James' World 2

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The ceremony takes place on the night of the full moon in February, which the Tibetans celebrate as the coldest of the year. Buddhist monks clad in light cotton shawls climb to a rocky ledge some 15,000 feet high and go to sleep, in child’s pose, foreheads pressed against cold Himalayan rocks. In the dead of the night, temperatures plummet below freezing, but the monks sleep on peacefully, without shivering.

Footage of the ritual exists from the winter of 1985 when a team of medical researchers led by Herbert Benson, a Harvard cardiologist, were allowed in as observers at a monastery just outside the town of Upper Dharamsala in northern India.¹ Benson had the blessing of the Dalai Lama, with whom he had developed a friendship; the physician was driven to understand the physiological mechanisms that allowed the monks to survive the night. Their bodies had entered a state that required years of meditative and physical practice that the Dalai Lama called miraculous. Had Benson’s research taken place today, it is very likely he would have called it “biostasis.”

Our bodies run a very tight ship. To keep living, we need a constant supply of oxygen, and our temperature is allowed to fluctuate within narrow limits. A fever can turn deadly, as can severe hypothermia. Healthy bodies have a steady heartbeat and a dependable oxygen consumption rate, which physicians use as a measurement of metabolism. If the life burning within us is a symphony, then metabolism is its score—the perfect sum of all the chemical reactions that take place inside our cells, carefully orchestrated.

Until recently, at least from the perspective of Western medicine, life’s tempo was considered non-negotiable. The change in outlook has come from an unusual initiative, a program led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which supports the United States military. Over the past five years, DARPA has funded research into biostasis, which aims to bring the metabolic symphony to a halt, before resuming the score some indefinite time later, exactly where it left off.

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Inside the “out there” quest for a drug that would help doctors save lives before it’s too late.

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https://nautil.us

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