Free Cheating Death by Sanjay Gupta Page A

can hold off the bands
     of Taliban for a few more hours, there will be plenty of time to wait for the lifesaving helicopter from Bagram Air Base.
    This scenario has never actually happened, but it may be closer than you think. The picture was painted for us by officials
     from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a military office devoted to exploring technological breakthroughs.
     DARPA funds some of the most cutting-edge medical research on the planet. If you want to think of ways to truly snatch life
     from the jaws of death, this is a good place to start.
    W HEN I ASKED DARPA officials about cheating death, I ended up in a spot that’s about as far from Afghanistan as you can get, walking past
     luxury speedboats docked along Fairview Avenue, collar turned up against the unseasonably cold Seattle day. The city was bracing
     for a rare snowstorm. The Space Needle rising up behind us seemed to touch the low gray clouds, and next to it, the wild red
     and silver curves of the Science Fiction Museum. Turning in from the waterfront, we were on the campus of the Fred Hutchinson
     Cancer Research Center, five brick-and-glass buildings sitting at the base of a steep hill, tucked between the water and a
     concrete overpass.
    On a wall of the narrow, tastefully decorated lobby sat three plaques framed in glass. These are the Nobel Prizes awarded
     to researchers at “the Hutch.” I thought it was pretty cool, but most of the people in the lobby walked by without a glimpse.
     I realized this was a place where breakthroughs are expected.
    I was here at the Hutch because I wanted a glimpse of what could be the biggest medical breakthrough ever—-a way to stop death
     in its tracks. As we crowded around a glass hood in a lab room upstairs, we looked at the unwitting subject of the day’s experiment:
     a furry white rat, all quick movements, trapped in a glass enclosure, his bright red eyes staring back at us with a hint of
     curiosity.
    A scientist named Mark Roth also peered at the rat, his eyes squinting under a tall forehead and an unruly patch of thinning
     red hair. A younger colleague, Jennifer Blackwood, casual in the running clothes she wore to work, checked the gear for the
     experiment. Roth gave her a nod, Blackwood turned a dial, and the rat’s enclosure began to fill with deadly hydrogen sulfide
     gas. “He has no clue,” she said. The gas is invisible, but we know it’s there because the rat is suddenly at attention, nose
     upturned and furiously sniffing at the air.
    Hydrogen sulfide is the chemical that gives rotting eggs such a strong smell. An ounce could kill dozens of people. 1 At a concentration of five hundred parts per million, it’s about four times as toxic as carbon monoxide, 2 but the rat doesn’t seem too alarmed. For several seconds, he just keeps sniffing. On a monitor next to the enclosure, though,
     we can see things changing. The monitor measures the rat’s output of carbon dioxide—his breathing, his metabolism. And the
     line is going down. Basically, Dr. Roth is turning off the rat. Not all the way, mind you—but pretty far down, like turning
     down the lights with a dimmer switch. Two minutes in and the rat is barely moving, just staring straight ahead. He’s not quite
     frozen, but everything about him is going in extreme slow motion.
    When Roth does this experiment for real, he can keep the rat in this state for six hours. He could probably do it even longer,
     but that’s when he turned the experiment off. “We proved our point” is how he put it to me. We won’t be around six hours later,
     so after about ten minutes, Blackwood turns the dial the other way, flushing the hydrogen sulfide from the rat’s enclosure
     and replacing it with oxygen. The dimmer switch comes back up. The rat starts to move. Five minutes later, the rat is wiggling
     around like nothing ever happened.
    Dr. Roth makes an unlikely mad scientist, with his easy smile, blue Converse