This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Herbert West, Reanimator, Lives

We do well to heed the warnings uber-materialist H. P. Lovecraft could give us:

I was West’s closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments -- grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.

Nonetheless, the headline out of Kiwi-land screams: Boffins create zombie dogs

[Note: a "boffin" is a British slang term for scientist. According to OED, its chief meaning is "an elderly naval officer;" but it also connotes "A person engaged in ‘back-room’ scientific or technical research. Hence boffin(e)ry, boffins collectively; also, the activity of a boffin. The term seems to have been first applied by members of the Royal Air Force to scientists working on radar."]

The news article reads:

Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medical advances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours,

But even this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.
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During the procedure blood is replaced with saline solution at a few degrees above zero. The dogs' body temperature drops to only 7C, compared with the usual 37C, inducing a state of hypothermia before death.

Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved.

Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery. The dogs are brought back to life by returning the blood to their bodies,giving them 100 per cent oxygen and applying electric shocks to restart their hearts.

Tests show they are perfectly normal, with no brain damage.

"The results are stunning. I think in 10 years we will be able to prevent death in a certain segment of those using this technology," said one US battlefield doctor.

This will certainly make problematic certain present medical definitions of death. It will also force Christians to confront the Tradition's holy anthropology. I fear that many present-day Christians will take their cue first from rationalist scientism, and than spread a veneer of Christianity over them, making the human soul an adjunct of materialist philosophy. Instead, they first should chew on meaty patristic anthropology and then conform scientific findings to that sacred understanding. An excellent example in this regard is St. Theophan the Recluse in his The Path to Salvation and The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attunded to It. Also, Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose's The Soul After Death, is an excellent resource.

Posted by Clifton at June 28, 2005 09:10 AM | TrackBack