Adrenalin for the "Dead"

No matter how often the Soviet scientific line may twist and turn, Russian researchers have never lost interest in revival of the "dead." They were working on it before the Revolution of 1905, and in 1952 Professor Vladimir Aleksandrovich Negovsky won a Stalin Prize of 100,000 rubles for such work in his Laboratory of Experimental Physiology for Reviving of Organisms. Still at it, he has now piled up an impressive score of patients plucked from the brink of beyond.

Naturally, the Soviet scientists define carefully the conditions under which their technique can be expected to work. It is no good, they say, when death has resulted from a long illness and vital organs have been gravely impaired. It is most likely to work after accidents, wounds or surgical shock. Then, they say, the victim spends five or six minutes in a state of "clinical death" (with no heart action or breathing) but still short of absolute or biologic death.

Within this narrow time span, Dr. Negovsky and his colleagues slap on a pulmotor type of respirator and slip a transfusion needle into an arm or leg artery. Then, pumping toward the heart, they give blood that has been generously spiked with adrenalin and glucose. Heart action is generally revived in less than a minute. Blood is then transfused by vein. Restoration of breathing may take as long as 18 minutes. Only after this are the higher nervous centers revived, with the body functions that they control. If the process is too prolonged, some brain centers never recover.

Last week, Physiologist Negovsky reported that this revival technique had been used in more than 1,800 cases since it was tried in the "Great Patriotic War," and that half the patients had pulled through with no mental impairment. The method is so simple that it "can be employed in any surgical department or first-aid station," he wrote, and the Ministry of Public Health is recommending its use in every hospital and first-aid center in the U.S.S.R.

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