happens when we die.
Death: Past and Present
Throughout history, the boundary between life and death was marked by the moment a person's heart stopped, breathing ceased, and brain function shut down. A person became motionless, lifeless, and was deemed irreversibly dead. This is because once the heart stops beating, blood flow stops and oxygen is cut off from all the body's organs, including the brain. Consequently, within seconds, breathing stops and brain activity comes to a halt. Since the cessation of the heart literally occurs in a "moment," the philosophical notion of a specific point in time of "irreversible" death still pervades society today. The law, for example, relies on "time of death," which corresponds to when the heart stops beating.
The advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the 1960s was revolutionary, demonstrating that the heart could potentially be restarted after it had stopped, and what had been a clear black-and-white line was shown to be potentially reversible in some people. What was once called death—the ultimate end point— was now widely called cardiac arrest, and became a starting point.
From then on, it was only if somebody had requested not to be resuscitated or when CPR was deemed to have failed that people would be declared dead by "cardiopulmonary criteria." Biologically, cardiac arrest and death by cardiopulmonary criteria are the same process, albeit marked at different points in time depending on when a declaration of death is made.
The apparent irreversibility of death as we know it may not necessarily reflect true irretrievable cellular damage inside the body.
Clearly, contrary to many people's perceptions, cardiac arrest is not a heart attack; it is the final step in death irrespective of cause, whether it be a stroke, a heart attack, a car accident, an overwhelming infection or cancer. This is how roughly 95 percent of the population are declared dead.
The only exception is the small proportion of people who may have suffered catastrophic brain injuries, but whose hearts can be artificially kept beating for a period of time on life-support machines. These people can be legally declared dead based on brain death criteria before their hearts have stopped. This is because the brain can die either from oxygen starvation after cardiac arrest or from massive trauma and internal bleeding. Either way, the brain dies hours or possibly longer after these injuries have taken place and not just minutes.
A Profound Realization
What has become increasingly clear is that the apparent irreversibility of death as we know it may not necessarily reflect true irretrievable cellular damage inside the body. This is consistent with a mounting understanding: it is only after a person actually dies that the cells in the body start to undergo their own process of death. Intriguingly, this process is something that can now be manipulated through medical intervention. Being cold is one of the factors that slows down the rate of cellular decay. The 53-year-old Frenchman's case and the other recent cases of resuscitation after prolonged periods of time illustrate this new understanding.
Last week's earth-shattering announcement by neuroscientist Dr. Nenad Sestan and his team out of Yale, published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, provides further evidence that a time gap exists between actual death and cellular death in cadavers. In this seminal study, these researchers were able to restore partial function in pig brains four hours after their heads were severed from their bodies. These results follow from the pioneering work in 2001 of geneticist Fred Gage and colleagues from the Salk Institute, also published in Nature, which demonstrated the possibility of growing human brain cells in the laboratory by taking brain biopsies from cadavers in the mortuary up to 21 hours post-mortem.
The once black-and-white line between life and death is now blurrier than ever. Some people may argue this means these humans and pigs weren't truly "dead." However, that is like saying the people who were guillotined during the French Revolution were also not dead. Clearly, that is not the case. They were all dead. The problem is not death; it's our reliance on an outdated philosophical, rather than biological, notion of death.
Death can no longer be considered an absolute moment but rather a process that can be reversed even many hours after it has taken place.
But the distinction between irreversibility from a medical perspective and biological irreversibility may not matter much from a pragmatic perspective today. If medical interventions do not exist at any given time or place, then of course death cannot be reversed.
However, it is crucial to distinguish between biologically and medically: When "irreversible" loss of function arises due to inadequate treatment, then a person could be potentially brought back in the future when an alternative therapy becomes available, or even today if he or she dies in a location where novel treatments can slow down the rate of cell death. However, when true irreversible loss of function arises from a biological perspective, then no treatment will ever be able to reverse the process, whether today, tomorrow, or in a hundred years.
Probing the "Grey Zone"
Today, thanks to modern resuscitation science, death can no longer be considered an absolute moment but rather a process that can be reversed even many hours after it has taken place. How many hours? We don't really know.
One of the wider implications of our medical advances is that we can now study what happens to the human mind and consciousness after people enter the "grey zone," which marks the time after the heart stops, but before irreversible and irretrievable cell damage occurs, and people are then brought back to life. Millions have been successfully revived and many have reported experiencing a unique, universal, and transformative mental state.
Were they "dead"? Yes, according to all the criteria we have ever used. But they were able to be brought back before their "dead" bodies had reached the point of permanent, irreversible cellular damage. This reflects the period of death for all of us. So rather than a "near-death experience," I prefer a new terminology to describe these cases -- "an actual-death experience." These survivors' unique experiences are providing eyewitness testimonies of what we will all be likely to experience when we die.
Such an experience reportedly includes seeing a warm light, the presence of a compassionate perfect individual, deceased relatives, a review of their lives, a judgment of their actions and intentions as they pertain to their humanity, and in some cases a sensation of seeing doctors and nurses working to resuscitate them.
Are these experiences compatible with hallucinations or illusions? No -- in part, because these people have described real, verifiable events, which, by definition are not hallucinations, and in part, because their experiences are not compatible with confused and delirious memories that characterize oxygen deprivation.
The challenge for us scientifically is understanding how this is possible at a time when all our science tells us the brain shuts down.
For instance, it is hard to classify a structured meaningful review of one's life and one's humanity as hallucinatory or illusory. Instead, these experiences represent a new understanding of the overall human experience of death. As an intensive care unit physician for more than 10 years, I have seen numerous cases where these reports have been corroborated by my colleagues. In short, these survivors have been known to come back with reports of full consciousness, with lucid, well-structured thought processes and memory formation.
The challenge for us scientifically is understanding how this is possible at a time when all our science tells us the brain shuts down. The fact that these experiences occur is a paradox and suggests the undiscovered entity we call the "self," "consciousness," or "psyche" – the thing that makes us who we are - may not become annihilated at the point of so-called death.
At New York University, the State University of New York, and across 20 hospitals in the U.S. and Europe, we have brought together a new multi-disciplinary team of experts across many specialties, including neurology, cardiology, and intensive care. Together, we hope to improve cardiac arrest prevention and treatment, as well as to address the impact of new scientific discoveries on our understanding of what happens at death.
One of our first studies, Awareness during Resuscitation (AWARE), published in the medical journal Resuscitation in 2014, confirmed that some cardiac arrest patients report a perception of awareness without recall; others report detailed memories and experiences; and a few report full auditory and visual awareness and consciousness of their experience, from a time when brain function would be expected to have ceased.
While you probably have some opinion or belief about this based upon your own philosophical, religious, or cultural background, you may not realize that exploring what happens when we die is now a subject that science is beginning to investigate.
There is no question more intriguing to humankind. And for the first time in our history, we may finally uncover some real answers.
Jessica Ware is obsessed with bugs.
My guest today is a leading researcher on insects, the president of the Entomological Society of America and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. Learn more about her here.
You may not think that insects and human health go hand-in-hand, but as Jessica makes clear, they’re closely related. A lot of people care about their health, and the health of other creatures on the planet, and the health of the planet itself, but researchers like Jessica are studying another thing we should be focusing on even more: how these seemingly separate areas are deeply entwined. (This is the theme of an upcoming event hosted by Leaps.org and the Aspen Institute.)
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Entomologist Jessica Ware
D. Finnin / AMNH
Maybe it feels like a core human instinct to demonize bugs as gross. We seem to try to eradicate them in every way possible, whether that’s with poison, or getting out our blood thirst by stomping them whenever they creep and crawl into sight.
But where did our fear of bugs really come from? Jessica makes a compelling case that a lot of it is cultural, rather than in-born, and we should be following the lead of other cultures that have learned to live with and appreciate bugs.
The truth is that a healthy planet depends on insects. You may feel stung by that news if you hate bugs. Reality bites.
Jessica and I talk about whether learning to live with insects should include eating them and gene editing them so they don’t transmit viruses. She also tells me about her important research into using genomic tools to track bugs in the wild to figure out why and how we’ve lost 50 percent of the insect population since 1970 according to some estimates – bad news because the ecosystems that make up the planet heavily depend on insects. Jessica is leading the way to better understand what’s causing these declines in order to start reversing these trends to save the insects and to save ourselves.
They received retinal implants to restore their vision. Then the company turned its back on them.
The first thing Jeroen Perk saw after he partially regained his sight nearly a decade ago was the outline of his guide dog Pedro.
“There was a white floor, and the dog was black,” recalls Perk, a 43-year-old investigator for the Dutch customs service. “I was crying. It was a very nice moment.”
Perk was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa as a child and had been blind since early adulthood. He has been able to use the implant placed into his retina in 2013 to help identify street crossings, and even ski and pursue archery. A video posted by the company that designed and manufactured the device indicates he’s a good shot.
Less black-and-white has been the journey Perk and others have been on after they were implanted with the Argus II, a second-generation device created by a Los Angeles-based company called Second Sight Medical Devices.
The Argus II uses the implant and a video camera embedded in a special pair of glasses to provide limited vision to those with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that causes cells in the retina to deteriorate. The camera feeds information to the implant, which sends electrical impulses into the retina to recapitulate what the camera sees. The impulses appear in the Argus II as a 60-pixel grid of blacks, grays and whites in the user’s eye that can render rough outlines of objects and their motion.
Smartphone and computer manufacturers typically stop issuing software upgrades to their devices after two or three years, eventually rendering them bricks. But is the smartphone approach acceptable for a device that helps restore the most crucial sense a human being possesses?
Ross Doerr, a retired disability rights attorney in Maine who received an Argus II in 2019, describes the field of vision as the equivalent of an index card held at arm’s length. Perk often brings objects close to his face to decipher them. Moreover, users must swivel their heads to take in visual data; moving their eyeballs does not work.
Despite its limitations, the Argus II beats the alternative. Perk no longer relies on his guide dog. Doerr was uplifted when he was able to see the outlines of Christmas trees at a holiday show.
“The fairy godmother department sort of reaches out and taps you on the shoulder once in a while,” Doerr says of his implant, which came about purely by chance. A surgeon treating his cataracts was partnered with the son of another surgeon who was implanting the devices, and he was referred.
Doerr had no reason to believe the shower of fairy dust wouldn’t continue. Second Sight held out promises that the Argus II recipients’ vision would gradually improve through upgrades to much higher pixel densities. The ability to recognize individual faces was even touted as a possibility. In the winter of 2020, Doerr was preparing to travel across the U.S. to Second Sight’s headquarters to receive an upgrade. But then COVID-19 descended, and the trip was canceled.
The pandemic also hit Second Sight’s bottom line. Doerr found out about its tribulations only from one of the company’s vision therapists, who told him the entire department was being laid off. Second Sight cut nearly 80% of its workforce in March 2020 and announced it would wind down operations.
Ross Doerr has mostly stopped using his Argus II, the result of combination of fear of losing its assistance from wear and tear and disdain for the company that brought it to market.
Jan Doerr
Second Sight’s implosion left some 350 Argus recipients in the metaphorical dark about what to do if their implants failed. Skeleton staff seem to have rarely responded to queries from their customers, at least based on the experiences of Perk and Doerr. And some recipients have unfortunately returned to the actual dark as well, as reports have surfaced of Argus II failures due to aging or worn-down parts.
Product support for complex products is remarkably uneven. Although the iconic Ford Mustang ceased production in the late 1960s, its parts market is so robust that it’s theoretically possible to assemble a new vehicle from recently crafted components. Conversely, smartphone and computer manufacturers typically stop issuing software upgrades to their devices after two or three years, eventually rendering them bricks. Consumers have accepted both extremes.
But is the smartphone approach acceptable for a device that helps restore the most crucial sense a human being possesses?
Margaret McLean, a senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California, notes companies like Second Sight have a greater obligation for product support than other consumer product ventures.
“In this particular case, you have a great deal of risk that is involved in using this device, the implant, and the after care of this device,” she says. “You cannot, like with your car, decide that ‘I don’t like my Mustang anymore,’ and go out and buy a Corvette.”
And, whether the Argus II implant works or not, its physical presence can impact critical medical decisions. Doerr’s doctor wanted him to undergo an MRI to assist in diagnosing attacks of vertigo. But the physician was concerned his implant might interfere. With the latest available manufacturer advisories on his implant nearly a decade old, the procedure was held up. Doerr spent months importuning Second Sight through phone calls, emails and Facebook postings to learn if his implant was contraindicated with MRIs, which he never received. Although the cause of his vertigo was found without an MRI, Doerr was hardly assured.
“Put that into context for a minute. I get into a serious car accident. I end up in the emergency room, and I have a tag saying I have an implanted medical device,” he says. “You can’t do an MRI until you get the proper information from the company. Who’s going to answer the phone?”
Second Sight’s management did answer the call to revamp its business. It netted nearly $78 million through a private stock placement and an initial public offering last year. At the end of 2021, Second Sight had nearly $70 million in cash on hand, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And while the Argus II is still touted at length on Second Sight’s home page, it appears little of its corporate coffers are earmarked toward its support. These days, the company is focused on obtaining federal approvals for Orion, a new implant that would go directly into the recipient’s brain and could be used to remedy blindness from a variety of causes. It obtained a $6.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health in May 2021 to help develop Orion.
Presented with a list of written questions by email, Second Sight’s spokesperson, Dave Gentry of the investor relations firm Red Chip Companies, copied a subordinate with an abrupt message to “please handle.” That was the only response from a company representative. A call to Second Sight acting chief executive officer Scott Dunbar went unreturned.
Whether or not the Orion succeeds remains to be seen. The company’s SEC filings suggest a viable and FDA-approved device is years away, and that operational losses are expected for the “foreseeable future.” Second Sight reported zero revenue in 2020 or 2021.
Moreover, the experiences of the Argus II recipients could color the reception of future Second Sight products. Doerr notes that his insurer paid nearly $500,000 to implant his device and for training on how to use it.
“What’s the insurance industry going to say the next time this crops up?” Doerr asks, noting that the company’s reputation is “completely shot” with the recipients of its implants.
Perk, who made speeches to praise the Argus II and is still featured in a video on the Second Sight website, says he also no longer supports the company.
Jeroen Perk, an investigator for the Dutch customs service, cried for joy after partially regaining his sight, but he no longer trusts Second Sight, the company that provided his implant.
Nanda Perk
Nevertheless, Perk remains highly reliant on the technology. When he dropped an external component of his device in late 2020 and it broke, Perk briefly debated whether to remain blind or find a way to get his Argus II working again. Three months later, he was able to revive it by crowdsourcing parts, primarily from surgeons with spare components or other Argus II recipients who no longer use their devices. Perk now has several spare parts in reserve in case of future breakdowns.
Despite the frantic efforts to retain what little sight he has, Perk has no regrets about having the device implanted. And while he no longer trusts Second Sight, he is looking forward to possibly obtaining more advanced implants from companies in the Netherlands and Australia working on their own products.
Doerr suggests that biotech firms whose implants are distributed globally be bound to some sort of international treaty requiring them to service their products in perpetuity. Such treaties are still applied to the salvage rights for ships that sunk centuries ago, he notes.
“I think that in a global tech economy, that would be a good thing,” says McLean, the fellow at Santa Clara, “but I am not optimistic about it in the near term. Business incentives push toward return on share to stockholders, not to patients and other stakeholders. We likely need to rely on some combination of corporately responsibility…and [international] government regulation. It’s tough—the Paris Climate Accord implementation at a slow walk comes to mind.”
Unlike Perk, Doerr has mostly stopped using his Argus II, the result of combination of fear of losing its assistance from wear and tear and disdain for the company that brought it to market. At 70, Doerr says he does not have the time or energy to hold the company more accountable. And with Second Sight having gone through a considerable corporate reorganization, Doerr believes a lawsuit to compel it to better serve its Argus recipients would be nothing but an extremely costly longshot.
“It’s corporate America at its best,” he observes.