Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Medicine Science

Humans Placed in Suspended Animation For the First Time (newscientist.com) 166

Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death. From a report: Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it "a little surreal" when they first did it. He wouldn't reveal how many people had survived as a result. The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma -- such as a gunshot or stab wound -- and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive. EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient's brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body -- which would otherwise be classified as dead -- is moved to the operating theatre. A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person's injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Humans Placed in Suspended Animation For the First Time

Comments Filter:
  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @04:53PM (#59436596)

    how long till Cryo-Prisons?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Anywhere from negative a few months, to a few months depending on whether or not China is already doing it without telling us.

    • Corpsicles! As predicted by Larry Niven.
      • by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:32PM (#59436768) Homepage

        I've never seen how this is a effective form of punishment. You freeze them for their sentence. Then when the term is up you release them. Sure their friends and relatives will grow older, die, or move on but that will happen in real time anyway.

        For the prisoner, you are suspended, then you wake up. From your point of view no time has passed. I just don't see any kind of punishment there. If I had choice to spend my prison time in real time or suspended animation, I would take the latter.

        Now if you parted them out and/or didn't wake them up, that is wombat of a different pedigree.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • John Spartan was conscious for his whole sentence

        • If long term suspended animation that doesn't age a person ever becomes viable, people will be paying a lot of money to go to the future. Anyone suffering from a disease that might be curable in a few hundred years would certainly give it a try.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • For the prisoner, you are suspended, then you wake up. From your point of view no time has passed. I just don't see any kind of punishment there.

          Hmmm...consider "normal life" in, say, 1875. Then consider the same in 1975. Care to make a guess what it's going to be like in 2075?

          Now, imagine that you grew up starting in 1850. But after a bad decision, you spent from 1875 to 1975 suspended. You're 25, with whatever passed for "normal education" wherever you live in 1874-, and living in a world where man h

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 21, 2019 @11:19AM (#59438962) Homepage Journal

            Great, now we have an ex-con who has had zero time for reformation or to reflect on their crimes, released into a world where it's extremely difficult for them to make something of their life.

            Arguably prison sentences should be "until reformed", not some arbitrary time period. Determining if someone is reformed means psychologists and eventually letting them return to society on day release or something, to prove they can go straight.

            • by jwhyche ( 6192 )

              Great, now we have an ex-con who has had zero time for reformation or to reflect on their crimes, released into a world where it's extremely difficult for them to make something of their life.

              This exactly. The movie Demolition Man, horrible movie I know, touched on this. When John Spartan and Simon Phoenix came off the ice they found themselves in a future where they had zero skills. They both had to fall back on skills that put them on ice to start with. I know they where supposed to be re-educated on ice but that didn't happen, so it shows what would happen.

        • >I've never seen how this is a effective form of punishment.
          Agreed. One-way time-travel to the future has some serious down sides, but it doesn't exactly scream "punishment".

          However, it *is* a humane and extremely effective way to remove criminals from the present as effectively as a death sentence, and they'll be somebody else's problem when they get out. So I could see it catching on anyway, if it weren't more expensive than imprisonment.

          I could also see it being a popular loophole around prison sent

      • Corpsicles! As predicted by Larry Niven.

        The strawberry and orange flavored ones are the best.

        • Corpsicles! As predicted by Larry Niven.

          The strawberry and orange flavored ones are the best.

          Orange all day , twice on Sunday. Fuck strawberry. I mean unless it's the only flavor left, then it's ok.

      • by shanen ( 462549 )

        Corpsicles! As predicted by Larry Niven.

        When? Philip Dick wrote Ubik around 1969. In that version the corpsicles are never actually revived, but can be communicated with as desired (within limits).

        (Just finished reading it today.)

    • I'm more interested in knowing how they determine

      they will have lost more than half their blood.

      Is there a machine or a test that can know blood volume remaining in the body? I could search this but there are probably medical geeks here.

      I'm thinking of a guy who is shot on a battlefield. A medic gets to him laying in a pool of blood. Maybe a couple of IBDs and a tourniquet are used to get him to a hospital....how do we know he is half or more empty without quantifying what leaked out?

      • by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Blood pressure is a pretty good proxy. If you don't have adequate blood volume, the heart won't be able to keep adequate flow to keep the pressure up, at which point everything just kind of shuts down. Also, the fact that you've been shot and your heart has stopped is a pretty good indicator. :-)

        • I figured it had something to do with BP, but wasn't sure how reliable it could be since that varies so much person to person.
      • > Is there a machine or a test that can know blood volume remaining in the body? I could search this but there are probably medical geeks here.

        Blood pressure, most likely.

      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        You can tell by examining the patient. Racing pulse, low/barely palpable blood pressure, increased respiratory rate, disorientation, aggressive behavior, loss of sphincter control and cold, clammy skin.
      • by Ambvai ( 1106941 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:58PM (#59436884)

        According to The Internet, once you go past 30% blood loss your blood pressure and heart rate will start showing severe symptoms. Past 40% is basically imminent death unless you happen to be in a hospital already, so beyond that, it doesn't really matter.

        There are specific medical tests to get a more accurate number, but given that blood loss of this nature tends to be an emergency, blood pressure and expected approximate body weight are the main metrics used since they'll get you to 'good enough' in almost every case.

        • According to The Internet, once you go past 30% blood loss your blood pressure and heart rate will start showing severe symptoms. Past 40% is basically imminent death unless you happen to be in a hospital already, so beyond that, it doesn't really matter.

          There are specific medical tests to get a more accurate number, but given that blood loss of this nature tends to be an emergency, blood pressure and expected approximate body weight are the main metrics used since they'll get you to 'good enough' in almost every case.

          If you have a hole or several holes, and the heart is still pumping there is only a matter of time before it all leaks out. If they can see the hole(s) , and they know the approximate time of trauma I imagine they just start running some calculus.

          Whats that? you have a leak in a conical shaped tank?

          Water is poured at the rate of 8 cubic feet per minute into a conical-shaped tank, 20 ft deep and 10 ft in diameter at the top. If the tank has a leak in the bottom and the water level is rising at the rate of 1

          • That is all well and good for static systems.
            But, the body is filled with all kinds of reactive and regulated non-linearities.

            In the body, "leaking holes" have ways of sealing themselves, or changing size and leak rate based on momentary conditions. The related rate problem you posit has no analogue in the body. For instance, a hole in a blood vessel will get smaller as the vessel depressurizes and elastic recoils. Veins will reach a critical sub-atmospheric pressure and collapse. Low flows will acceler

      • Primer on blood loss (Score:5, Informative)

        by az-saguaro ( 1231754 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @07:12PM (#59437144)

        Understanding blood volume and how to measure it is basic stuff in surgery and surgical research, our mature understanding of it going back to mid 20th century. But, it is not an easy thing to do, and there are a lot of little caveats that make it hard to determine in a living subject. The techniques depend on "indicator dilution" methods that are themselves very dynamic and prone to error, offsets, or drift, because they depend on inject chemicals that are rapidly bound, excreted, or metabolized. The practical side of this is that it is easy to implement in an animal lab or human volunteers, harder to implement in a clinical studies center, and essentially impossible in ordinary every day hospital care. We have NO handy-dandy bedside test or imaging that gives us blood volume. It sure would be nice to know that number in some patients, but we simply don't have a convenient way.

        However, blood volume per se is not the crucial parameter. Blood flow is the key item, as ml blood per gram of tissue per minute. Normal blood volume in a healthy person, and normal red blood cell and hemoglobin counts, have a built in excess or capacitance to serve as a reserve to accommodates bleeding or trauma. That is why you can donate a unit of blood over lunch break, 500 ml, 10% of typical adult blood volume, without the slightest awareness of it. The body has remarkable chemical, cardiovascular, neurological, and endocrine responses that can compensate for acute blood loss, thereby maintaining normal blood flow despite the loss of volume. For the average adult, total body blood flow, "cardiac output", is about 5 l / min. When blood loss exceeds a volume where total body blood flow cannot be sustained at that level, then the body knows how to selectively clamp down flow to non-essential ischemia-tolerant tissues or organs in order to preserve normal blood flow to essential organs. When blood loss goes yet farther, then blood flow becomes critically reduced to the essential organs, and that is when all the bad stuff happens.

        Ischemic tissues, perfusion and oxygen deprived, must switch over to anaerobic forms of metabolism, for which energy supply is limited. Organic acids build up. Critical cell subsystems and organelles become impaired to the point that they cannot function, and cells become leaky so that trans-membrane chemistry starts to equilibrate, and eventually basic energy conversion systems in the cell are irreparably degraded from which there is no recovery.

        Although we cannot directly measure blood volume in ordinary patients, we know in exquisite detail how other systems and physical signs correlate with these various degrees of deprivation and dysfunction, things such as heart rate, blood pressure, urine output, respiratory patterns, and various chemicals. The following are rules of thumb. If you lose 10% of volume, there is little perceptible acute change, same as donating a unit of blood. In surgery, our criteria for transfusion are not based on blood volume lost (which we always estimate but have no accurate measure of) or volume remaining (as we cannot measure it), rather on heart rate (high) and blood pressure (low), and those change start at about 20% volume loss. At 30% volume loss, internal shuffling of perfusion is apparent as urine flow starts to diminish - this is the first clinical physical sign of significant blood loss with risk for progressive problems if not corrected, although if losses are limited to 30% without treatment, the patient will likely recover with transient renal dysfunction being the main consequence. By this point, there will be chemical changes that can be detected on standard clinical blood tests, such as high lactic acid. Beyond that, progressive organ dysfunction is obvious. At 40% volume loss, transient renal injury, liver dysfunction, pulmonary complications, neurological changes, and multiple metabolic imbalances will all be present. Of course, the time at those lower levels matter, so that 40% loss for 15 minutes before resuscitation isn't too ba

      • As another reported in a longer version. They don't need to know to the Milliliter how much blood was lost. At 50% loss your heart stops.

        Patient comes in with heart stopped and massive blood loss, what's the assumed blood loss? >50%

        It's not rocket science, it's a pretty simple thing to know if someone's lost enough blood for their heart to stop because, their heart stops.

    • Never.... no free labor and 100% burden on the state for care.... but, I suppose you wouldn't have to feed one. But then again, there is really no punishment since, to the criminal, it will seem instantaneous time served. You will have a 80 year old functioning with a 20 year old's life experience and mental capacity and no recrimination... have fun on the street guy!

      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        All of his criminal contacts are gone or moved on, no family left that knows him as anything but a thawed out stranger. Meanwhile, all his criminal knowledge is out of date.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Such a strange concept.

      There are three major purposes for prisons, how you weight each one depending on your personal beliefs:

      1) punishment (hopefully to provide deterrence)
      2) rehabilitation
      3) public safety

      Suspending prisoners doesn't accomplish 2 or 3 (presumably you let them out when their sentence is finished) and doesn't really seem too effective for 1, which is itself not particularly effective anyway.

      • Such a strange concept.

        There are three major purposes for prisons, how you weight each one depending on your personal beliefs:

        1) punishment (hopefully to provide deterrence)
        2) rehabilitation
        3) public safety

        Suspending prisoners doesn't accomplish 2 or 3 (presumably you let them out when their sentence is finished) and doesn't really seem too effective for 1, which is itself not particularly effective anyway.

        Cryo-prisons really only address #3

        And it isn't without merit. But prisons are really costly and really ineffective at accomplishing much else anyway. In fact most people usually just become worse criminals as a result of being in prison.

        The number of people currently incarcerated does not accurately reflect the the number of individuals that are a danger to society.

        A majority would respond much better to help and support.

    • That would serve little purpose. If the goal is to never let them out - then a death sentence would be better - it would serve the same goal (they've never again be conscious) and SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper and more efficient.

      If the goal is for rehabilitation and reintegration into society, then suspended animation serves no purpose - they'd not have any time to "reflect" on their actions or be reconditioned, so in that case it would be a useless pause in their existence.

      If this technology is perfected it would

      • by suutar ( 1860506 )

        If we pull in the Demolition Man world as many of these comments seem to do, you can reprogram people while they're frozen, both adding skills and knowledge and blocking certain actions; this could be used for rehabilitation. If it works right, of course.

        • by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

          If it works right, why wouldn't you do this for everyone? I'm sure most students would rather wake up from a decade of cryo-sleep with knowledge of calculus than actually spending a decade sitting in classrooms.

        • If we pull in the Demolition Man world as many of these comments seem to do, you can reprogram people while they're frozen, both adding skills and knowledge and blocking certain actions; this could be used for rehabilitation. If it works right, of course.

          Interesting, I recently read an article about a new technology that is being used to augment the sleep cycle to increase the speed of learning. It is largely believed that the REM cycle of sleep is responsible for organizing and storing the details of the day. They have potentially found a way to improve this process by enhancing the efficiency by recording the electric impulse and then repeating that back over the brain during sleep.

          Sounds a bit scary. But what gave me chills was when the lead scientist

    • by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      how long till Cryo-Prisons?

      I think the Cryo-Prisons come before the 3 sea shells

    • how long till Cryo-Prisons?

      if eternal life were announced, Slashdotters would whine about boredom.

      • how long till Cryo-Prisons?

        if eternal life were announced, Slashdotters would whine about boredom.

        Well... for one it means having kids wouldn't be a thing anymore.

    • You can't rehabilitate someone who can't experience anything, it would be pointless. Yes it would punish them but they would learn nothing.

    • how long till Cryo-Prisons?

      Depends on how much you/we care if the prisoners can be revived... Freezing them is the easy part.

    • Forever, Some might pay for this privilege, either to wait for a cure to some currently incurable disease, or maybe hoping for a cure to debilitating diseases like Parkinsons. Other customers might include people who think the future is going to offer them something they can't have now like space travel. Nope, cryo-prisons only in movies.
    • How long till Taco Bell ?
    • I never understood cryo-prison. So you go to sleep, and wake up years later in a completely new world. Big deal. What's the punishment, to a hardened criminal or psychopath? Rather, making them COUNT the hours of each day, for thousands of days - THAT is punishment...
    • if not then we've got a ways to go still.
  • I mean cold..

    Anything to increase the amount of time available to fix a critical injury is fine by me, assuming the process doesn't kill more people than would have died without it or cause serious brain injuries due to lack of oxygen.

    • or cause serious brain injuries due to lack of oxygen.

      Uh, what? You don't seem to understand what's going on here. That's *precisely* what this technique is designed to PREVENT!!!

      Without cooling, once your heart stops your brain only has about 4 minutes before you start getting brain damage from lack of oxygen.

      With immediate cooling, your brain's metabolism is slowed so much that those 4 minutes of oxygen can get stretched out to a couple of HOURS before brain damage sets in.

      • I think he knew that, he just had a brain freeze.

      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Lots of things are designed to do things they fail at.

        Restarting the heart, CPR, or a bypass machine could help minimize brain damage. Presumably it does in some fraction of the 5% who survive.

        Blood replacement, cooling, "leisurely" surgery and rewarming could result in increased morbidity and/or mortality. Presumably they have pretty good preliminary evidence that it does not, because they got an ethics committee to approve the study.

        • Lots of things are designed to do things they fail at.

          Sure, I mean, it's possible that stitches could OPEN wounds further, and wrapping a wound in bandages could expose MORE of it...

          We should probably all be super concerned about those possibilities.

        • The ethics committee approved the experiment because otherwise the guy was absolutely, positively, dead, beyond any medical doubt whatsoever. He had precisely zero chance of survival without the experiment.

          Ethics committees are generally willing to allow experiments under these circumstances: the worst possible outcome of the experiment is exactly the same as what would happen if they didn't try it, and any other outcome is better.

        • None of those does any good when the problem is a giant hole in an artery or vein. You just pump the blood out faster.

          Chilling them is SOP when you do certain operations, like a Bentall procedure (replacing the aortic valve and aortic root in one go). You have to go on complete circulatory arrest for 15-30 minutes minimum, in addition to the time on bypass, to make it possible. You put them on bypass and use the pump to chill the body, then you turn the pump off to do the finicky bits. You then restart the
  • So how do they get consent to try this experimental procedure?

    • Re:Consent? (Score:5, Informative)

      by egr ( 932620 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:17PM (#59436694) Journal
      It is right in TFA:

      The trial was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA made it exempt from needing patient consent as the participants’ injuries are likely to be fatal and there is no alternative treatment. The team had discussions with the local community and placed ads in newspapers describing the trial, pointing people to a website where they can opt out.

    • Re:Consent? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:36PM (#59436780)

      Unless you're wearing something like a "Do Not Resuscitate" bracelet, consent in traumatic scenarios is basically implied. If I keel over outside my office with a stroke and the EMS rushes me to the hospital unconscious, they don't wait for consent before operating.

      • > they don't wait for consent before operating.

        or charging so much you need to sell your house when you recover....

      • Re:Consent? (Score:5, Informative)

        by demonlapin ( 527802 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @08:14PM (#59437354) Homepage Journal
        Emergency consent (at least in my state) can also be obtained by the attestation of two physicians that the procedure is a necessary thing to save a life - at least if no advanced directive contradicts it. Typically, the surgeon and anesthesiologist do this. We did it all the time for major trauma when I was a resident. I don't work in a hospital that takes that stuff these days, but I probably do it once or twice a year on someone who's going down the tubes when the family isn't available in person or by phone.
  • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:24PM (#59436724)

    They have been doing this research on humans since 2014 when the protocol for doing this was developed and approved for research purposes. Before that, they did experiments on dogs, which seemed to be promising. The principle researcher doing the human trial has been promising his research would be published "within a year" since 2014. It's been 5 years and two hospitals in two locations now with no real reports to see. Something isn't right.

    I have a bad feeling that this procedure is not working so well and the researcher is desperately trying to find the "magic process" that actually ends up helping mortality rates. As it stands, the patients are very near death if they qualify for the trial, my guess is that they are just not seeing any improved survival rates in their study so they keep stretching it out hoping to find some demographic or situation that justifies the heroic efforts and increased risks to the patient this process would entail.

    • Are you sure? It says the "first time".

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      I don't know whether this particular variation is improving survival rates, but a less dramatic (and shorter delay) version did even in the 1970's. So I see no reason to doubt it's success in principle. But if all your experimental subjects are already moribund, any survival rate is quite unlikely.

      That said, the procedure is probably quite expensive, requiring specialized equipment and a specially trained operating theater staff (including surgeons), so I don't think you should expect it to become routine

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The problem could also be that people that end up at the hospital with uncontrolled bleeding and massive blood loss, have sustained major internal trauma so they are likely to dies even if blood loss weren't an issue
    • by urusan ( 1755332 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @06:48PM (#59437058)

      I dunno, 5 years of work on trials for a rare kind of case doesn't seem too outlandish. It says that it'll take them at least a year to get 20 cases for the study. I wonder how long it took them to get approval in the first place.

      You say there were 2 hospitals in 2 locations, what's your source on that?

      • by urusan ( 1755332 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @07:06PM (#59437126)

        I found more information through news articles linked to by Wikipedia's page on the procedure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        It sounds like the problem was that the first hospital he was working at just didn't have enough serious cases to meet the strict criteria where he would be allowed to apply EPR. https://www.newyorker.com/maga... [newyorker.com] That lost him a year or two before he moved to a more violent location to start over. The rest of the time was basically just waiting for 20 cases to roll into the hospital he was located at to become part of the study (10 experimental plus 10 control).

        This makes sense, while extreme trauma isn't that rare when you look at the whole nation, it's fairly rare in any given location, especially if you get down to the level of a single hospital rather than the entire city. To speed up this kind of study, you'd have to deploy EPR across many hospitals, but he's in just one hospital.

        Good science takes time.

        That said, unless there's an amazing effect there's a good chance that with just 10 experimental cases that we still won't have good data. Perhaps though the idea here is to show that it's not a danger to humans, so combined with the promise from the animal data, there can be a wider trial deployed across multiple locations.

  • Nothing new (Score:5, Funny)

    by Weirsbaski ( 585954 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @05:39PM (#59436804)
    This is nothing new- I was once in a work meeting that went so slow that time literally stopped for me. And my manager didn't even offer to use expensive cooling equipment.
    • except corporate droids aren't ever revived, we are the walking dead.

    • The problem was your manager's mouth was moving at a non-negligible fraction of the speed of light. For him, time passed normally - but for those of you observing the meeting, time dilated for the entire period he was talking.

  • This begs the questions...

    what's cooler than being cool?

  • not dead (Score:4, Informative)

    by aepervius ( 535155 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @06:11PM (#59436920)
    "which would be classified as dead" nope it would be classified as "clinically dead" which is actually not what you mean, it just mean that there is a cardiac arrest and breathing stopped and nothing else. The term is important to differentiate from brain death where there has been irreversible cessation of brain activity - which is the real death "you are dead here is your certificate" - in the very far past before resuscitation procedure pretty much if you were clinically dead you were soon to be brain dead. Same difference. But in the last decades it has stopped being true, you can be in cardiac arrest (and routinely for some operation you are set in such a state) and still be brought back. Personally I think they should drop the term clinically dead, as it is obviously confusing people, e.g. the "you would be classified as dead" no you would not until there is irreversible brain death unless you use the clinical death which is NOT what lay person mean with death. The term is outdated IMO and instead of clinical death they should be using I dunno "cardiac circulation breach" or something.
    • Re:not dead (Score:5, Funny)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @06:34PM (#59437026)

      "which would be classified as dead" nope it would be classified as "clinically dead" which is actually not what you mean, it just mean that there is a cardiac arrest and breathing stopped and nothing else. The term is important to differentiate from brain death where there has been irreversible cessation of brain activity

      "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do."

      "What's that?"

      "Go through his pockets and look for loose change."

      • Stop hassling him.. He's been mostly dead all day. You moved your head! Doesn't that make you happy? Love that show..
  • by slickwillie ( 34689 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @06:14PM (#59436936)
    Haven't the Russians been doing this for centuries? Except they use vodka instead of water and they jump into frozen lakes on for pleasure.
  • by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @06:48PM (#59437062)

    Just like backups, putting a human into suspended animation is stupidly easy. Anyone can do it with any IQ.

    The hard part, of course, is getting said human out of suspended animation.

    Just like computer backups - any idiot can write a backup program. However, writing the program to restore the backup is very tricky.

  • by smoot123 ( 1027084 ) on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @08:07PM (#59437340)

    My kids basically went into suspended animation for their entire school vacations.

  • If you die of the gunshot wound, there is nobody left to send the 750k bill to.

    Now we can freeze you right before you die, just long enough for the bill to hit your estate.

    Oh, you can't afford the freezer? No problem. btw, your bill is past due.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Working...