Chapter 11 a long habit

Although we have come a long way from our ancestors in understanding some of the esoteric aspects of biology, we still, like our ancestors, adopt a highly complex, evasive attitude toward death: we share their aversion to talking about personal death, and we do not like it. Willing to think of personal death.That's indecent, like talking about venereal disease or abortion in the old days to a mixed crowd.Mass death doesn't disturb us in the same particular way: we can gather around a dinner table and talk about wars in which 60 million lives were wiped out at once.We talk about it like we talk about bad weather.We can watch sudden, gory deaths in vivid color every day on film and television without holding back a tear.It is only when the number of deaths is small and nearby that we begin to brood restlessly.At the heart of the matter is the naked, grim death of man himself.This is the reality with which we are most absolutely sure of all the realities in nature, yet it is unspeakable and unimaginable.Perhaps, we are less willing than our predecessors to face this reality, because we hope in our hearts that this thing will leave us.To mask this thinking, we like to think that with so many amazing ways we seem to be able to harness nature, if we just get smarter in the future, say next year, we might avoid this central problem.

Thomas Browne (Thomas Browne, Sir, 1605-1682, English) said: "The long habit of living makes us unwilling to die." Now, this habit has become an addiction: we are obsessed with being alive; Catch us, we hold on to it, the bond grows stronger and stronger.We cannot think of breaking the habit, nor even think of breaking it when we have lost our original enthusiasm for life, or even our enthusiasm for it. We have come a long way in our technological ability to avert death, and it is conceivable that we might be able to delay death for a longer period of time, perhaps with a lifespan comparable to that of the Abkhazians in Russia.Those people, it is said, prolong their lives and live vigorously for a century and a half.If we can get rid of certain chronic, aging diseases, as well as cancer, stroke and various coronary heart diseases, we will live longer.It sounds attractive and plausible, but it's not at all credible.If we were disease-free, we'd be better off in the last decade or so, but we'd still likely end up on roughly the same timetable as we do now.We might die within a predetermined number of days, as genetically different races of mice, or Hayflick's different tissue culture lines, are controlled by their genomes.If that's the case, we're going to die of old age, it's just that some of us may fall apart by 60, and others much later, depending on the genetic timetable.

If we were freed from most, if not all, of today's diseases, we might dry up at the end and be blown away on a breeze, but we would still die. Most of my friends don't see it the way I do.They like to take it for granted that we die only because we are sick, due to this or that fatal disease.Without these diseases, we would live indefinitely.Although biologists have been shown in their own careers that death is absolutely inevitable, some of them would like to think that death is caused by disease.Everything dies, everything around us, trees, plankton, moss, mice, whales, flies, mitochondria.The simplest organisms sometimes have a hard time thinking of it as death, since the strands of replicating DNA they leave behind are obviously living parts of themselves, whereas in our case it's not so obvious (not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that). different, but it seems so).Flies do not die of disease one by one.They just grow old and die, like flies.

We long to live, even in the face of blatant evidence that old age is not necessarily a joy to be enjoyed in the society we have constructed so far.It would be a blessing if we could put aside the search for new technology until we found something more satisfying to do for an extended period of time.Certainly need to find something to replace sitting at the gate looking at the watch over and over again. Maybe if we didn't abhor the discomfort of dying so much, we wouldn't be so eager to prolong life.Despite our dizzying advances in other areas of biology, we know surprisingly little about this universal death process; it seems we don't want to know about it.Even if we could imagine that death is death without first suffering a painful illness and then dying, we would be afraid of that.

There are signs that medicine may be expressing renewed interest in this process, partly out of curiosity and partly out of an embarrassing realization that we are not dealing with this aspect of disease in the way that physicians of the past have been. out skills.In those days they were not as sure as we are now that disease is isolated and sometimes overcome.At that time, the most difficult and most important service of a good doctor was to stand by and comfort patients when they were dying.These are usually done at home.Now, it's happening in hospitals, and it's happening quietly (one of the reasons people are growing more and more afraid of death today, perhaps, is that so many people are completely unfamiliar with it; they've never actually seen it happen in real life ).Some of our technology allows us to deny the existence of this thing.We keep flickering life in this or that group of cells for a long time, as if we keep a flag flying.Death doesn't happen all at once; cells die one by one.If you want, you can revive the cells in large numbers a few hours after the light of life goes out, and you can keep them growing in tissue culture, because the news of irreversible death eventually spreads to all parts of the body, and it takes hours or even a few days.

Maybe we're about to discover that death isn't such a bad thing after all.Sir William Osler (1849-1919, Canada) once saw it this way.He disagrees with people talking about the pain of death, insisting that there is no such thing. In a nineteenth-century memoir of African expeditions, there is a story by David Livingstone (1813-1873, England, Scotland) about a near-death experience of his own.He was caught by a lion, the beast tore his chest open, and escaped only by a lucky bullet from his friend in time.Later, he recalled that passage vividly.He was so amazed at the uncommon sense of peace, serenity and painlessness associated with death.So he created a theory that all animals have a protective physiological mechanism that kicks in at the brink of death, carrying them to the other shore in a cloud of calm.

I have only seen the pain of death once, and that was in a man with rabies.For twenty-four hours, he knew every step of the process of his own disintegration with extreme clarity, right down to his last breath.In the particular neuropathology of rabies patients, it appears that the protective mechanism has hit a snag and is not switched on. From a growing number of heart patients, we have new opportunities to learn more about the physiology of death firsthand.Some patients go through that whole process and come back alive.From what we've learned from the first people who were resurrected from suspended animation of a heart attack (which has come to be known as Lazarus Syndrome), Osler seems to be right that those who remember all or part of the episode of people did not recall any fear or pain.Several people, who appeared to be dead, were conscious throughout the process, feeling a strange sense of detachment.A man had a coronary infarction, his heart stopped in front of a hospital, and he was actually dead.After a few minutes, his heart restarted under the stimulation of electrodes, and he resumed breathing and came alive.According to his description, the strangest thing was that there were so many people around him, coming and going in such a hurry, playing with his body so excitedly, and all he felt was peace.

A recent study of the reactions of patients with pulmonary disorders to death concluded that the process was far more painful to the bystander than to the patient.Most of the patients seemed to be calmly preparing to die, as if they were intuitively familiar with the event.An elderly woman reported that the only painful and frustrating thing about dying was being disturbed.On several occasions, she was given traditional treatments to maintain her oxygen supply or restore fluids and electrolytes.But each time she felt that being alive was a kind of torture.She hated interrupting her dying process.

I myself am surprised to think that there is nothing wrong with dying.But perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise.After all, death is one of the oldest and most basic biological functions, and the mechanism it forms is also meticulous, and it is the genetic information that is conducive to maintaining the biological characteristics to guide the living beings through every step of death, just like all other aspects of our common life. Same as the key activity. But even so, if at the initial, partial stage, this transformation is a coordinated, holistically harmonious physiological process, there remains one thing that remains to be explained, and that is the permanent loss of consciousness.Shall we still be perpetually perplexed by this question?Where did the consciousness go?Could it have just fallen dead at once, lost in the humus, and turned into waste?The disappearance of consciousness seems unnatural to me, given the tendency of nature to make use of complex and impenetrable mechanisms.I'd rather think that it somehow separated from the filament it was attached to, and then retracted like a light breath into the membrane it came from, a new bit of memory in the biosphere's nervous system, but I don't have any information Confirm it.

This is left to another science, to be studied in the future.It may turn out later, as some scientists have suggested, that we can never study consciousness because of a certain uncertainty principle, which states that the mere act of "seeing" makes it twitch, blur, disappears from view.If so, we will never know the truth.I envied my friends who believed in telepathy; oddly enough, it was my European scientist acquaintances who were most willing to believe it and accepted it most readily.Their aunts had all received the telepathy, and there they sat with the proof of the transfer of consciousness, and with the material to create a new science.It is really frustrating for my aunt, who is not so lucky, to never receive any response.