 | Podium: champagne
Podium: champagne for Fernando Alonso |
Month: October 2005
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Motor racing-Formula One
2005 World Champion Fernando Alonso celebrates with Renault F1 team members
Motor racing-Formula One statistics for Japanese Grand Prix Wed Oct 5, 5:56 AM ET
Formula One statistics for Sunday's Japanese Grand Prix:
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CHAMPIONSHIP
Renault's Fernando Alonso became Formula One's youngest, and first Spanish, champion in Brazil aged 24 years and 58 days.
Alonso is an unassailable 23 points clear of McLaren's Kimi Raikkonen with two rounds remaining.
McLaren can win the constructors' title in Japan if they finish one-two and Renault score no more than one point.
The Mercedes-powered team are two points clear of Renault.
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WINS
Alonso and Raikkonen have both won six races each.
McLaren have won nine races, including the last five in a row, while Renault have had seven victories.
McLaren have led 586 of the season's 1,071 laps so far, equating to 2,830km out of 5,166km or 54.8 percent of the total distance to date.
Of that, Raikkonen has led 32.7 percent of the total, Alonso 27 percent.
The last time that McLaren won six races in a row was in 1988, the year Brazilian Ayrton Senna and France's Alain Prost dominated with 11 wins in succession and 15 in total.
McLaren's one-two finish in Brazil, with Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya leading home Raikkonen, was their first since Austria in August 2000.
Ferrari have just one win in 16 races this season, a hollow victory in a six-car U.S. Grand Prix that the seven Michelin-equipped teams shunned for tyre safety reasons.
That is also the only win of the year for a car on Bridgestone tyres.
The last time Ferrari won so few races was 1995, before Michael Schumacher joined, when they ended the year with just one victory.
Seven-times champion Schumacher has won 84 races, more than any driver in Formula One history.
Ferrari, the only team to have been in the championship since the start in 1950, have won 183 times. McLaren have 147 wins and Williams 113. Renault have 24.
Raikkonen's victory from seventh place on the grid in Canada makes him the lowest-placed starter to win so far in 2005.
Williams' last win was in Brazil last year with Montoya.
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JAPAN
Ferrari have won the last five Japanese Grands Prix.
Schumacher has won six times in total at Suzuka, including once with Benetton in 1995.
BAR's Takuma Sato is the only Japanese in the race.
Schumacher and Brazilian team mate Rubens Barrichello are the only current drivers to have won at Suzuka.
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POINTS
Minardi rookie Robert Doornbos is the only driver yet to score this season.
Toyota need to score 18 points more than Ferrari to oust the Italian team, champions for the past six years, from third place in the standings.
Ferrari have not finished a season outside the top three since 1993, when they were fourth.
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POLES
Michael Schumacher has started 64 races on pole position and needs one more to equal the late Brazilian Ayrton Senna's record.
Schumacher has been on pole position at least three times in every season since 1994, when he won his first title with Benetton. This year he has had just one.
Eight of the 17 races so far this year have been won by the driver on pole position.
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FINISHES
Portugal's Tiago Monteiro suffered his first retirement of the season in Brazil. The Jordan driver had racked up 16 successive finishes before that, a record for a rookie. -
One Legend Found, Many Still to Go
The kraken, in an illustration by Alphonse de Neuville from Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."
October 2, 2005
One Legend Found, Many Still to Go
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
THE human instinct to observe nature has always been mixed with a tendency to embroider upon it. So it is that, over the ages, societies have lived alongside not only real animals, but a shadow bestiary of fantastic ones - mermaids, griffins, unicorns and the like. None loomed larger than the giant squid, the kraken, a great, malevolent devil of the deep. "One of these Sea-Monsters," Olaus Magnus wrote in 1555, "will drown easily many great ships."
Science, of course, is in the business of shattering myths with facts, which it did again last week when Japanese scientists reported that they hooked a giant squid - a relatively small one estimated at 26 feet long - some 3,000 feet down and photographed it before it tore off a tentacle to escape. It was the first peek humanity has ever had of such animals in their native habitat. Almost inevitably, the creature seemed far less terrifying than its ancient image.
Scientists celebrated the find not as an end, but as the beginning of a new chapter in understanding the shy creature. "There're always more questions, more parts to the mystery than we'll ever be able to solve," said Clyde F. E. Roper, a squid expert at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.
Monster lovers take heart. Scientists argue that so much of the planet remains unexplored that new surprises are sure to show up; if not legendary beasts like the Loch Ness monster or the dinosaur-like reptile said to inhabit Lake Champlain, then animals that in their own way may be even stranger.
A forthcoming book by the noted naturalist Richard Ellis, "Singing Whales, Flying Squid and Swimming Cucumbers" (Lyon Press, 2006), reinforces that notion by cataloguing recent discoveries of previously unknown whales, dolphins and other creatures, some of which are quite bizarre.
"The sea being so deep and so large, I'm sure other mysteries lurk out there, unseen and unsolved," said Mr. Ellis, also the author of "Monsters of the Sea" (Knopf, 1994). Explorers, he said, recently stumbled on an odd squid more than 20 feet long with fins like elephant ears and very skinny arms and tentacles, all of which can bend at right angles, like human elbows. "We know nothing about it," Mr. Ellis said. "But we've seen it."
Historically, many unknown creatures have come to light purely by accident. In 1938, for example, a fisherman pulled up an odd, ancient-looking fish with stubby, limblike fins. It turned out to be a coelacanth, a beast thought to have gone extinct 70 million years ago. Since then, other examples of the species have occasionally been hauled out of the sea.
Land, too, occasionally gives up a secret. About 1900, acting on tips from the local population, Sir Harry H. Johnston, an English explorer, hunted through the forests of Zaire (then the Belgian Congo) and found a giraffe-like animal known as the okapi. It was hailed as a living fossil.
In 1982, a group of animal enthusiasts founded the International Society of Cryptozoology (literally, the study of hidden creatures) and adopted the okapi as its symbol. Today, self-described cryptozoologists range from amateur unicorn hunters to distinguished scientists.
At the Web site for the group, www.internationalsocietyofcryptozoology.org, there is a list of 15 classes of unresolved claims about unusual beasts, including big cats, giant crocodiles, huge snakes, large octopuses, mammoths, biped primates like the yeti in the Himalayas and long-necked creatures resembling the gigantic dinosaurs called sauropods.
Lake Champlain, on the border between Vermont and New York, is notorious as the alleged home of Champ, a beast said to be similar to a plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile with a small head, long neck and four paddle-shaped flippers.
There, as at Loch Ness and elsewhere, myth busters and believers do constant battle. "Not only is there not a single piece of convincing evidence for Champ's existence, but there are many reasons against it," Joe Nickel, a researcher who investigates claims of paranormal phenomena, argued in Skeptical Inquirer, a monthly magazine that rebuts what it considers to be scientific hokum.
Then there are the blobs. For more than a century, scientists and laymen imagined that the mysterious gooey masses - some as large as a school bus - that wash ashore on beaches around the world came from great creatures with tentacles long enough to sink cruise ships. Warnings were issued. Perhaps, cryptozoologists speculated, the blobs were the remains of recently deceased living fossils more fearsome than the dinosaurs, or perhaps an entirely new sea creature unknown to science.
Then last year, a team of biologists based at the University of South Florida applied DNA analysis to the mystery. It turned out they were nothing more than old whale blubber. "To our disappointment," the scientists wrote, "we have not found any evidence that any of the blobs are the remains of gigantic octopods, or sea monsters of unknown species."
Psychologists say raw nature is simply a blank slate for the expression of our subconscious fears and insecurities, a Rorschach test that reveals more about the viewer than the viewed.
But the giant squid is real, growing up to lengths of at least 60 feet, with eyes the size of dinner plates and a tangle of tentacles lined with long rows of sucker pads. Scientists, their appetites whetted by the first observations of the creature in the wild, are now gearing up to discover its remaining secrets.
"Wouldn't it be fabulous to see a giant squid capturing its prey?" asked Dr. Roper of the Smithsonian. "Or a battle between a sperm whale and a giant? Or mating? Can you imagine that?"
"We've cracked the ice on this," he said, "but there's a lot more to do."
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October 5, 2005
With Lenin's Ideas Dead, What to Do With His Body?
By C. J. CHIVERS
MOSCOW, Oct. 4 - For eight decades he has been lying in state on public display, a cadaver in a succession of dark suits, encased in a glass box beside a walkway in the basement of his granite mausoleum. Many who revere him say he is at peace, the leader in repose beneath the lights. Others think he just looks macabre.
Time has been unkind to Lenin, whose remains here in Red Square are said to sprout occasional fungi, and whose ideology and party long ago fell to ruins. Now the inevitable question has returned. Should his body be moved?
Revisiting a proposal that thwarted Boris N. Yeltsin, who faced down tanks but in his time as president could not persuade Russians to remove the Soviet Union's founder from his place of honor, a senior aide to President Vladimir V. Putin raised the matter last week, saying it was time to bury the man.
"Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime," said the aide, Georgi Poltavchenko. "I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin."
In the unending debate about what exactly the new Russia is, the subject of Lenin resembles a Rorschach inkblot test. People project their views of their state onto him and see what they wish. And so as Mr. Poltavchenko's suggestion has ignited fresh public sparring over Lenin's place, both in history and in the grave, the dispute has been implicitly bizarre and a window into the state of civil society here.
First came a rush to second the idea, from figures including Nikita Mikhalkov, a prominent film director and chairman of the Russian Cultural Foundation, who shares Mr. Poltavchenko's distaste for the relic.
"Vast funds are being squandered on a pagan show," Mr. Mikhalkov told Russian journalists, saying that Lenin himself wished to be buried beside his mother in St. Petersburg. "If we advocate Christian ideals, we must fulfill the will of the deceased."
Then came the backlash. Gennadi I. Zyuganov, leader of Russia's remnant of the Communist Party, lashed out at proponents of moving the remains, insisting that Lenin had no wish to be buried elsewhere.
He also made a pre-emptive strike against any suggestion of relocating other deceased Soviet leaders, who are buried under a lawn behind Lenin's mausoleum. There, along the Kremlin wall, are the remains of Yuri V. Andropov, Leonid I. Brezhnev and Konstantin U. Chernenko, as well as those of Stalin and Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.
At a news conference on Friday, Mr. Zyuganov described those who would dare move those Communist figures as people "who do not know the country's history and stretch out their dirty hands and muddy ideas to the national necropolis."
His position has only hardened. "Raising this issue smells of provocation and illiteracy," Mr. Zyuganov said Tuesday in a telephone interview, during which he accused President Putin of hiding behind an aide to test the idea in public. "It seems unlikely that Poltavchenko would come out with a proposal of such desecration of Red Square without approval from the highest power."
Lenin, who led the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, died in 1924 at the age of 53. A near theology rose around him in the ensuing decades.
Some still see in him the architect of a grand and daring social experiment. Others describe an opportunist who ushered vicious cronies to power, resulting in a totalitarian police state. "It is time to get rid of this horrible mummy," said Valeriya Novodvorskaya, head of the Democratic Union, a small reform party. "One cannot talk about any kind of democracy or civilization in Russia when Lenin is still in the country's main square."
She added: "I would not care even if he were thrown on a garbage heap."
Others propose moving Lenin on religious grounds, combining words and ideas rarely associated with the man. Setting aside the matter of Lenin's atheism, Svetlana Orlova, a deputy speaker of the upper house of Parliament, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday that his followers should consider "Lenin's soul, which has been searching for peace."
Informal polls conducted Monday by the radio station Ekho Moskvy found that 65 percent of people who called in, and 75 percent of people who contacted the station via the Internet, said that not just Lenin but all of the Soviet figures should be evicted from Red Square.
But the polls were hardly scientific, and for every Ekho Moskvy listener there often seems to be another Russian who still believes. "The name of Lenin is quite sacred," said Nikolai Kishin, 51, a clerk from the Siberian city of Irkutsk who emerged from the mausoleum on Tuesday, having paid his respects.
Such opposing views cannot be bridged any time soon, but on one point all agree: Lenin, the central symbol of the Soviet period, has survived Russia's transition and found an enduring place in public life.
His once ubiquitous statues may have mostly been torn down in Eastern Europe, but they scowl at passers-by from the Russian Pacific to the Baltic, and it is not hard to find him on pedestals, murals or plaques in nations that have made great show of shaking free from Moscow's reach, including Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine.
While he is loved by a dwindling number of followers and hated by many, he is tolerated for reasons that mix nostalgia, resignation, political expediency and ennui.
Where Mr. Putin stands is now the central remaining question of Lenin's future address.
Mr. Putin said in 2001 that he did not want to upset the civic order by moving the founder's remains. "Many people in this country associate their lives with the name of Lenin," he said. "To take Lenin out and bury him would say to them that they have worshiped false values, that their lives were lived in vain."
Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, said Tuesday that the president's position was unchanged. "He is not supporting those who are insisting on removing the body immediately," Mr. Peskov said.
But Ms. Novodvorskaya and Mr. Zyuganov, two politicians who agree on almost nothing, both say the president is testing the reaction.
Ms. Novodvorskaya suggested that the president could find it useful, at a time when he is being portrayed as an autocrat, to lead a catharsis of the Lenin phenomenon. "He is trying to be taken as a democrat in the eyes of the West," she said. "He is also very fond of playing his comedies of national reconciliation."
No matter what Mr. Putin decides, there already are indications that time may ultimately do what no politician has yet achieved. The youngest Russian adults barely recall the Communist times.
"Lenin," mused Natasha Zakharova, 23, as she walked off Red Square, admitting that she was not quite sure whose body she had just seen. "Was he a Communist?"
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Illustration by Rutu Modan
October 2, 2005
Many Unhappy Returns
By JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
When I opened the front door, my mother handed me four cases of yogurt. All strawberry. She doesn't notice flavors. Coffee, vanilla, blueberry - they don't mean a thing. I asked her how much I owed her, and she told me that with the coupons, and how she used them on double-down day, that she actually made money off the purchase. I told her I didn't see how such a thing was possible, and she explained that the yogurts were a buck apiece and her coupons were for 75 cents. Doubled, that's $1.50.
"I make 50 cents off each one I buy," she said.
She was excited because she had a project for the two of us: a defective shirt that needed exchanging. She got it from a clothing store near my house that has been around for decades. When I was a kid, my mother would bring me there to try on bell-bottoms, making me undress right in the aisles.
"What's wrong with the shirt?" I asked.
"It's missing a sleeve," she said. "How can I let your father leave the house like that? No way."
It should be said that my father has left the house in far worse: green corduroy vests, T-shirts advertising aquarium supplies, ties intended for novelty use only. If it were handed to him as he was getting out of a shower, I'm sure my father would figure out a way to wear a bridge chair. I asked how a missing sleeve might have escaped her notice during the purchase. She didn't remember. She bought it a long time ago.
"How long ago?" I asked.
She didn't really get the question. Life for my mother wasn't exactly a chronological unraveling. She was coming to visit me. I was around the corner from the store. It was just a clever thing to return it now - killing two birds with one stone. She looked at the bag and thought for a moment.
"Five years," she said.
This kind of operation was what my mother lived for. It would be a challenge; a battle of wills - a game of chess, but with yelling. I remember as a kid watching her open three bottles of tahini, one after the other. She wasn't satisfied with the hermetic popping sound the caps made - it was too muted. She liked a pop that was more emphatic, a pop that cried, "I have not been sprinkled with hemlock." She returned all of them to a grocery store she chose not because she'd bought the tahini there, but because of its proximity to our house. The store didn't sell tahini. I'm not sure they even knew what it was.
To be honest, it isn't that my mother exerts Clarence Darrow-like powers of persuasion; it's that she has no shame. None at all. As an adult, I seem to have taken on the extra shame she has no use for. I don't like to draw attention to myself. If a waitress gets my order wrong, I keep my mouth shut. If a bus driver goes past my stop, I just get off at the next one. Scenes just aren't my thing. But even now, no matter where I go with my mother, there are always the inevitable spectacles. Just the thought of her getting all froth-mouthed about that one-armed shirt - it was enough to make me queasy.
At the store, my mother went to the cash register and pulled the article of clothing out of the crumpled plastic bag.
"It's missing a sleeve," she said to the saleswoman.
The saleswoman looked at it. Then she held it up and turned it around.
"It doesn't have sleeves," the saleswoman said. "It's a poncho."
"A pon-cho?" my mother repeated, as though it were a foreign word - which, in her defense, I suppose it sort of is.
You would think that would be the end of it, that confronted with reason, my mother would accept the fact that we live in a universe where such a thing as a poncho exists, and we would leave. But this was not to happen. Reason is of no concern in a staring contest. "I don't care what it is," she said evenly. "It's factory-defective. My husband can't wear it."
I thought of my father, a man very big on tucking in - sweaters, aquarium-supply T-shirts - packing the bottom of the poncho into his pants, belting up and heading out for an evening on the town looking like Fatty Arbuckle.
The saleswoman refused to give the money back, so my mother asked her to get the manager. She disappeared behind a row of suit jackets and as we waited for her return, I remained by my mother's side, standing there in this way I later realized I had developed as a kid. It was a posture that was meant to convey filial loyalty, peppered with a touch of what Vietnam vets call the thousand-yard stare. In the back room, I imagined the saleswoman conferring with the manager, a bedraggled, shiny-jowled man, as he stared at my mother through a security cam, watching with a look of recognition that quickly turned to panic.
When the saleswoman returned, she immediately started offering store credit. That was a mistake. Weakness. "Credit? So you can unload socks on us?" my mother asked. "We need more socks like we need rickets."
Desperate to defuse the situation, I grabbed a baseball cap off a nearby shelf and handed it to my mother. Reluctantly, she got it for me with her credit. "Lucky for you my boy needs a hat," she said. "Walk around in it. Make sure it isn't too tight around the temples."
As we left the store together, my new cap on my head, I felt about 10 years old. "I'll hold on to the receipt," my mother said. "Just in case."
Jonathan Goldstein is the author of "Lenny Bruce Is Dead," a novel that will be published next year.
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Brazilian Grand Prix 2005
Start: Fernando Alonso takes the lead
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Start: the crash of Antonio Pizzonia and David Coulthard
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Fernando Alonso leads Juan Pablo Montoya
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Start: the crash of Antonio Pizzonia and David Coulthard
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Start: Antonio Pizzonia spins out of control while Jarno Trulli tries to avoid him
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Start: Antonio Pizzonia spins out of control while Jarno Trulli tries to avoid him
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Kimi Raikkonen
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Rubens Barrichello
F1 > Brazilian GP, 2005-09-25 (Interlagos): Sunday race
Brazilian GP: Renault race notes
Racing series
Date
2005-09-25
Fernando Alonso third and Giancarlo Fisichella fifth this afternoon in Brazil. The Spaniard becomes the youngest world champion in F1 history.
Fernando Alonso today became the youngest world champion in Formula One history, after his thirteenth podium finish of the 2005 season in the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos.
Starting from pole position, the Spaniard drove a characteristically aggressive, consistent race to claim third position at the flag. With a championship lead of 23 points, and only two races remaining in the 2005 season, he therefore has an unassailable lead in the drivers' championship.
At 24 years old, he therefore will become the youngest world champion in F1 history, in addition to the records of youngest holder of pole position and youngest race-winner he already holds.
Team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella suffered a more complicated race, after struggling with oversteer that limited his pace. After starting third, the Italian finished fifth, just behind Michael Schumacher's Ferrari.
The Mild Seven Renault F1 Team now occupies second place in the constructors' championship with 162 points, 2 behind McLaren Mercedes. An all-out fight for the constructors' crown will be the object of the final two races of the season.
Fernando Alonso: 3rd
"It is too early to realise what is happening to me, and I think I will only understand properly in the days to come. So far, I have spoken to the King of Spain, the Prince and the Prime Minister -- it is impossible to really say anything about it now."
"I thought we could fight with the McLarens today but it was clear after the first stops that we couldn't keep their pace, so I just concentrated on controlling Michael Schumacher behind me, and managing the tyres."
"The engineers were also worried it might rain, so in the last laps I was really focusing on that, and preserving the tyres, and I was sure there were strange noises coming from the car, so it was only when I crossed the line that I realised I had become world champion!"
"I want to dedicate this championship to my family, and all my close friends who have supported me through my career. Spain is not a country with an F1 culture, and we had to fight alone, every step of the way, to make this happen."
"A huge thank you to the team as well: they are the best in Formula 1, and we have done this together. It will say that I am world champion, but we are all champions, and they deserve this."
"Now, I can go to the last two races and enjoy them a bit more. We made some conservative decisions in some of the last races, and now we will be able to race with nothing to lose until the end of the season.
Giancarlo Fisichella, 5th:
"I had poor rear end grip at the beginning of the race, and that meant I was struggling with oversteer in the high speed and low speed corners, and just trying to keep the car on the circuit."
"To be honest, I was a little disappointed to finish fifth because we should have been able to beat the Ferrari today, but the really important thing is Fernando becoming world champion. I am very happy for him, he has done a great season with no mistakes, and I wish him all the best."
"But we still have a second crown to race for, and we need to keep fighting against McLaren to get back the lead. I though we were much closer to them this weekend, so their pace in the race was a surprise. We're not giving up though, and we will fight to the very end of the season.
Flavio Briatore, Managing Director:
"I am just delighted today. For Fernando of course, who has been fantastic all season, and for the team as well. They have produced a fantastic car and even if McLaren has been quicker, the points tell the only story that matters, over nineteen races."
"Fernando is just 24 years old, and he has been an incredible leader in this championship. The team works to make the car quicker, and he transforms that into results: that gives the team amazing motivation."
"Of course, we have to thank the team back in Enstone and Viry, all the partners who have supported us to make this championship possible, and everybody at the Renault group: they have all been part of a fantastic adventure."
"Now, we need to do our best in the constructors' championship, with Fisico and Fernando both pushing hard. We are doing our best to get closer to McLaren, and to take it down to the final race."
Pat Symonds, Executive Director of Engineering:
"Fernando is a worthy champion, and thoroughly deserves every success he has achieved this year. The race itself was not dramatic for either driver, but it certainly produced a spectacular result."
"Now, we will be focusing 100% on the constructors' championship. There is no doubt McLaren are quicker than us, and we relinquished our lead today -- albeit by a slender margin. But the team is working hard to develop the car and improve our speed, and we were certainly closer to them this weekend thanks to the developments at Enstone and Viry."
"We fully intend to take the fight to McLaren right up until Shanghai. But first things first: we will be celebrating a worthy champion this evening, and letting the feeling sink in properly!"
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Honda takes full control of BAR
Honda takes full control of BAR
Japanese car manufacturer Honda plans to go it alone in Formula One from next year after acquiring a 100% stake in the BAR Honda team on Tuesday.
Honda announced its buyout of founding owner British American Tobacco's 55% share ahead of this weekend's home Grand Prix in Suzuka.
Honda will name their new team for 2006 in agreement with future sponsors.
"We want to challenge for the championship," said Honda's operating officer Hiroshi Oshima.
"We want to race as Honda and we want to take the team in a better direction."
Oshima explained that the Japanese giant had begun negotiations in the summer to increase its share from 45% to full acquisition.
BAR were runners-up to Ferrari in the constructors' title last season with drivers Jenson Button of Britain and Japan's Takuma Sato.
Meanwhile, Sato, who has lost his BAR seat for next season, said he had been offered a drive by an as-yet unnamed group hoping to establish F1's 11th team next year.
"It's not confirmed that this new team will race but I have received an offer," said the 28-year-old.
"I'm not planning to quit Formula One. I have to keep going and look for a solution."
Honda also said they were considering supplying engines to the new team.
Honda's operating officer Hiroshi Oshima said: "(Formula One supremo) Bernie Ecclestone has given the team his blessing and we are looking into the possibility of supplying their engines."
Story from BBC SPORT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/4307126.stm
Published: 2005/10/04 05:07:48 GMT -
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT
Harry Campbell
The Second International Conference on Gross National Happiness
RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT
Local Pathways to Global Wellbeing
St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada
June 20 to June 24, 2005
Overview
A landmark international conference was held in Nova Scotia, Canada, from June 20-24, 2005. The conference examined successful initiatives world-wide that attempt to integrate sustainable and equitable economic development with environmental conservation, social and cultural cohesion, and good governance.
Addressing the degrading social and environmental consequences of prevailing development trends, the conference confronted the challenge of redirecting global development towards socially and environmentally responsible policy and practices. The goal of these practices is to ensure long-term prosperity and equity for all consonant with care for the natural world.
Innovative, working models of alternative development practices were presented in a way that provoked stimulating and proactive dialogue and supported deep learning. Delegates engaged in a hands-on problem solving approach designed to provide practical guidance to governments, businesses, and non-government organizations that want to take concrete steps towards creating good and sustainable human societies.
Examples of initiatives from Bhutan, Brazil, Canada, India, Kenya, Mali, the Netherlands, the USA, Mexico, Iceland, and other places were profiled. The focus was on how these programs are implemented, why they can work on a global level, how major challenges were overcome, and what challenges remain. Speakers addressed questions of both policy and practice.
More than 30 years ago, the King of Bhutan declared that "Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product." Delegates from Bhutan described the challenges they now face in putting that view into practice. Other delegates described innovative means of measuring progress that account more fully for social, human, and environmental realities than the dominant conventional measures that focus on economic growth alone. Business leaders described businesses that practice fair trade, produce sustainably, and promote practices that protect human rights. One busload of delegates toured Nova Scotia’s leading-edge leading solid waste-resource management facilities. And one workshop profiled models of sustainable forestry management.
Delegates in one workshop learned how the Dutch government gave its citizens far more free time and sharply reduced unemployment by encouraging shorter work hours. Other workshops focused on wind power and sustainable energy use, and one examined the innovative solar energy and rainwater harvesting practices of India’s remarkable Barefoot College. The founder of Honey Care Africa presented award-winning sustainable community-based development practices that have been introduced in Kenya. Please see the proceedings pages for summaries of these and many other workshops.
RETHINKING DEVELOPMENT gathered together 450 government, non-government, business, labour, academic, and youth leaders and delegates from 33 countries, including representatives from Canada and from the Atlantic Provinces. There were keynote addresses by His Excellency John Ralston Saul; Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface Inc, who has vowed to make his company completely sustainable; and Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Home Minister and former Prime Minister of Bhutan, which recently received the United Nations 'Champion of the Earth' award for placing the environment at the centre of all its development policies. Other notable speakers include Marilyn Waring, John Taylor Gatto, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Sanjit Bunker Roy, Ela Bhatt, Krishna Kumar, Mathis Wackernagel, Francisco VanderHoff Boersma, John Helliwell, Farouk Jiwa, Alan Savory, Holly Dressel, Raffi, Elizabeth May, Cindy Blackstock, and Vicki Robin.
The conference was designed to offer practical tools, inspiration, critical understanding, and connection to an international support network, so that participants could leave prepared to implement successfully practical actions in their own countries and communities. The design of the conference was intended to create an atmosphere of open participation that would demonstrate modes of communication practiced in a society devoted to enhancing wellbeing.
In February 2004, an initial conference on this theme was held in Bhutan, which attracted more than 300 participants from Bhutan and 20 other countries to discuss the country's experiment with a "Gross National Happiness" model. It was agreed to continue these discussions and examine other initiatives, with particular emphasis on ways in which humanity can adopt strategies that counteract the consequences of today's global development patterns.
In that spirit, the 2005 conference was held in Canada at St. Francis Xavier University and co-hosted by Genuine Progress Index Atlantic; the Coady International Institute; Shambhala; the Centre for Bhutan Studies; the Province of Nova Scotia; the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary's University; and the University of New Brunswick. Funding is from the International Development Research Centre, the United Nations Development Program, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, the Government of Canada's National Crime Prevention Strategy, and the Province of Nova Scotia. The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council is a conference partner.
We are also grateful for contributions and donations to the conference from the Resource Recovery Fund Board, St. Francis Xavier University, the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE), Hewlett-Packard Inc., Maurice Strong, Nova Scotia Health Promotion Highland Region, the MacLeod Group Inc. (Antigonish), the St. Margarets Bay Shambhala Centre, the Town of Antigonish and Aida Arnold.
The financial support of the Government of Canada provided through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) is gratefully acknowledged.
This website, first built to announce this conference, is now a record of conference proceedings open to all — so that all may catch a glimpse of what actually happened at this remarkable gathering.
What they are saying about Rethinking Development
Overview :: Presenters :: Proceedings :: Papers :: Home
Conference Scent-free Policy
Please note that some delegates are highly sensitive to scented products and chemicals, and become ill from exposure to them. Therefore please do not wear or bring scented products or regular bug spray to the conference. Unscented soap, shampoo, and other products, and natural bug spray will be available at the conference. Thank you for your consideration.
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A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom
Andrew C. Revkin/The New York Times
Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, in draped sweater, met with Bhutanese teachers
October 4, 2005
A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.
Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.
But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.
In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan's newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation's priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness.
Bhutan, the king said, needed to ensure that prosperity was shared across society and that it was balanced against preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government. The king, now 49, has been instituting policies aimed at accomplishing these goals.
Now Bhutan's example, while still a work in progress, is serving as a catalyst for far broader discussions of national well-being.
Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.
The goal, according to many involved in this effort, is in part to return to a richer definition of the word happiness, more like what the signers of the Declaration of Independence had in mind when they included "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right equal to liberty and life itself.
The founding fathers, said John Ralston Saul, a Canadian political philosopher, defined happiness as a balance of individual and community interests. "The Enlightenment theory of happiness was an expression of public good or the public welfare, of the contentment of the people," Mr. Saul said. And, he added, this could not be further from "the 20th-century idea that you should smile because you're at Disneyland."
Mr. Saul was one of about 400 people from more than a dozen countries who gathered recently to consider new ways to define and assess prosperity.
The meeting, held at St. Francis Xavier University in northern Nova Scotia, was a mix of soft ideals and hard-nosed number crunching. Many participants insisted that the focus on commerce and consumption that dominated the 20th century need not be the norm in the 21st century.
Among the attendees were three dozen representatives from Bhutan - teachers, monks, government officials and others - who came to promote what the Switzerland-size country has learned about building a fulfilled, contented society.
While household incomes in Bhutan remain among the world's lowest, life expectancy increased by 19 years from 1984 to 1998, jumping to 66 years. The country, which is preparing to shift to a constitution and an elected government, requires that at least 60 percent of its lands remain forested, welcomes a limited stream of wealthy tourists and exports hydropower to India.
"We have to think of human well-being in broader terms," said Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan's home minister and ex-prime minister. "Material well-being is only one component. That doesn't ensure that you're at peace with your environment and in harmony with each other."
It is a concept grounded in Buddhist doctrine, and even a decade ago it might have been dismissed by most economists and international policy experts as naïve idealism.
Indeed, America's brief flirtation with a similar concept, encapsulated in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 bestseller "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," ended abruptly with the huge and continuing burst of consumer-driven economic growth that exploded first in industrialized countries and has been spreading in fast-growing developing countries like China.
Yet many experts say it was this very explosion of affluence that eventually led social scientists to realize that economic growth is not always synonymous with progress.
In the early stages of a climb out of poverty, for a household or a country, incomes and contentment grow in lockstep. But various studies show that beyond certain thresholds, roughly as annual per capita income passes $10,000 or $20,000, happiness does not keep up.
And some countries, studies found, were happier than they should be. In the World Values Survey, a project under way since 1995, Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, found that Latin American countries, for example, registered far more subjective happiness than their economic status would suggest.
In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after communism had collapsed.
"Some types of societies clearly do a much better job of enhancing their people's sense of happiness and well-being than other ones even apart from the somewhat obvious fact that it's better to be rich than to be poor," Dr. Inglehart said.
Even more striking, beyond a certain threshold of wealth people appear to redefine happiness, studies suggest, focusing on their relative position in society instead of their material status.
Nothing defines this shift better than a 1998 survey of 257 students, faculty and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health.
In the study, the researchers, Sara J. Solnick and David Hemenway, gave the subjects a choice of earning $50,000 a year in a world where the average salary was $25,000 or $100,000 a year where the average was $200,000.
About 50 percent of the participants, the researchers found, chose the first option, preferring to be half as prosperous but richer than their neighbors.
Such findings have contributed to the new effort to broaden the way countries and individuals gauge the quality of life - the subject of the Nova Scotia conference.
But researchers have been hard pressed to develop measuring techniques that can capture this broader concept of well-being.
One approach is to study how individuals perceive the daily flow of their lives, having them keep diary-like charts reflecting how various activities, from paying bills to playing softball, make them feel.
A research team at Princeton is working with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to incorporate this kind of charting into its new "time use" survey, which began last year and is given to 4,000 Americans each month.
"The idea is to start with life as we experience it and then try to understand what helps people feel fulfilled and create conditions that generate that," said Dr. Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton economist working on the survey.
For example, he said, subjecting students to more testing in order to make them more competitive may equip them to succeed in the American quest for ever more income. But that benefit would have to be balanced against the problems that come with the increased stress imposed by additional testing.
"We should not be hoping to construct a utopia," Professor Krueger said. "What we should be talking about is piecemeal movement in the direction of things that make for a better life."
Another strategy is to track trends that can affect a community's well-being by mining existing statistics from censuses, surveys and government agencies that track health, the environment, the economy and other societal barometers.
The resulting scores can be charted in parallel to see how various indicators either complement or impede each other.
In March, Britain said it would begin developing such an "index of well-being," taking into account not only income but mental illness, civility, access to parks and crime rates.
In June, British officials released their first effort along those lines, a summary of "sustainable development indicators" intended to be a snapshot of social and environmental indicators like crime, traffic, pollution and recycling levels.
"What we do in one area of our lives can have an impact on many others, so joined-up thinking and action across central and local government is crucial," said Elliot Morley, Britain's environment minister.
In Canada, Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, has been working informally with about 20 other economists and social scientists to develop that country's first national index of well-being.
Mr. Messinger is the person who, every month, takes the pulse of his country's economy, sifting streams of data about cash flow to generate the figure called gross domestic product. But for nearly a decade, he has been searching for a better way of measuring the quality of life.
"A sound economy is not an end to itself, but should serve a purpose, to improve society," Mr. Messinger said.
The new well-being index, Mr. Messinger said, will never replace the G.D.P. For one thing, economic activity, affected by weather, labor strikes and other factors, changes far more rapidly than other indicators of happiness.
But understanding what fosters well-being, he said, can help policy makers decide how to shape legislation or regulations.
Later this year, the Canadian group plans to release a first attempt at an index - an assessment of community health, living standards and people's division of time among work, family, voluntarism and other activities. Over the next several years, the team plans to integrate those findings with measurements of education, environmental quality, "community vitality" and the responsiveness of government. Similar initiatives are under way in Australia and New Zealand.
Ronald Colman, a political scientist and the research director for Canada's well-being index, said one challenge was to decide how much weight to give different indicators.
For example, Dr. Colman said, the amount of time devoted to volunteer activities in Canada has dropped more than 12 percent in the last decade.
"That's a real decline in community well-being, but that loss counts for nothing in our current measure of progress," he said.
But shifts in volunteer activity also cannot be easily assessed against cash-based activities, he said.
"Money has nothing to do with why volunteers do what they do," Dr. Colman said. "So how, in a way that's transparent and methodologically decent, do you come up with composite numbers that are meaningful?"
In the end, Canada's index could eventually take the form of a report card rather than a single G.D.P.-like number.
In the United States there have been a few experiments, like the Princeton plan to add a happiness component to labor surveys. But the focus remains on economics. The Census Bureau, for instance, still concentrates on collecting information about people's financial circumstances and possessions, not their perceptions or feelings, said Kurt J. Bauman, a demographer there.
But he added that there was growing interest in moving away from simply tracking indicators of poverty, for example, to looking more comprehensively at social conditions.
"Measuring whether poverty is going up or down is different than measuring changes in the ability of a family to feed itself," he said. "There definitely is a growing perception out there that if you focus too narrowly, you're missing a lot of the picture."
That shift was evident at the conference on Bhutan, organized by Dr. Colman, who is from Nova Scotia. Participants focused on an array of approaches to the happiness puzzle, from practical to radical.
John de Graaf, a Seattle filmmaker and campaigner trying to cut the amount of time people devote to work, wore a T-shirt that said, "Medieval peasants worked less than you do."
In an open discussion, Marc van Bogaert from Belgium described his path to happiness: "I want to live in a world without money."
Al Chaddock, a painter from Nova Scotia, immediately offered a suggestion: "Become an artist."
Other attendees insisted that old-fashioned capitalism could persist even with a shift to goals broader than just making money.
Ray C. Anderson, the founder of Interface Inc., an Atlanta-based carpet company with nearly $1 billion in annual sales, described his company's 11-year-old program to cut pollution and switch to renewable materials.
Mr. Anderson said he was "a radical industrialist, but as competitive as anyone you know and as profit-minded."
Some experts who attended the weeklong conference questioned whether national well-being could really be defined. Just the act of trying to quantify happiness could threaten it, said Frank Bracho, a Venezuelan economist and former ambassador to India. After all, he said, "The most important things in life are not prone to measurement - like love."
But Mr. Messinger argued that the weaknesses of the established model, dominated by economics, demanded the effort.
Other economists pointed out that happiness itself can be illusory.
"Even in a very miserable condition you can be very happy if you are grateful for small mercies," said Siddiqur Osmani, a professor of applied economics from the University of Ulster in Ireland. "If someone is starving and hungry and given two scraps of food a day, he can be very happy."
Bhutanese officials at the meeting described a variety of initiatives aimed at creating the conditions that are most likely to improve the quality of life in the most equitable way.
Bhutan, which had no public education system in 1960, now has schools at all levels around the country and rotates teachers from urban to rural regions to be sure there is equal access to the best teachers, officials said.
Another goal, they said, is to sustain traditions while advancing. People entering hospitals with nonacute health problems can choose Western or traditional medicine.
The more that various effects of a policy are considered, and not simply the economic return, the more likely a country is to achieve a good balance, said Sangay Wangchuk, the head of Bhutan's national parks agency, citing agricultural policies as an example.
Bhutan's effort, in part, is aimed at avoiding the pattern seen in the study at Harvard, in which relative wealth becomes more important than the quality of life.
"The goal of life should not be limited to production, consumption, more production and more consumption," said Thakur S. Powdyel, a senior official in the Bhutanese Ministry of Education. "There is no necessary relationship between the level of possession and the level of well-being."
Mr. Saul, the Canadian political philosopher, said that Bhutan's shift in language from "product" to "happiness" was a profound move in and of itself.
Mechanisms for achieving and tracking happiness can be devised, he said, but only if the goal is articulated clearly from the start.
"It's ideas which determine the directions in which civilizations go," Mr. Saul said. "If you don't get your ideas right, it doesn't matter what policies you try to put in place."
Still, Bhutan's model may not work for larger countries. And even in Bhutan, not everyone is happy. Members of the country's delegation admitted their experiment was very much a work in progress, and they acknowledged that poverty and alcoholism remained serious problems.
The pressures of modernization are also increasing. Bhutan linked itself to the global cultural pipelines of television and the Internet in 1999, and there have been increasing reports in its nascent media of violence and disaffection, particularly among young people.
Some attendees, while welcoming Bhutan's goal, gently criticized the Bhutanese officials for dealing with a Nepali-speaking minority mainly by driving tens of thousands of them out of the country in recent decades, saying that was not a way to foster happiness.
"Bhutan is not a pure Shangri-La, so idyllic and away from all those flaws and foibles," conceded Karma Pedey, a Bhutanese educator dressed in a short dragon-covered jacket and a floor-length rainbow-striped traditional skirt.
But, looking around a packed auditorium, she added: "At same time, I'm very, very happy we have made a global impact."
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Round-Trip Journeys to the Afterworld
A patient is delivered by helicopter to Berlin's Accident Hospital: More seriously wounded patients might survive if they were put into a state of suspended animation before they got transported
Medicine
Round-Trip Journeys to the Afterworld
By Jörg Blech
Researchers allow pigs and dogs to bleed to death, fill their bodies with cold saline solution, and then bring the dead animals back to life a few hours later. The ability to switch living beings off and then on again could revolutionize medicine -- especially treatment of bleeding victims or heart-attack patients.
First the heart begins to beat, and then the pig starts breathing. Finally, it stands up and looks curiously at the man in the lab coat standing outside its cage.
"This animal was dead for several hours," says Hasan Alam, 39, a surgeon at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. "But we brought it back. And now it's here again."
The same magic forces seem to be at work in the animal research facility of the General Hospital of the City of Vienna. Pigs are suddenly opening their eyes after their hearts were stopped with electric shocks and they lay dead for half an hour. "The miracle," says Wilhelm Behringer, 39, a physician specializing in emergency medicine, "is that the animals return to life without neurological damage."
In the last few years, the two research groups have sent a hundred pigs on round-trip journeys into the afterworld, using variations on the same trick in each case. The physicians flood the animals' bodies with several liters of a saline solution that's been cooled to about two degrees C (36° F). This puts the animals into a mysterious state of suspended animation that prevents the cells of their lifeless bodies from dying off. None of the animals feel pain, because the experiments are done under full anesthesia.
Until now, we've left it to science fiction writers to describe what it might be like to take a break from life and then return at some point in the future. Only in science fiction can an astronaut sink into a Rip van Winkle-like sleep that lasts centuries, only to wake up -- wrinkle-free -- in some distant time or galaxy. And only in science fiction can people with incurable diseases have themselves placed into suspended animation until science catches up and discovers a cure.
Dozens of people have felt such a tremendous yearning for a second life that they spent a lot of money to have their bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen after death. Awaiting resurrection, their heads and bodies float in tanks in Arizona and California operated by companies that specialize in this practice.
The spectacular animal experiments performed in Boston and Vienna make these utopias seem not quite so bizarre. The researchers don't talk in terms of years, but they're convinced -- for the first time -- that sending humans into an hours-long deathly sleep will be possible.
"It may sound futuristic, but we now have the ability to deliberately bring the body to a standstill," explains Hasan Alam, who recently moved his laboratory from Maryland to Massachusetts so that he could take advantage of fresh research funding to move ahead with his project.
Alam hasn't even unpacked his moving boxes yet. Instead, he prefers to sit in his corner office, wearing a dark blue suit, interviewing the kinds of ambitious doctors and scientists he needs to work on his project.
"We are preparing initial clinical trials with human beings," explains Alam. He isn't the only one conducting this kind of research. In hospitals in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Houston, other doctors are pursuing similar plans to essentially switch off the human body and then switch it on again. The data from these experiments will then be included in a joint analysis.
The candidates Professor Alam envisions for these trips to death and back are people who are admitted to emergency rooms with the most serious of gunshot wounds or injuries from accidents. Although their wounds may be relatively easy to suture, "surgeons need time," says Alam. He says that 19 of such patients out of 20 bleed to death before emergency doctors can finish their work.
But, as Alam and his associates hope, deliberately placing the dying bodies into a state of suspended animation can provide precious time needed to bring the victims to the hospital and perform surgery.
This is the scenario they envision: Instead of following the usual procedure of pumping banked blood into a trauma patient, emergency physicians allow the patient to bleed to death within minutes while recapturing the patient's blood. At the same time, the patient is quickly filled up with a cold saline solution. Only when his wounds have been sutured is the patient revived by returning his own warm blood to his veins and arteries.
The Boston group plans to try this procedure in human subjects within the next 12 to 18 months. Hasan Alam believes the relevant ethics commission will approve his request, because the first of these experiments would be performed on injured patients who normally couldn't be saved with conventional emergency medicine.
The idea that in certain situations it can be a good idea to refrigerate a human being goes back to Peter Safar, a doctor who was born in Vienna and died in 2003, at the age of 79. Safar was interested in developing a new method of emergency medical care for the US military. In the Vietnam War, many GIs suffered serious wounds in battle and lost so much blood that they went into cardiac arrest. But with a little more time, many could have been taken to field hospitals and stitched back together.
At the University of Pittsburgh, Safar sent dogs into a state he called "suspended animation." To do this, he allowed the dogs to bleed to death and then flushed ice-cold saline solution into their aortas through a tube (at a rate of one to two liters a minute). Within a few minutes, the dogs' body temperatures plunged to 10° C (50° F). The pallid canines were dead, at least according to the laws of medicine: no heartbeat, no breathing, no brain activity.
The dogs' blood was collected, kept warm, enriched with oxygen and later pumped back into their bodies. Then the white-haired professor used mild electric shocks to bring the lifeless creatures back to life. After Safar's death, his colleagues fine-tuned the process by adding tiny amounts of sugar to the cold saline solution. This, the Pittsburgh researchers announced in June, enables them to revive the dogs after as long as three hours.
In other experiments, scientists have already shown that the principle of suspended animation could revolutionize emergency medicine. Professor Behringer's research team in Vienna, for example, has focused its research efforts on saving people who collapse after a heart attack and then often die of cardiac failure. The Vienna researchers have replicated this process in animal experiments. Pigs are fully anesthetized and then given an electric shock to the chest, stopping the heart and replicating a heart attack.
After 15 minutes of complete cardiac arrest and 20 minutes of resuscitation using such conventional methods as heart compression massage, electroshocks and medication, the Viennese are able to revive very few of these pigs. And those that do make it end up having severe neurological damage.
The results are vastly superior when the researchers, before attempting resuscitation, flush three liters of saline solution into the main arteries of the lifeless pigs, thereby deliberately cooling down the brain and heart (in contrast to the experiments in Boston, these animals are not allowed to bleed to death). After a 20-minute waiting period -- simulating the time it might take to transport a trauma patient to a hospital emergency room -- the animals are connected to a heart-lung machine, reanimated, and then, using medication and ice cubes, kept in a recuperative state of semi-narcosis at a body temperature of 33° C (91.4° F) for 24 hours. Only then, says Behringer, are they "permitted to wake up again." Eighty-five percent of the pigs wake up, without significant consequential damage.
Hasan Alam's group, whose research is directed at saving people who would normally bleed to death, has reported similar results. In their experiments, the scientists used scalpels to inflict potentially fatal injuries on the pigs, then waited half an hour before beginning to suture the wounds. All the animals that received no cooling fluid died. Other pigs were quickly cooled from a body temperature of 37°C (98.6° F) to 10° C (50° F) in 28 minutes. Eighty-seven percent of these animals were saved with emergency surgery and revived after more than an hour.
The surviving pigs were given behavioral tests, which they passed with flying colors. They were able to find hidden raisins and apples just as effectively as normal control animals. Analyses of their brain tissue revealed that the pigs had survived their death-excursions without neurological damage.
All of this seems incompatible with the rules of biology. Until now it was considered incontrovertible that the brain will if it's deprived of oxygen for only a few minutes (four to five minutes in human beings). Heart cells and other tissue are also irreversibly destroyed if the oxygen supply drops below a critical level.
But it seems the shock of cold temperature can interrupt these processes. For every 10° C (18° F) drop in human body temperature, the metabolic rate drops by 50 percent. This reduction also slows down the process of dying, explains Hasan Alam. At a body temperature of 30°C (86° F), the brain can survive without oxygen for 20 minutes. Decrease the temperature to 10° C (50° F) and the brain can survive for as long as 90 to 120 minutes.
This phenomenon explains those legendary cases in which people have survived extremely long periods of oxygen deficiency. In the spring of 2000, for example, a three-year-old girl in a stroller rolled down an embankment and sank into the cold water of the Neckar River in southern Germany. The water temperature was 10° C (50° F). Even though the girl was under water for 45 minutes, emergency personnel were able to revive her. Scientists also know that heart attack patients' chances of survival increase when their bodies are cooled.
Researchers don't understand the details of why cold temperatures protect the body against death. They do know that metabolism continues in the body's cells for a short period of time after a person is already dead; but the remaining oxygen in the blood is no longer sufficient to produce energy. Instead, the cellular respiratory chain produces toxic free oxygen radicals at a higher rate than normal, killing the cells. In other words, the cellular metabolism continuing in a cell after death is in fact the cell's own downfall.
Apparently, the cool saline solution puts a stop to this process. First, the cold temperature dramatically reduces metabolic activity. Second, the solution completely flushes the blood and, along with it, the remaining oxygen out of the body tissue. There is nothing left to fuel the respiratory chain, and free radicals can no longer be produced to kill off the cells. The result? The body glides into a state of suspended animation.
Using the same logic, this sleep of death should also set in if cell respiration is interrupted by other means. This is precisely what 47-year-old cell biologist Mark Roth of the University of Washington in Seattle has demonstrated in a series of elegant experiments. To conduct the experiments, he used gases like carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide, which interfere in oxygen-consuming metabolic processes, binding to the same proteins and enzymes in the body and thus destroying cellular respiration.
When Roth administered a gaseous mixture of hydrogen sulfide and normal air to laboratory mice, the animals sank into an artificial hibernation. Their heart rates declined from 120 to 10 beats per minute. Their body temperatures dropped from 37° C (98.6° F) to as little as 15° C (59° F), which was slightly higher than the temperature in the room. After six hours, their metabolic rate had dropped by 90 percent. The resuscitation of these deep sleepers was remarkably simple. After being kept in fresh air and at normal room temperature, the mice woke up on their own and were as healthy as before. Roth plans to repeat his experiments with larger animals, and is ultimately aiming for human tests.
Just how long these excursions into the afterworld can be drawn out remains unknown. In any case, no one is likely to be booking trips to faraway galaxies anytime soon. It may be that the records achieved so far -- three hours in dogs and six hours in mice -- already represent the upper limit.
Freezing entire bodies in liquid nitrogen is not an alternative. In fact, scientists are now convinced that this approach is mistaken. Although human metabolism comes to an abrupt halt at -196° C (-320° F), ice crystals forming in the cells at this temperature destroy the tissue.
Of course, this discovery comes a bit late for those trusting souls who had their remains put to rest in nitrogen. "All those whose bodies were deliberately frozen," says Viennese physician and scientist Behringer, "will never be thawed and brought back to life."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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