NASA recently discussed plans to put astronauts in a state of temporary cessation of vital functions. A hospital in Pennsylvania managed to put patients in a similar state.
A hospital in Michigan, run by the Cryonics Institute, has 117 patients who are temporarily disabled. But the science fiction technology that has begun to come to fruition raises concerns and legal questions.
A still from the 1965 science fiction series Lost in Space, with the Robinson family frozen.
Photo: Still from the 1965 science fiction series Lost in Space, the Robinson family is frozen. Photo: CBS Television / Wikimedia Commons / Enrico Giuseppe Agostoni / iStock / Thinkstock
Most of the patients who are introduced in a state of artificial clinical death are legally considered dead, doctors state their death. At Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, fatally gun-wounded patients are immersed in a dormant state to buy more time for surgery.
Lawyer Kamil Muzyka asks: "Why is a person who is temporarily brought into a state of artificial clinical death for transportation to a hospital, surgery and subsequent resuscitation treated as a deceased?"
Muzyka specializes in industrial property law and is interested in legal aspects related to artificial intelligence. He also examines the question of hypothetical mining on asteroids from the perspective of international space law. He wrote an article on these issues published by the Institute for Ethics and Advanced Technology, a Connecticut-based nongovernmental organization.
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According to him, although at the current technological level, declaring people who are in a state of artificial clinical death as dead may be justified, this could lead to problems in the future.
Muzyka believes that one of the solutions would be to appoint a representative for the patient, because he himself cannot legally express his will. According to him, it would be easier than first declaring a person “dead in absentia” and then canceling it after resuscitation. With the latter approach, difficulties may arise in restoring property rights and other rights.
If the introduction of cessation of vital functions becomes widespread in the future, then lawyers should "do everything to create appropriate legislation so that artificial clinical death is considered a life-saving procedure, and not death or the possibility of obtaining donor organs."
In one method of immersion in artificial clinical death, a cold saline solution is poured into the brain and heart, which circulates throughout the body instead of blood. In this case, the body is greatly cooled.
Surgeon Peter Rea of the University of Arizona, who developed the technique, said in an interview with New Scientist in March: “With these experiments, the definition of a deceased person has changed … Every day at work, people die. They show no signs of life, they have no pulse, no brain activity. I sign the death certificate knowing in my heart that they are not really dead. I could freeze them. But I have to put them in a bag."
The Cryonics Institute's laboratories are located in Florida and have branches throughout America, the organization's website says. The freezing service fee is $ 88,000.
Mark Shaffer, NASA's senior aeronautical engineer, spoke at the International Astronomical Congress in Toronto this month about the introduction of artificially near death astronauts for flights to Mars, according to the Liberty Voice Guardian.