Free Cheating Death by Sanjay Gupta Page B

sneakers, and a pullover shirt left over from
     his daily commute—a four-mile jog. His idea of a fun night is to sit home watching movies with his wife, teenage daughter,
     and ten-year-old son. 3 When the first lab mouse came back from a dose of hydrogen sulfide, Roth’s first move wasn’t to call DARPA or the NIH—it
     was rounding up everyone in the lab and going across the street for a beer. A Xeroxed picture of “the beer mouse” is still
     on the wall, along with oddball stickers and articles, like one about a guy who kept his wife in a freezer for six years after
     she died of cancer. But make no mistake: There is big stuff going on here. Maybe Nobel Prize–type stuff. It has already gotten
     Roth a so-called genius fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. 4
    You see, the amazing thing isn’t that you can fiddle with the dimmer switch on these lab rats and mice, it’s what you can
     do while the lights are almost out. To come up with a pause button for death—something that would really help those soldiers
     in Afghanistan—you need to do some gruesome stuff. You need to mimic the wounds that a soldier might suffer from a bullet
     or explosion, and you have to drain the blood from your lab animals, let them die—or come close—and then find a way to put
     them back together. When you drain the blood from lab mice and leave them for six hours, there’s no way to bring them back.
     When Roth did the same thing after knocking them out with hydrogen sulfide, well, it was another story. The mice were all
     brought back, and they all woke up. There was nothing wrong with them.
    As you might imagine, the team at DARPA is pretty excited about this. 5 And so are a lot of other people. After the first experiments, Roth founded a private company, Ikaria, to turn the poison
     gas into medical therapies. By the time it merged with a larger company in 2007, the business was valued at $670 million. 6
    Asked what drives him, Roth chuckles. Then he says it’s simple: people die, and they don’t want to. “We’re trying to extend
     survival. If you go to most physicians, they say, ‘Time of death is whatever,’ and you ask, ‘Why did he die?’ A lot of physicians
     will say it’s because of a failure to perfuse tissues with enough oxygen. Whether it’s cardiac arrest or cancer, it’s the
     inability of blood to get to some essential organ,” said Roth. “Is it true? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know why anyone ever
     dies. I think about it a lot.”
    Roth raises an essential question,
the
essential question: whether it’s a gunshot wound or cancer, drowning or a heart attack, what do the endgames have in common?
     In theory, the damage from almost any injury or illness could be repaired given enough time. Massive wounds can be pieced
     together, and even hearts can be replaced.
    It’s all about time. When the heart misses a beat, an hourglass starts running. Up to now, we’ve been measuring time in seconds
     and minutes, an hour or two at most. CPR might stop the falling sand for a few
minutes
. Zeyad Barazanji and Mike Mertz are alive because someone used those precious minutes to pump on their chests, keeping blood
     and oxygen going to their vital organs. Anna Bagenholm got an extra three
hours
. She’s alive because she was doused in a freezing stream, and her metabolism slowed enough that there was time to get her
     to a hospital before too many cells inside her brain and heart could die.
    Seconds, minutes, hours. Sure, these are great achievements in a crisis where every second counts, but let’s use our imagination
     to take a step further, to see if we could stop the sands of the hourglass entirely—or at least slow them to an imperceptible
     trickle. There are a handful of tantalizing examples, which suggest there might be a way to do just that.
    One especially dramatic story of survival belongs to a thirty-five-year-old man named Mitsutaka Uchikoshi from Nishinomiya,
     Japan. One afternoon