I found this article on digg.com (after reading about all the controversy - wow, nerds get fiesty when provoked) today and found it fascinating. It talks about what it really means to be "dead", and how it's almost the opposite of what we've been teaching our medical community until now.
From what I understand, when someone has a heart attack, it's true that their heart stops beating, but the cells actually remain alive and intact. It's only when those cells become re-oxygenated (which is usually during the time the paramedics revive the victim) that they release their self-destructive "stuff" and start to die. According to the article, a new strategy is to actually cool down the body of a heart attack victim and "bring them back to life" really slowly and avoid the release of the "suicidal chemical" the mitochondria would otherwise release. It has an 85% success rate, while the old (a.k.a. current) method had only 15% of people survive. It's amazing!
To think that we could look back in a few decades from now and realize that we could have saved so many people and we had the strategy all wrong. Kind of like how a few centuries ago, people would bury the "dead" who were really just in comas and would actually wake back up while buried. ("Saved by the bell" apparently stems from that, when during the Plague people were being buried alive but unconscious, and morticians started tying bells to their hands before being buried so that they could save them if they woke up. Can we say creepy?!)
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