Cancer, heart disease, diabetes… name most serious conditions, and the treatment has changed radically from decades ago. Except for one: death.
But according to Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center, “what we believe about death is fundamentally wrong.” It is not the end, he says, but a “reversible state.”
Parnia’s 30-year investigation into where life ends and death begins has made him a leading resurrectionist, with a fundamental desire to change how we see both. He describes his discoveries in Dying Clearlywhich will be published on Thursday: a book that provides compelling evidence that bringing the dead back to life is not as difficult as we might think, and his investigation into what happens when consciousness fades.
Parnia, who is British and trained at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London, has come to the conclusion that a flatline on an ECG (electrocardiogram) is meaningless. “You can reverse death, and it’s not just a wish, it’s a reality,” says the 52-year-old. “People used to think you could never go beyond the limits of [flying]let alone go beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. And if you always believed that, you would never try.”
Death, he adds, suffers from terrible PR. “If we remove that social label that makes us think everything stops and look at it objectively, it is actually a wounding process” — a process that, he believes, can be treated.
Research over the past five years has made it clear that our idea of dying is “simply a social convention that doesn’t match scientific reality.” This “new frontier of science,” as Parnia calls it, feels at least a little bit revolutionary, fundamentally challenging one of life’s two certainties (taxes, unfortunately, seem less susceptible to reversal). But he remains frustrated that existing theories about death, which are “either outdated and just plain wrong, or at best inadequate and inaccurate,” persist given the research and tools we now have at our disposal.
In 2012, the resuscitation rate after cardiac arrest at his New York hospital was 33 percent (compared to a U.S. average of 16 percent); he believes his team is the only one in the world giving patients cocktails of drugs similar to those proven to successfully preserve pig organs after resuscitation, and which have “significantly improved survival.”
Parnia, who has a similarly named research lab at NYU Langone, says brains “may be salvageable not just for hours, but potentially for days.” In one case, brain cells were found to be fully functional 48 hours after being removed from a person’s body, despite the ice used to preserve the organ because it was delivered too late by DHL. “So that’s a game-changer.”
In recent years, such discoveries have come fast and furious. Parnia cites a 2019 Yale University study detailing how decapitated pig brains were revived up to 14 hours after death as one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that the same thing has been done in humans (the research was labeled “Frankenstein-style” in the year before it was published). Another Yale study published in 2022 showed how a modified heart-lung machine combined with a series of drugs could regenerate organs in pigs. “It’s only a matter of time” before those same results cross the pig-human barrier, Parnia believes.
While the promise of reversing death at any moment would be compelling, our current obsession with thwarting time is insatiable; there are supplements and tinctures filling health food shelves and social media feeds; and record-breaking podcasts making stars of their DNA-defying supremos. Last month, excitement mounted again as news circulated of Tomorrow Bio, Europe’s first cryonics startup, offering deep-freeze services for £170,000 a pop.
Cryonics has yet to prove it can bring people back to life (Parnia calls it “wishful thinking”), although “the idea that cooling the body is very protective is true.” He points to the case of a British woman who suffered hypothermia while hiking in Spain in 2019, whose heart stopped beating for six hours while rescue teams tried to find her. “That’s well beyond what we consider death for a human being,” Parnia says. Still, she was resuscitated after being flown to a specialized center with an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine (ECMO, which takes over the function of the heart and lungs when the body can’t). “She was lucky that she [ECMO]. They did it, they didn’t give up on her. If they had taken her to another place, she would have been declared dead.” (In another similar case, a woman was revived seven hours after being found in the cold in a park.)
Back from the dead
These are reported as exceptional cases, but Parnia says they don’t have to be. For the most part, CPR, which was introduced in 1959, is our only method of resuscitation—despite the fact that it has a 10 percent success rate and many hospitals have ECMO machines. “Why would we do something that is so inferior, that either doesn’t work well or brings people back but leaves them with brain damage?” Parnia fumes. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Yet it’s not just willpower that’s holding medical professionals back from mounting a full-time resurrection mission. With hospitals stretched thin – NHS waiting lists hit a record high in August, rising for the fifth month in a row – the likelihood of departments having the resources and staff to be at patients’ bedsides 24/7 may seem even more remote than the idea of people rising from the dead in the first place.
But Parnia is convinced it can be done, and the fact that he is halfway through a shift in intensive care when we speak does not dampen his enthusiasm. Although his fascination with the subject began in 1994, when a man he had been chatting to an hour earlier suddenly passed away in the hospital where he worked, the quest has only recently begun to feel personal.
Gave up too soon?
He notes that his age and gender put him at high risk for a heart attack, “so I tell everyone, look, I’m going to have a cardiac arrest soon. And I’m shocked at the treatment I’m going to get… It’s horrible what we have to go through when [interventions] “If I have a heart attack and die tomorrow, why should I stay dead? It’s not necessary anymore.”
Parnia doesn’t believe that everyone who dies should be brought back – someone with multi-organ failure is clearly not a candidate for life extension. But in the many “heartbreaking” cases of people dying while otherwise healthy (Parnia cites a young mother stabbed to death in an attack in a Sydney shopping mall earlier this year, or people killed in war), we give up too quickly. “You just need someone to go into the operating room, find the wound site, stitch it up and pump blood back into your body,” he says. Those who die while “otherwise young, otherwise healthy – those people are all potentially saveable.”
For Parnia, these ideas are not grim, but “hopeful, amazing, and life-affirming.” Just as bringing people back through resuscitation would have been considered a fantasy 100 years ago, “I have little doubt that in the future, people who would be declared dead today will be routinely brought back to life.” He acknowledges that major changes like these are unlikely to have fully occurred by the time he dies, but he remains optimistic, he says. “As I look ahead, I’m excited to think about what will be discovered.”
Dying Clearly by Sam Parnia will be released on August 29.