Through the Wormhole

Death will someday come for us all.

But are the dead really gone forever?

Advances in medicine and bold leaps in computer science

may soon allow the dead to walk the earth again...

or survive in some other strange, new form.

Can we resurrect the dead?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

Death is our ultimate destination,

a place from which no one ever returns.

But what if death was not the end?

We each have a genetic blueprint,

one that science can now read.

Soon, it may be possible to reproduce my body after I die.

But what about the lifetime of knowledge and experience

contained in here?

Will we ever have the tools

to raise body and soul from the dead?

All of us must eventually come face-to-face with death.

No matter how hard we wish to hold on to someone we love,

sometimes, we just have to let go.

I had a dog I loved to go exploring with.

But worms had eaten away at his heart.

The pain of saying goodbye forever cuts deep,

but it is unavoidable.

Or is it?

This patient is dead.

He has no heartbeat, no respiration,

no blood flowing through his heart.

But today, he will be brought back to life by this man,

heart surgeon John Elefteriades of Yale-New Haven hospital.

John regularly kills his patients, then resurrects them.

Once I got to medical school and residency,

heart surgery was the only thing I ever wanted to do.

At that time, it was kind of like being a fighter pilot

within medicine, if you know what I mean.

It was exploring the frontiers. It was high-risk.

John still flies at the edge of the surgical horizon.

Today, he's trying to repair a severely damaged heart,

a heart that can't be fixed while blood flows through it.

The heart must be shut down, but doing so

will cut off the blood supply to the patient's brain,

starving it of oxygen.

John needs 45 minutes to operate.

At normal temperatures,

the brain will begin to die after just five minutes.

John's radical solution

is to freeze the patient into a state of suspended animation.

The brain doesn't tolerate

more than a momentary interruption of blood flow.

If the interruption of blood flow

goes beyond several minutes,

then the brain cells start to die,

and that's where the protection of low temperature

gives us the opportunity to protect

the very vulnerable brain.

The patient's warm blood has been drained from his body,

run through a bypass machine filled with ice,

then pumped back through his veins and arteries.

This has gradually cooled him down to 18 degrees Centigrade --

55 Fahrenheit.

The activity of his cells and neurons cannot be measured.

If you had a general practitioner

or a cardiologist or somebody come in

and use their regular criteria for life or death,

all the criteria for death would be fulfilled.

At this point, the heart-lung machine and the respirator --

the devices that keep him alive -- are shut off --

no breathing, no blood pumping --

a condition virtually identical to death.

John has 45 minutes to operate in safety.

After an hour, brain damage will set in.

Now his decades of experience come into play.

We're still in suspended animation.

So we've got 15 minutes to go for safety.

Finally,

John and his team manage to complete the repairs

with seven minutes to spare.

The patient has been virtually dead for 38 minutes.

They slowly bring back life support,

returning him to the land of the living with

no damage to the brain.

Each and every day, I'm amazed that this can be done.

The definition of death has changed, really,

and death is death when it's permanent.

But those criteria

in this very, very special high-technology scenario

of suspended animation or deep hypothermic arrest --

those criteria for death don't really apply.

But can we bring life back

to those who die in less controlled situations?

Lance Becker is the director of the University of Pennsylvania's

Center for Resuscitation Science.

He believes the key to resurrection

is buried deep within our cells.

Well, what we've known for just literally thousands of years

is that, if you keep meat cold, it keeps longer.

The decay process, which is actually that death process --

All of those things are slowed down

in the cold setting.

When the temperature comes down,

the cells don't need as much oxygen,

they don't metabolize as much,

and they essentially sort of go into slow-mo, hibernation-style.

Your body is made of tens of trillions of living cells.

Regulatory genes tell these cells how to behave.

Think of them as the cells' operating system.

At the end of a cell's life, the genes produce

destructive enzymes that tear the cell apart.

Every day, roughly 50 billion of your cells die.

When something goes very wrong --

say, you suffer a cardiac arrest --

the injured cells sound an alarm,

telling their healthy neighbors it's time to die.

This sets off a wave of cellular suicide

that spreads rapidly across the body.

We don't die by accident.

There's biological programming

that actually controls the way we die.

And in that programming

is the opportunity for modifying that program

so that we can alter the outcome --

bring someone back to life.

To find out what triggers the death program,

Lance took healthy cells and starved them of oxygen.

He expected most of the cells to die

and the survivors to flourish when oxygen was restored.

So, what I found

was the opposite of what we thought we would find,

which is the cells without oxygen

just sort of laid there.

They didn't do anything, but they didn't die.

But what happened was, when we reoxygenated those cells,

that's when cell death occurred.

So it is a little bit ironic

that oxygen, the molecule that we love and that we live with,

becomes the molecule that drives death.

Somehow, reintroducing oxygen into cells

triggers the death signal

that causes them to commit mass suicide.

Freezing seems to interrupt this process.

Lance pressed on,

knowing that, if he found the death signal's source,

he might be able to stop it from transmitting

without the need for freezing.

As we began to ask ourselves,

"What could explain this sort of bizarre behavior?"

We started seeing cellular pathways.

All of the paths led us to the organelle inside our cells

that we call the mitochondria.

Mitochondria lie deep within every single cell of your body.

They take the food you eat and the oxygen you breathe

and convert them into chemical energy.

In some ways, it's a little bit like a nuclear power plant.

And you know how, in a nuclear power plant,

there are rods that come together and they produce the heat,

and if you don't control that process,

you end up with Chernobyl.

What happens is, after one mitochondria goes nuclear,

it starts to trigger a chain reaction

that amplifies the death signal,

and that death signal can be spread throughout the body.

Lance and his team suspect

we might be able to stop this chain reaction

by poisoning our mitochondria

with sulfide, cyanide, and carbon monoxide.

A finely calibrated dose of these toxins

might disarm the death signal.

It will be quicker than freezing,

and it could reverse a cellular meltdown.

So, ideally, what we'd like to do

is we'd like to get a few of those molecules on board

as we're beginning to bring oxygen back to the patient.

We think we can restart that mitochondria,

have it convert back to producing energy

instead of producing death.

These treatments are still highly experimental.

But if doctors can silence the death signal,

it may soon be commonplace

to revive the dying and the recently dead.

Medical science has already proven

that the dead can live again

under a very controlled set of circumstances.

But can it take us further?

What if we could grow the dead back to life?

Imagine how much richer humanity might be

if we could raise Einstein or Mozart from the grave

or how much it would mean to us personally

if we could bring back the loved ones we have lost?

It may be possible.

Cloning has opened up a new road to resurrection...

But should we take it?

Bob Lanza was born into a working-class Boston family.

Today, he owns an island in Massachusetts

and lives in a sprawling compound

that's part house, part natural-history museum.

These are the fruits of a career in biotechnology.

Here's a brontosaurus femur.

One of the first things people ask me when they come into the house

is, "Bob, are you gonna clone that?"