The technology of death

Did you know that a false news in a French newspaper about the death of Alfred Nobel (instead of the death of his brother) and whose title was "the merchant of death passed away" caused him to dedicate his inheritance to the benefit of humanity. And when will all humanity pass from the world?

When you open the newspaper, or the news on TV, you usually get bad news. The earth is slowly warming up, and in a few decades the oil will run out, and even the birds can no longer be fed breadcrumbs without getting bird flu.
But in no newspaper and in no news release do we talk about the real disaster, the inevitable tragedy towards which we walk with our eyes open and our heads held high. Gentlemen, in something like eighty years, plus or minus twenty years on average, we will all be dead. Yes, there's no getting away from this hard news. Everyone you know, everyone you loved, all the bad and all the good, all the wise and all the stupid - we will all be dead.

So much for the bad news. And for those who are now expecting good news, then there is none. We are all dying, only some of us haven't faced it yet. As the famous proverb says: nothing is certain in life, except death and Zvika Peak.

This chapter will deal with technology and the history of death. We will talk about what it is to die, about how to die properly, about how to determine who is dead and who is alive, about embalming and more advanced body preservation technologies and for dessert, we will kill the entire universe. Just to put things in proportion.
But I didn't come to spoil the party, you know, and constantly remind you that we're going to die. Therefore, I will try not to say about people that they are 'dead', during the whole program, if possible. lets start.

People have been retarded throughout known history, of course, and I also have reasonable grounds to believe that they didn't live forever before known history either. There are estimates, which to be honest, I'm not really sure are based on actual research, that over a hundred billion people have kicked the bucket since the dawn of mankind. It seems that we, the living, are in a certain minority.

Although death has always accompanied us like a dark shadow, rarely have death had such a dramatic impact on human history as during the Black Plague. The Black Plague, or 'Black Death', as this terrible disease was called, struck Europe towards the middle of the twelfth century and pushed one-third to two-thirds of the European population over the edge. Yes, you read that right. One-third to two-thirds of the entire European population, and many millions more from around the world. It is hard to grasp the meaning of this number the first time you hear it. Entire cities were emptied of their inhabitants, entire villages were wiped off the face of the earth, there was hardly a single family that managed to escape the cruel fate, there was not a single person who did not lose a loved one. You have to stop and think about it, really reflect on it, to understand the magnitude of the tragedy: one third to two thirds.

The Black Death had a huge impact on humanity. You could make a whole program about the black plague and its results, but I will give only one example this time. Because the population is so drastically reduced, suddenly there were lots of vacant plots of land. But as we said, one-third to two-thirds of the farmers decided that they preferred to fertilize the soil personally, so there was a huge shortage of working hands. Those who controlled the land were, of course, the nobles - but suddenly a situation arose where there was a demand for tillers, without whom all this land would be useless. The balance of power has changed: the nobles need the peasants, just as much, if not more, than the peasants need the nobles. The familiar social structure of the Middle Ages received quite a shock here.

But the effect of the black plague that I want to talk about in our context, was on the Catholic Church. Among the many millions who went to visit Jesus at home, there were naturally also multitudes of priests and church people. This created a severe shortage of people who knew how to pray properly, how to perform religious ceremonies and the like. The church had to recruit many young and inexperienced priests and they had to be educated quickly.

One of the cornerstones of the clergy profession is the management of death matters in the community. In order to pass on the required knowledge to the new priests, the book 'Ars Moraindi' was written, loosely translated: 'The Art of Death'. The book, entitled Macabre-something, was written by an anonymous author, probably a monk or other churchman, and is divided into several parts.

The first part addresses the person who is about to close the basta, and explains to him that death is not so terrible - if you are a Christian, of course. The second part lists the temptations that the dying person faces, such as despair, or impatience or loss of faith and how to resist them. The following sections guide the priest and the family on how to behave in the midst of the deceased-to-be, how to console, how to pray and how to conduct the relevant ceremonies.

The book 'Ars Moriandi' was very popular in the Middle Ages, and was widely distributed, including an illustrated version for those who cannot read. The importance of the book is twofold. First, it was the first time that someone defined officially and in writing how one should die, and what a 'good death' is. The church always kept this knowledge to itself, as a source of power, and the book dispersed the knowledge (and power) in the community and, in the end, reduced the value of the church. Second, until that time the emphasis was on the fate of all humanity at the time of the end of days. Ares Moriandi, on the other hand, gave emphasis mainly to the individual destiny of each and every person, thus he was part of a trend that put the person at the center, and not humanity as a collective. This trend gradually gained momentum until the height of humanism during the Renaissance. The French philosopher Voltaire defined it well, in the 18th century, when he was on his deathbed and was asked by the priest to deny the devil. Voltaire answered him - now is not the time to make new enemies.

So we saw that there is already an instruction book that explains how to die like a human being. But what is dying, anyway? How do you know if someone is dead or not?
Until not long ago, the definition of death was quite simple: either you were alive or you weren't. It was a quite clear transition, a continuous dividing line between this world and the next, and it was forbidden to bypass. If you had a beating heart and breathing lungs, you were alive. If not, then you are in serious trouble (or all your problems have been solved, depending on your personal approach to the matter).

But starting from the middle of the twentieth century, there was a very serious progress in everything that concerns the techniques of resuscitation. Suddenly, even if your heart stopped beating for a few minutes, and your lungs were no longer pushing air - you could still be brought back from never-never-land back to the hospital. Basically, if you can be brought back to life from apparent death, then you were never dead.

Cessation of blood flow and breathing is today defined as 'clinical death'. Clinical death, to simplify a whole medical theory here, means that you have all the outward signs of someone from the marble club, but you are not dead yet. From a state of clinical death it is possible to return to life if medical help arrives within a few minutes. The meaning is that death stopped being something sharp and clear, yes or no, zero or one - and became a continuous process. It is very difficult to put your finger on the point in this continuous process where you can say with absolute certainty that you stopped being a member of a health fund and became another satisfied customer of a Kadisha company.

Moreover, the opposite situation also arises: a person can be clinically alive, and still be dead if his brain has stopped functioning. But the question of 'brain death' is not a simple question either. The brain is divided into different areas with specific functions: the frontal lobe, for example, is considered to be the area where the 'higher' thought activity takes place - memory, personality, thoughts, everything that makes us human. The brainstem, on the other hand, is the most ancient and primitive area of ​​the brain, a relic from early periods of evolution, and is responsible for the most basic actions in the body such as pulse and breathing. When the doctors and legislators came to define what 'brain death' is, the question immediately arose as to which part of the brain must die in order for the rest of the body to agree to accept the condition, because it is certainly possible that the frontal lobe will stop functioning but the brain stem will continue to keep the body alive for a long time.

This question, when a person is officially considered dead, is not just a philosophical one. It is really critical regarding the whole question of organ transplantation. It is necessary to establish with certainty that you are dead, so that you can be turned into a spare parts warehouse. In the United States, a special presidential commission examined this question in 1981. Usually, committees are not known for doing a particularly good job: for those who don't know, a camel is a cat designed by a committee. This committee, unusually, did a good job. It defined brain death as the death of the entire brain, without exception, and this definition has been accepted as the standard in most countries around the world.

If you get a bunch of doctors together, and ask them if they can tell a dead person when they see one, most of them will likely say yes. It's a matter of professional pride. Not every doctor can help you live, but being a doctor and not knowing the difference between a living person and a dead person is like being a professional chess player and not remembering how the horse moves.

But history proves that this is not true. These misses happened - and they were much more common than you might think. The statistical estimates I've read speak of a misdiagnosis of death in one out of a thousand to one out of a hundred cases, as absurd as that sounds. Diagnosing someone as dead while they are actually still alive can result from various health conditions such as certain diseases or toxins that result in such severe withdrawal of life signs that even a professional may be confused.

Stories of people being brought to burial and then brought back to life were extremely common in the past. For example, a woman named Marjorie Elphinson was buried in the 17th century in Scotland. Shortly after, grave robbers broke into the fresh grave and tried to steal the jewelry she was wearing - Marjorie surprised them when she started moaning loudly. The robbers fled as long as they could, and Marjorie returned to her home and continued to live for a long time. In fact, she returned to her closet only six years after her husband. I'm sure she wasn't an authentic Scotsman but a Pole: with them, as you know, it's 'sick sick sick, widow'.

In another case, a Christian cardinal named Somaglia, lost consciousness in 1837. Everyone was sure that he had joined all the other Christian saints, and it was decided to embalm him (soon we will also talk about embalming). The junta opened the cardinal's chest with a knife - and to his surprise, he discovered that the deceased's heart was still beating! At the same time, the patient also woke up from his coma, unfortunately one minute too late. The deep cut in the chest sent him to the next world.

These cases of misdiagnosis of death were so common that in the 19th century there were many people who were very afraid of the possibility of being buried alive. The thought of the horrible confinement inside the small, stuffy closet was really hard to bear, and a number of inventors tried to find creative solutions to this problem.

One of them was Count Kernicki, a Belgian doctor of law. Karnicki became famous for a clever method he found to prevent cases of being buried alive. His solution was a long tube, one end of which was inserted through a hole in the coffin, and the other end of which reached up to the surface. The end inserted into the coffin contained a ball with a spring, and the ball was placed on the occupant's chest area, it was called that. The end that was on the surface contained an airtight box. If there was movement in the chest, even a relatively small movement, the spring would be released inside the tube, and above the surface the box would be breached and opened to allow air to pass into the grave. At the same time, a flag would also be raised that would signal to passers-by and call for their help. It's a cute patent, no doubt, but in my opinion its genius is actually expressed in another aspect of the invention: this tube was reusable - that is, reusable. If in the end it turned out that the deceased really took his luggage and boarded the last train, they would pull the pipe out of the grave, plug the small hole that was created, and pass the pipe to the next in line.

I don't know of any cases where someone was actually saved thanks to such an invention, but there were quite a lot of variations on ideas like that of Count Karnicki, such as a rescue distillate that would call for help even at night, or a loud bell that would ring. There are those who say that the origin of the phrase 'saved by the bell', ('saved by the bell' in direct translation), is in one such invention - but there is a reasonable chance that this is not the real source of this well-known phrase.

Mistakes of journalistic or media reports about someone dying, while still walking, are actually very common in modern times - perhaps as a result of the faster pace of life that causes faster mortality, at least in the media.

The most famous case that occurred in Israel is the so-called 'death' of MK Amnon Rubinstein. A telephone report was received at the Knesset Secretariat saying that the honorable MK had passed away. Knesset Speaker Avraham Borg delivered an emotional eulogy, Knesset members bowed their heads and stood in silence for a minute. Shortly after it turned out that Rubinstein was much less dead than it seemed, and in fact he was completely alive. The person responsible for this prank was Zalman Shushi, a famous shemale who claimed that he did what he did to attract attention.

In another case, a French newspaper mistakenly reported the death of Alfred Nobel, the famous scientist and inventor of dynamite. Nobel is really a villain, but it was not Alfred Nobel, but Ludwig Nobel - his brother. The French newspaper that published the news, reported the death of the scientist under the headline 'The merchant of death has passed away', and explained to its readers that Nobel became very rich thanks to the dynamite that made it possible to kill the most people in the shortest time. Alfred Nobel was deeply disturbed by this unflattering obituary, and feared that history would remember him posthumously as an evil genius. There is reason to believe that his decision to establish the Nobel Prize to promote science was largely due to this early obituary.

And if we are already dealing with matters of determining death and specifically determining death when the patient is still likely to live, then it is worth mentioning here one of the medical devices that had the greatest impact on preventing such errors: the stethoscope.

The stethoscope, which today is identified more than any other instrument with the medical profession, was invented by Dr. René Laanque in 1816. Until then, in order to listen to the noises inside the chest, the respected doctor had to lean forward and put his ear to the patient's body. Apart from the fact that it's a bit embarrassing for everyone involved, it's neither really hygienic nor really effective: the earpiece of the ear doesn't adhere perfectly to the body, and it's hard to hear the quieter sounds. This problem is especially manifested in the obese patients.

When Dr. Leank encountered a young patient, the embarrassment he felt when he had to press the face of the young woman's breasts made him look for a creative solution. He recalled an acoustic phenomenon that he encountered several times in the past: when you put your ear to a piece of wood, you can perfectly hear every scratching and rustling at the other end of it. Leank, who was also a hobby carpenter, built a suitable sized wooden cylinder, and to his delight found that he could hear the heart and lung sounds much better.

He wrote a very successful book, in which he described the stethoscope and even gave it its name, from the Greek words 'status' (chest) and 'scope' (to look, or examine). He received a lot of publicity and a lot of professional respect, and considered the invention of the stethoscope the greatest achievement of his life. When he was very ill, on his deathbed, he passed his stethoscope to his young nephew, who was a doctor himself. The nephew pressed the stethoscope to Lanke's chest, and heard the all-too-familiar murmurs of tuberculosis. There is a certain irony in this, that the stethoscope that was the pride of Laanck's life, is the one with the help of which the diagnosis was made for the disease that ultimately took his life.

Leanke's stethoscope was very primitive, and other doctors perfected it over the years to the form we know today.

The one who tested the use of the stethoscope as a means of diagnosing death was Dr. Eugene Boucho, who even won the prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1846 for the best work on 'Signs of death and prevention of premature burial'. The doctor's competitors offered very creative solutions for accurate death diagnosis: for example, a long needle that was inserted into the heart and at the top was a small flag that would wave if the heart was beating. Or special forceps for pinching the nipples, which I think if you don't already die when they test you with them, you must be very sorry for it.
The stethoscope made it possible to know with almost absolute certainty whether the heart was still beating or not, and Dr. Buchou suggested that if you do not hear the heart's activity for two minutes, you can determine with certainty that the subject has joined those who prefer to smell the flowers from below. Under pressure from his critics, Dr. Bocho agreed to extend the test time to five minutes - which may have seemed a short time to him, but I'm sure that for some people it can really help them in life.

Let us move on to what happens to the body after death.

Each culture has its own methods of disposing of the body after the funeral ceremony. Burial rites are the most ancient rites known to us today, and there is evidence that even the ancient Neanderthal man used to ritually bury his dead, over two hundred thousand years ago.
In Tibet there are monasteries where it is customary to leave the corpses as food for eagles, as part of the cosmic cycle of life and death in Buddhism, and perhaps because it is sometimes very difficult to dig in the cold Tibetan soil. Also in India there is a community called 'Parsis', who are really Persians in origin, who usually leave the dead to the vultures. Who said Persians are stingy? The BBC reported in 2001 that a serious problem faced by the people of the community was that the eagle population in India was drastically reduced due to a disease that affected the birds, and as a result there was no demand for their special bird food. The council of sages of the community turned to seek assistance from a technological source, because their religion forbids burial of any kind in the ground. The solution was to install mirrors that would concentrate the sun's heat on the body and thus speed up the natural decomposition process.

It is surprising to discover, perhaps, that embalming is one of the oldest technologies in the hands of mankind.

Although without a doubt the most famous mummies originate from ancient Egypt, they are not the oldest. This honor is reserved for mummies from Chinzoro, from South America, in the areas of present-day Chile and Peru. This fact suggests that the ambient temperature and the amount of humidity in the air have a dramatic effect on the preservation of the body, much more so than artificial embalming techniques. The cold and dryness that prevail in the regions of Chile and Peru in question are responsible for the preservation of the seven thousand year old mummies. The censors, if we can call them by that name, began embalming those who preferred to remain at room temperature, as early as five thousand years BC, two thousand years before the ancient Egyptians and a thousand years before the invention of writing.

The origin of the name 'mummy' is from the Arabic word 'mummy', which means bitumen: it is the black substance that, when mixed with gravel, creates asphalt. The name was given to the mummified bodies because bitumen was indeed used in the preservation process of some of the bodies.

The Egyptian embalming process was quite complex, and required lengthy preparation. For the Egyptians, preserving the body was necessary to preserve the soul. Without the body, according to ancient Egyptian belief, the soul would be doomed to wander forever in the twilight zone between this life and the next. In the first step, they would remove the internal organs and put them in jars with a preservative. The body would then be soaked for forty days in a substance that would absorb the moisture and dry it completely, and finally the mummy would be wrapped in many meters of cloth. The glue that was used to stick the fabrics to each other and to the body was also an excellent insulator, preventing air and moisture from entering from the outside.

The Egyptians embalmed each other in commercial quantities, and throughout history thousands of mummies emerged from the Egyptian sands. Most of them, unfortunately, have been lost forever. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that the powder obtained from mummified skin was an important ingredient for many medicines. Many mummies were crushed to dust, and others were burned as fuel instead of wood.

Even today it is customary to embalm important people. Lenin, for example, was embalmed in 1924 and is still preserved in a fairly good condition (at least according to the pictures published on the Internet) for eighty-something years. The modern embalming process is quite fast, mainly thanks to the use of formalin, a chemical that has excellent preservation properties.

If the embalming process is not successful, for some reason, this may have unpleasant consequences. Pope Pius XII was the 1939th Pope, ruling Christendom from 1958 until his death in XNUMX. The Pope's personal physician, Riccardo Lizzi, was a charlatan (so according to many sources) and the drugs he concocted for Pius were quite bad and probably did more harm to his health than otherwise He would take medicine at all. But all of this pales in comparison to the damage Ricardo did to the Pope after Hela decided to feed the worms personally. The personal physician took command of the embalming process of his former boss, but used a private embalming method of his own invention. The unfortunate result was that the rotting process of the Pope's body actually accelerated instead of slowing down. The corpse took on an oval hue at record speed, and Pius' nose fell off it. The gases that accumulated inside the body caused it to swell to such an extent that the coffin locks were broken, and the soldiers of the Swiss Honor Guard who watched over the body while it was presented to the visitors had to change every fifteen minutes in order not to pass out, and this despite the fact that large fans were placed near the coffin to divert the stench. The embarrassment to the Holy See was so great that the Pope who replaced Pius decided to banish Ricardo from the Vatican for the rest of his life.

Nowadays there are even more advanced methods of treating the bodies of those who have checked out.

The ecological method, for example, involves freezing the body in liquid nitrogen, then crushing it into tiny grains using strong sound waves. The grains go through a special process that removes all the heavy and polluting metals from them, and only then is the deceased buried, minus his metals, in a special coffin that also decomposes after a while. It's an interesting method to protect the environment, although I have to point out that I have a feeling that the process of freezing, crushing and filtering wastes much more energy and indirectly causes more serious environmental pollution, than just burying the body in a hole in the ground and that's it. It reminds me of a wise sentence I heard from an engineer at one of my previous workplaces: 'In our company, we save money, whatever it costs.'

But there are those who are not ready to accept the fact that they, like everyone else, will move upstairs one day. You can understand them: it's not that life is so short, it's just that death lasts too long. For such people, their only hope is the science of cryonics.

Cryonics is the attempt to freeze the body of the deceased just a few moments after death, in order to preserve it in the hope that one day human civilization will be advanced enough to be able to thaw it, bring it back to life and cure it of the reason it came to where it came in the first place. This is also the reason why cryonics practitioners do not call their clients 'dead' but 'patients'.
You can't freeze someone just like that: the ice that forms inside the cells causes tears in the cell envelope and irreversible destruction of the tissues. Therefore, it is necessary to remove all water from the body and replace it with special chemicals called cryoprotectants, which when frozen become as hard as glass but do not harm the cell tissue, a process known as 'vitrification'. Only then is the body cooled to a temperature below one hundred and thirty degrees Celsius below zero.

The rationale behind cryonics is on the one hand strange but at the same time also makes sense in its own way. Those who believe in cryonics do not claim that in the future doctors will be able to bring back to life those who today are busy pushing chrysanthemums from below. Instead, they reject the definition of death as it is now, saying that there is a good chance that someone who is considered dead today according to modern medicine, will not necessarily be considered dead a century from now. As we have already seen in the current chapter, the definition of death has changed dramatically in the last hundred years, from clinical death to brain death, so there may very well be something to their claim.

It is worth noting that usually the whole body is not frozen, which may be a very expensive business, but only the head. The assumption here is that if future medicine is sophisticated enough to bring you back to life a hundred years after your bus has left the station for good, doctors should have no problem growing you a new pair of legs.

If, however, the doctors of the 22nd century encounter a problem in the matter of growing limbs, they may take a completely different method to bring the frozen brain back to life: transferring the contents of the brain to the computer, that is, uploading all thoughts, all memories and all personality to a computer.
I am aware that this idea sounds very bizarre. And although we are not close to such technology, it is not as far-fetched as one might think. Today it is not possible to read the brain activity at a sufficiently precise level, but perhaps the future will provide us with a method to copy the full contents of the brain into a computer that will simulate the activity of the neurons. If this becomes possible, and all the information in the brain is fully copied to the computer, it will be practically impossible to differentiate between the reactions of a normal human being and the reactions of a computerized creature.

Such technology would effectively eliminate death altogether, I suppose. It will also allow everyone to create perfect replicas of themselves, and will create countless fascinating dilemmas that will feed philosophy students for decades.

And having spoken of the death of a few, let us kill them all.

Astronomers and astrophysicists today believe that the universe began with what is known as the 'Big Bang', or in English The Big Bang: the universe was all one concentrated mass of ultra-compressed matter, which exploded and gradually became the universe we know today. But just because we know how it all started, doesn't mean we know how it will all end. Apparently, the universe continues to expand as a result of the big bang, but will it continue to expand forever? The answer is not clear at all. There are several theoretical possibilities about the end of it all. The first is the 'big freeze': the universe will continue to expand forever, and the stars will waste their fuel until one day there will be no more hot spots in the universe. Everything will be at a uniform and cool temperature.

Another option is the 'Big Crunch', in English The Big Crunch. In this state, the universe will reach a point of maximum expansion and then begin to contract again - until it reaches the state of one highly compressed mass of matter again, and then (perhaps) another big bang will occur like the one that started it all for us. There are also other exotic options that I don't think are worth going into, because they are not that interesting, and as one Chuck Plenihuk said: "All God does is watch us, and kill us when we start to get bored. We must not be boring."

מקור

This article is taken from the program script 'Making history!', A bi-weekly podcast about the history of science and technology.