Bio-wise and otherwise

The 'dead'ly paradox

It's a given that a person is clinically dead when the oxygen supply is cut off to the vital organs like the heart and the brain. 

Here's the thing then- doctors can  pronounce a person clinically dead based on vital signs. But are all the cells dead when clinical death happens? How and when do we pronounce cellular death? 

There are  two types of cell death- the unprogrammed and the programmed. Unprogrammed cell death happens due to cell aging, or cell damage.

During programmed cell death (or  'Apoptosis')  a cell actually commits 'suicide' under circumstances like stress or disease (like cancer). Mitochondria (tiny bean-shaped structures contained in cells) have the remarkable ability to distinguish a cancerous cell from a normal one- and when that happens, there is a chemical trigger sent by mitochondria to the cancerous cell ordering it 'to die'.  When viewed under a microscope, cells that have been subjected to programmed cell death look different than cells that have undergone normal death. Apoptotic cells are shrunken with  fragmented chromosomes, whereas cells having undergone normal death are swollen and turgid. At the biochemical level too, certain proteins (called 'Caspases') are selectively  'switched on' during programmed cell death.

A recent article (which got voted its way into Slynkr) points to an astonishing finding- that hours after a person is clinically pronounced dead, the cells are still alive. 

Doctors often give doses of epinephrine, do a CPR or apply  paddles to jolt the near-dead person back to life.  These procedures are said to 'reoxygenate' the tissues with the hope of bringing the person back to life.

But while these procedures are what the doctor ordered, how do the cells behave under these procedures?

The recent study has indicated that when doctors pump up (reperfuse) the oxygen levels into the cells of a near dead person (using CPR and other techniques), the body is somehow unable to distinguish these re-oxygenated cells from cancerous ones. The mitochondria respond to such cells in exactly the same way they respond to cancerous cells. They trigger programmed cell death. 

So is it such a good idea to hyperoxygenate the body? Or is it better to send in some salt and  ice through the blood vessels and reduce the metabolic rate, while doctors start working on the heart? In a few trial experiments, doctors found that the salt-and-ice method had astonishing results- showing better recovery among patients.

There are clearly different layers to viewing life forms. The gross can include viewing the whole body, specific  tissues, cellular states, etc.

The subtle delves into deeper layers through metaphysical studies. The heart rate has been shown to  go down remarkably during a meditative state.  Meditation is also said to be linked to a change in one's consciousness. So if life (or death) can be defined physiologically, psychologically and biochemically, why can't there be another state of definition- namely, consciousness?

Physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK, and psychologist Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona in Tucson took this complexity one step further by explaining away consciousness through physiology. They proposed that consciousness might arise from wave-like quantum-mechanical effects involving protein filaments called microtubules in nerve cells.

Many theories exist to support or dispute the phenomenon of consciousness.

Nevertheless, science cannot dispute that there are different states like sleep, wakefulness, dream state and the unconsciousness state. Metaphysicists say that these are indeed the different states of 'consciousness'.

So then, is body consciousness the same as cellular consciousness? What happens to this collective consciousness when death happens?

If body death and cellular death are not happening in synchrony, is there a  'pause-ible' state between life and death?

If life is complex, so is death, it seems. 

Posted at 05:10AM May 08, 2007 by Manju in Sun  |  Comments[0]