How do the death-faking serums (or wutever they called) work?

[Lonkut]

I saw on Alias once that this guy killed this other guy by lethal injection and than a few hours later the dead guy was injected something and came back to life. How do they work? are they real?

 

[Little Raven]

They work the same way that the DNA-analysis machines work on CSI. You know the ones that you simply insert a slide of blood and you get an exact match in minutes? Which is to say that they work much, much, MUCH better on TV than they do in real life.

In theory, the serum would probably attempt to slow the metabolism of the person to incredibly slow levels...the heart would still beat, but just enough to keep brain cells from dying, or at least from dying too quickly. You probably wouldn’t fool a PET scan, but someone holding their finger to your neck might not detect a pulse. The antidote would return the metabolism to normal levels…’resurrecting’ the person, if you will. There are various animals that do similar things…hibernating squirrels, for example, are able to reduce their metabolisms to astoundingly low levels and recover with no apparent ill effects, so in theory, it should be doable.

However, people aren’t squirrels, and the likely outcome of administering a ‘fake death’ serum is very real death for the unfortunate recipient. We just don’t understand enough about how our bodies work to manipulate them on that level. We know that on very rare occasion, people who ‘die’ under very specific conditions (generally involving freezing water) can be brought back, often with side effects but sometimes seemingly none the worse for the wear. We also know that most of the time they simply die. I have no doubt that the CIA has cooked up something resembling the Alias serum, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want it used on me.

 

[Kozmos]

I've heard something about a fake suicide pill.

 

[Perfection]

The dilithium crystals interact with the naquadah in your blood stream temporarily deactivating your midichlorians giving you the appearance of death, however once flux capacitance is reached they valmorphanize back to thier original form and you regain conciousness/pulse etc.

 

[taper]

Haitian voodoo cults have used natural herbs and such to induce a death-like state, aka zombies. To those untrained in medicine, it appears the person is dead, and then brought back to life by the voodoo priestess.

Of course, everything you see on TV is real, the stuff you can't buy in stores is kept secret by the government for evil purposes.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I've heard the bit about people under the ice going into hibernation, their body slows down drastically, and they can survive for, in one instance, a half-hour under the ice, and survive.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Now this is one thing I wouldn't want to mess with. It's this kind of stuff that probably got people 'buried alive' because people thought they were dead. (admittedly most of it is urban legends, but it has happened for real a few times in history).

 

[TheBladeRoden]

What I'd really like is the drug that makes people think I'm alive and well when i'm actually dead.

 

[Fifty]

The dilithium crystals interact with the naquadah in your blood stream temporarily deactivating your midichlorians giving you the appearance of death, however once flux capacitance is reached they valmorphanize back to thier original form and you regain conciousness/pulse etc.

Are you sure?

 

[Volum]

Probably the same thing they used in Romeo & Juliet